Tag: Railroad
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Shortline
That’s shortline (with a “t”) not shoreline. The term describes very small railroads. I first became aware of shortlines a couple of years ago when we took a brief trip to Vermont during early Autumn. One of our activities included an excursion along the western bank of the Connecticut River. We took that trip on…
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Rapid Transit in 1844
I’ve slowly been overhauling the non-12MC part of my website to upgrade to Google Maps API v3. That’s the portion for which I obtained the howderfamily.com domain long before Twelve Mile Circle became the tail wagging the dog. As part of that I revisited a genealogy page I wrote about ten years ago. It looked…
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Checkerboarding
Checkerboarding has nothing to do with the game of checkers other than bearing a striking resemblance to its playing surface. Nor is it some awful new interrogation technique invented to pry information from suspects under duress. It is this. I discovered the anomaly on Google Maps in Oregon awhile ago while discussing Latitude Longitude Sequences…
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Kansas Mountain Time
Loyal reader Mr. Burns pointed out that my intended Dust Bowl route will traverse a psuedo-geo-oddity. I’ll move from Central Time to Mountain time while heading due north. That happens in other places sporadically, although not as rarely as moving east from Mountain Time into Pacific Time for example. One can’t be too choosy in…
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King of Portmanteau
If Portmanteau was a nation, Albert J. Earling would have been its king. By now most readers understand Twelve Mile Circle’s fascination with portmanteaus. It’s the birth of creative new words resulting from the smashing together two or more existing words. Previous articles dealing with this device included Mardela to Delmar and Dueling Portmanteau Placenames.…
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Locomotive Engineer for a Day
All children want to be a locomotive engineer at one point in their childhood. Or maybe that was just me? It’s one of those exciting jobs like astronaut or fireman or race car driver. So I had an opportunity to reach back to my childhood dreams recently. I got as close as humanly possible to…
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Bridge Between Wisconsin and Michigan
My favorite inspiration, random Internet queries falling from the sky onto the Twelve Mile Circle via search engines, struck again recently. This time our anonymous explorer wanted to find more information about a bridge from Wisconsin to Michigan. The natural reflex would be to pull out a map… … and say to oneself, a bridge…
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Vennbahn
Google Street View finally arrived in Belgium. This offered an opportunity to revisit a topic that’s been sitting in my queue unaddressed for the longest time. I figured that most of us were familiar with the Belgian portion of the Vennbahn railroad line. This is the line that created several small German enclaves within Belgium…
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Utah Adventure, Part 2
I’m now well into the Utah trip and we’ve shifted our focus from the mountains to the desert. Golden Spike National Historic Site The Golden Spike National Historic Site marks the point of completion of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States in 1869. It’s in the middle of nowhere. I am not exaggerating…
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Low Clearance
I’ve seen an unusual website mentioned on several aggregator and blogging websites called 11foot8.com. I’m sure that some of you’ve seen it too and it probably doesn’t need much introduction. It features an 11 foot 8 inch (3.56 metre) overpass on Gregson Street in Durham, North Carolina that has the propensity to peel the tops…