Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Tag: Railroad

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Autumn Weekend in Vermont

    My wife and I took the kids on a roadtrip, a brief vacation over the Columbus Day holiday. We drove up to Vermont and remained there for a few days in the crisp autumn weather. We experienced rolling countryside, amazing Fall foliage and natural beauty in abundance. I’ll be sure to post some of those…

  • Australia’s Longest Straight Line?

    Lines continue to fascinate me, both imaginary and real. I found myself pondering the website of Australian Rail Maps, looking at their Western Australia page. I’d heard about a specific segment crossing the hauntingly desolate Nullarbor Plain and I intended to investigate it further. It’s here, between kilometre 797 west of Ooldea (South Australia) and…

  • A Couple of Recent Bloggy Finds

    I’ve been getting a few reader referrals over the last couple of days from a blog I’d never seen before. It had a rather intriguing and promising Intertube domain, railmaps.blogspot.com. Naturally I wanted to check it out. The site was kind enough to recommend me to its readers and I hoped to repay the favor.…

  • Rambling Along the Taylor-Rose Segment

    I derive inspiration from odd places. Recently I stumbled across a simple notation on a chart, no more than a throwaway comment really, and it fascinated me. I noticed a brief history of Highway 183 on the US Highways website,(1) “Since 1930; original route North Platte, NE – Dresden, KS, extended north to Vivian, SD…