Professor William G. Thomas is running a really neat operation at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln titled
"Railroads and the Making of Modern America." The project presents the impact of railroads on American society with a focus on western settlement, social history and labor history. It's a nice place to see what younger scholars and students are writing about railroads and may be helpful in focusing your own research inquiries or developing your ideas for a research project.
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Dear Nick Fry and Ron Hoess,
ReplyDeleteWide gauge railroads would save enormous amounts of energy because piggyback operations would become practical and railroads haul freight for a small fraction of the energy, truck and all, than trucks do. I thought you might find the following article about wide gauge railroads for much more efficient piggy back useful as a possible project to be advocated at;
http://charles_w.tripod.com/widerr.html . Piggy back would take a lot of traffic from both trucks and cars off the interstate highways, make a backup for the Panama Canal in wartime, and be much more efficient for light bulk cargo like food and garbage.
You also may find useful a similar concept for personal transport by Raymond Lashley at; http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans/lashley.htm .
Maybe your country would find it profitable to build such a line in a corridor paralleling a region where there is a very high volume of truck traffic. It would be not only profitable for you, but would be a profitable for the truck companies, and considerable advantage to your country. Of course it would hurt the profits of motels and truck stations.
Sincerely, Charles Weber