Be careful what you throw away

I’m always amazed by what we throw away, and that doesn’t always mean what we dump into the landfill or smugly recycle. I’m referring, instead, to major industrial, technological and architectural accomplishments gone poof into the wrecker’s dumpster.

Oh, there are usually good and valid reasons, on the day the wrecking ball hits, for many of these actions. In the case of Chicago’s Union Station concourse, there were developers clamoring to build along the west bank of the Chicago River and no end of problems in sight for the passenger service owned by the railroads. It seemed that, like New York’s Penn Station, another calamity, there would only be call for commuter rail, and commuter rail didn’t require an elegant concourse. The demolition started in 1969 and soon thereafter Amtrak was formed.

Amtrak has been saddled with the undersized facilities buried under the office tower where the magnificent concourse once stood. Periodic renovations will never recreate what once would have given both Amtrak and what is now Metra plenty of space.

Hindsight. But…

New York City has realized the monumental mistake the city made in tearing down the headhouse for Penn Station and replacing it with a poorly conceived sports arena and high-rise building containing a claustrophobic excuse for a station in its basement. At least New York is now taking steps to remedy the situation by turning the adjacent post office building—architecturally similar to the original station—into an improved version.

Hindsight. But, but…

My favorite throw-aways to mourn are the multitude of urban streetcar systems that were summarily paved over—with perverse bonfires to dispose of wooden streetcars—during the first half of the twentieth century. All in favor of the internal combustion engine, now one of our favorite bugaboos. Along with the electric interurbans, close cousins to the streetcars, these systems utilized electricity that, in those days, was probably mostly generated by dirty coal. Engineering achievements ahead of their times? Perhaps.

But when will we ever be patient enough to allow the times to catch up? Today, those same streetcars could be powered by clean, renewable solar or wind power.

Chicago once had the world’s largest (by mileage) system of electric streetcars. When traffic got heavier, the easy fix was not to build more traffic lanes or re-position car tracks as many European cities have done; it was to either substitute trolley buses—admittedly also potentially run on sustainable energy—or to substitute buses run on internal combustion engines. The bus option allowed more maneuverability on city streets, alleviating the need for boarding islands in some of Chicago’s wider streets, and allowing the buses to get the hell out of the way of other traffic. Trolley buses did not reduce operating costs as much, however, because the wires and distribution system still had to be maintained.

Many miles of Chicago streetcar tracks were simply paved over, some to be eventually dug up when widening or repositioning of lanes became necessary despite the use of buses. Others still languish under God knows how many resurfacings of asphalt and the ubiquitous patches seen on most city streets.

Hindsight…but…but…but...

Next weeks, I’ll go into other examples of discarding too soon, and I’ll also have a few more comments about New Mexico Rail Runner.

©2017 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)