Ladies in nymph-like attire twirling and leaping through fields – sounds like the turn of the century pageantry movement to me. The Centenary Pageant in 1927 for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad is a rather late occurrence of this type of display of civic and industrial pride. Part artistic endeavor and part technological exhibition, Baltimore and Ohio set up a location for the festival at Halethorpe near Baltimore. The pageant, staged each afternoon of the festival, melded hist

OK, we all know it, I’m obnoxiously devoted to my home state. So when I read current “transit” news about Maryland transportation officials meeting with Frederick County Commissioners(1 November 2013), I was disappointed to read that it was all about widening I-70 and I-270. Ever since governments intentionally participated in the trashing of public investment in transportation in favor of the automobile, future funding that prefers interstates makes me yawn. Not only do we p

Commuters rush through the LIRR entrance corridor past artwork that evokes the original and only Pennsylvania Station. Andrew Leicester. Ghost Series, 1994. Photo: RL Fifield. If you enter Penn Station through the Long Island Rail Road entrance, you’ll see reliefs along the corridor that depict the tumbling Corinthian columns of McKim, Mead, and White’s Pennsylvania Station (1910). If you’d like to grumble along with me, please follow these links to my prior posts about the d

Much of NYC’s life takes place underground. Last Tuesday was a holiday for my place of work, and I used the morning to get some errands for some projects done. On the subway, sometimes you are just traveling. This is what most commuters do, enter a sort of stasis between work and home. You might people watch, which is certainly an urban pastime. There are the colorful, the rude, the homeless, the people asking for money. It’s not as “heads down, me against the world” as some

After a boozy brunch with Dr. V’s cousins, we wandered up the sunny side of the street to Grand Central Terminal, celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. The kiosks were great. You can ask about various GCT topics at the push of the button. When they aren’t talking, they just look around and look bored. A former customer service manager relates that GCT before the renovation was “a hell hole.” RL Fifield 2013. The former waiting room space is used for exhibitions and eve

Munich Hauptbahnhof. RL Fifield 2012. I had a crazy scheme for last week’s trip to Germany. My last visit was to Dusseldorf and Cologne. I had work in next door Bonn this time around. I wanted to see something else of Germany besides its western edge. I flew into Munich and spent the day there. How do you get to Bonn if you are train geek? You take the ICE. I got a bit more of a train ride than I bargained for: it was a 5 1/2 hour ride. What’s on the Menu? New York Public Lib

Hauptbahnhof. It has to be my favorite German word. Feeling adventurous, I decided to fly directly to Munich and check out the city before going to Bonn for an appointment. This meant a five hour train ride via the ICE, the express service which gets up to a thrilling 157 mph between Frankfurt and Cologne (the speed staved off the increasing jet lag and my need to nod off). There are two places I check out in every town: the market, and the train station. Like so many German

Answer: Corsets. The Royal Worcester Corset Factory was the largest U.S. employer of women in 1908. Elizabeth Freake and Baby Mary. Worcester Art Museum. I spent all of 18 hours in Worcester last week. It has the bones of any successful city of the turn of the century. Money made in industry went to civic projects, art museums, and city beautiful movements. It is home to the American Antiquarian Society, a repository of historic newspapers, prints, and myriad other documents

Once again Transit Tuesday is busting in on Museum Monday. RL Fifield 2012. The Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania is located in Strasburg, just outside Lancaster. It’s close to the outlet store schlock on Route 30 east of Lancaster, but once you turn off the main drag, the view gets rural real quick. Strasburg is amazingly preserved, and on the eastern edge of town is a collection of over 100 rail cars. Across the street is the Strasburg Rail Road. We visited Thanksgiving weeke

I was putting together another post on Amtrak when I stumbled across a New York Times Opinion on Amtrak’s Quiet Car by Tim Krieder. The Quiet Car is at first brilliant: I settle myself away from the din of the other carriages. There’s the cellphone conversation we’d rather not hear about (surgery, sales, boyfriend). The businessmen strutting their acumen to each other.  The travelling family unaware that others are using the train. The Quiet Car is for single people who enjoy

Work took me kicking and screaming to Ottawa this week. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Canada. It was just a chock a block week and I managed to miss being in-country for a presidential election again. Parliament in Ottawa from the Musee de la Civilisation in Gatineau. RL Fifield 2012. What I didn’t realize until this trip was arranged that the greater city straddles Canada’s two identities. On the southern side of the Ottawa River is Ottawa proper, with its iconic Parl

People generally know one thing about Johnstown, PA: the flood. The Johnstown Flood National Memorial is located on the rim of the former recreational lake that burst on May 31, 1899 and spilled 20 million tons of water into the town below, killing 2,209. The local Johnstown Flood Museum is located in a former Carnegie Library, a building built to replace the original library destroyed in the flood. Johnstown Inclined Plane – whoa! RL Fifield 2008. The Johnstown Inclined Plan

On the top of my list of cool things to do in New York City: visit City Hall Station, the abandoned star of the New York city subway system. Opened in 1904, the one way loop station’s design and close proximity to the Brooklyn Bridge station doomed it for obsolescence from the beginning. It was closed in December, 1945. Today, it’s used to turn around downtown 6 trains and deposit them back on the uptown bound local track. City Hall Station. RL Fifield photo, 2010. You can to

Transit Tuesday is moving on in on Museum Monday. London Transport Museum. Old Metropolitan Railway Car. Photo: RL Fifield 2010. If I didn’t live in New York City, I would live in London. It feels like home. And for fans of transit, the London Transport Museum is an excellent time. In the city that invented modern urban transit, a plethora of equipment, signage, photos, and groovy wax mannequins in the old flower market building in Covent Garden just has to be good. In the su

Beer. Mmmm. Recently, my friend Ms McC and I travelled to Maryland for a eighteenth century event at Fort Frederick State Park (see my posts on nearby Hagerstown and the CCC Museum at Fort Fred). Being like-minded in our love for the American experience, we targeted Pottsville, Pennsylvania as our stop-off point: home to Yuengling Beer since 1831. They claim the title of “America’s Oldest Brewery.” Check out the history of American ale and beer making via the New York Histori

Sorry for the pun. Photo: r25 Productions. Flowers by Amanda’s in Havre de Grace. Since I was a little girl, driving into Havre de Grace meant curving around the high stone embankment to the right and passing under the hulking iron bridge that carries the Pennsylvania Railroad over the Susquehanna: it’s been doing so since 1906. That bridge says Havre de Grace to me like little else; so much so that some of our wedding photos are in front of it. Rendering of the new bridge at

Inari sushi – sweetened deep fried tofu skin stuffed with rice dressed with rice vinegar, salt, and sugar. Photo by miwa_in_oz There is one redeeming thing about the current New York Penn Station – it’s Penn Sushi. They have great inari sushi. I always stop in to see the very friendly staff and pick up sushi whenever I travel by train. As for the rail station, it’s a joke. The large photographs of the original New York Penn Station posted around today’s Main Concourse just ba

RL Fifield 2009. A fantastic collection in an incredible building tell the epic story of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. The 1884 Roundhouse that serves as the centerpiece of the museum complex sits on the site the birthplace of American railroading, the ground dedicated to that purpose since 1829. The museum celebrates technology, travel, and business, and its quietness is a memorial to the shrinkage of the passenger rail industry and the shift of freight handling out of the

I was inspired by this salted paper print from the 1850s of people posing for a photograph on a Baltimore and Ohio engine. I thought about the women in their stays and hoops, and wondered if they were boosted up onto that ledge, or if they walked out from the cab to rest upon their perch. Either way, it’s not easy with your torso confined (I had to crawl up into a 5 ton troop transport in eighteenth century stays to be transported for a reenactment once – a National Guardsman

The El still lives on in Chicago – I’m not sure that they could live without it. But the El once was a vital part of New York transportation, an improvement on surface railways, pre-dating the underground subways, and discarded hastily during the rise of the automobile. The last elevated line in Manhattan was the 3rd Avenue line, at last abandoned in the Bronx in 1973. The Els were noisy and cast shadows on the streets below. There were once elevated lines on 3rd, 6th, and 9t