This post is not about servants. So much of the time when I refer to runaways, it’s in relation to indentured and enslaved women. Communipaw Terminal’s now grassy rail beds. RL Fifield, 2011. Thanks to Mr. I for sending around this link to a well-written article in Popular Science about a runaway Jersey Central ghost train that charged out of Jersey City’s Communipaw Terminal on November 12, 1959 at 10:30pm. Read the article here. How the locomotive jumped a closed switch and

I’ve been working on a short story for years about a friendship slipping into an unfamiliar place. One of these days I’ll fish it out of the muck. In my book (ha), trains are good places for writing, and good places to write about. I don’t feel the same way about airplanes, where you enter a sort of stasis between points A and B. This introductory portion was inspired by the Northeast Corridor, the stretch of rail between New York and DC. A jolt over the old join in the rail

Fred Harvey was a British immigrant that brought high standards for trackside eating halls alongside the Atchinson, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad. Beginning in the 1870s, the Harvey family operated numerous restaurants and hotels along the railroad, culminating in several hotels along the south rim of the Grand Canyon, which still operate today. It also outlines the careers of many others, including interior designer Mary Colter, who was responsible for the interiors of many

Yes, I’m a museum professional, but that doesn’t mean I don’t use museum databases to see objects I enjoy when I get home. I’m responsible for long-term preservation activities for a group of objects from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, so as a generalist researcher using museum databases, I tend to relax looking for things very different from the ones I work with. Regular readers are familiar with my penchant for trains, tangled up somewhere in the back of my brain with n

I was compiling a list of objects with a Maryland theme from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection for the fun of it. My mother’s family has been rooted along the lower Susquehanna and Chesapeake Bay for nearly 400 years. It was fun to find this early nineteenth century watercolor of crossing the Susquehanna at Wright’s Ferry, described as being near Havre de Grace. Nearly fifty miles away, I would hardly describe Havre de Grace as being near present day Columbia, Penns

Group listening to Bob Diamond of BHRA in the tunnel under Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn. RL Fifield, 2010. Until December 2010, at the intersection by the Trader Joes on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, you might find a few traffic cones surrounding a popped manhole cover. Dozens of people queued on the nearby sidewalk. Between green lights, a few people would cross the street to the area in the middle of the intersection, and one by one, slip below the asphalt on a household ladder

Passing under the lift bridge serving the Norfolk & Southern Railroad at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. RL Fifield, 2012. There’s a reason they call it the City of Bridges. The winding Cuyahoga River hems in the island on which Cleveland was founded. As the industrial mecca grew, so did the need to feed the city with rails and roads. All of these bridges had to give way to ships on the Cuyahoga. This has left the city with a large grouping of active vertical lift and turnta

CNJRR Train Shed and Communipaw Terminal. RL Fifield, 2011. Staring out over New York Harbor, the Central Railroad of New Jersey’s (CRRNJ) Communipaw Terminal was an early and major powerhouse of New York City transportation and where two thirds of immigrants landed after their stop at Ellis Island. The CRRNJ began operations among the first of American rail companies, in 1839.The station was built in 1889 to replace an earlier 1864 station. The train shed was built in 1914 t

But instead, all I got was this tiny seat on a tin-can of an airplane. I investigated the details of how I would possibly get to Albuquerque by train. In the adventure category, it puts plane travel to shame. But we’ve gotten used to departing and arriving the same day for most points on the globe. It’s hard to look at the two to three trains, fifty-some hours over three days (not counting layover time) with a straight face. Long distance train travel is primarily about the t

Travel by Train, Denver Colorado. RL Fifield photo, 2007. Bumping around the Internet, I came upon this group of images of North American train stations. Some I recognized, while others were from towns I have never considered. As I looked at the first photos, more photos kept loading, until there were hundreds. Frame ones with gingerbread. Adobe ones. Victorian ones. Richardsonian Romanesque ones.  Art Deco ones. Lost beauties and sterile Amtrak replacements c. 1975. Every to

Travel by Train, Denver Colorado. RL Fifield photo, 2007. Bumping around the Internet, I came upon this group of images of North American train stations. Some I recognized, while others were from towns I have never considered. As I looked at the first photos, more photos kept loading, until there were hundreds. Frame ones with gingerbread. Adobe ones. Victorian ones. Richardsonian Romanesque ones.  Art Deco ones. Lost beauties and sterile Amtrak replacements c. 1975. Every to

New York Penn Station, thy name is Melancholy. New York’s Pennsylvania Station. Lost, 1963. Photo credit: New York Public Library via Visualhunt.com / No known copyright restrictions More than one website chronicles the beauty lost that was Penn Station, so I’ll skip the details about McKim, Mead, and White, Jane Jacobs, and Madison Square Garden. But every time I enter the dingy, low-ceilinged tunnels that make up the station today, it chills me to think we could lose such a

Cafe Witteveen (run by friend Jeremy W.) featured a website dedicated to the insignias of railroads long gone by. Honoring my Maryland roots, here’s a Baltimore & Ohio insignia from 1945: Baltimore & Ohio Railroad insignia (1945). Photo: http://annyas.com/railroad-company-logo-design-evolution/ This reminded me of a job Walker Evans did in 1956 for a Fortune Magazine article entitled “Before They Disappear.”  The film is housed in the Walker Evans Archive at The Metropolitan

Cafe Witteveen (run by friend Jeremy W.) featured a website dedicated to the insignias of railroads long gone by. Honoring my Maryland roots, here’s a Baltimore & Ohio insignia from 1945: Baltimore & Ohio Railroad insignia (1945). Photo: http://annyas.com/railroad-company-logo-design-evolution/ This reminded me of a job Walker Evans did in 1956 for a Fortune Magazine article entitled “Before They Disappear.”  The film is housed in the Walker Evans Archive at The Metropolitan

I prefer rehabbed PCCs, but at least it’s a streetcar! Photo credit: mariordo59 via Visual hunt / CC BY-SA Streetcar service ended in Washington DC on January 28, 1962. But the nation’s capital is bringing them back, starting with two lines serving H Street/Benning Road and Anacostia in 2013, and extending to 8 lines in all. Go here to check out the plans. I attended The George Washington University for grad school in the late 1990s and got to be old acquaintances with the DC