The famous 1970s map of the New York Subway returns in digital form.
Norman Bel Geddes’ 1932 design for a sleek ocean liner. In many ways it more resembles a contemporary sci-fi design for a starship, and yet in other ways it rapidly predates the present -day trend towards extremely large cruise ships with highly contoured forms. Photo: Sharon Hahn Darlin / Flickr
A segment from OPB’s Oregon Field Guide on the Columbia River’s barge traffic. According to a recent BBC report, the ports of the lower Columbia River are responsible for 80% of the export grain in North America, and much of it moves to the docks via barge.
SF Weekly writer journeys from San Francisco to Los Angeles on public transit, via Muni Diaries.
Grain on the Columbia, on OPB’s “Think Out Loud.”
BBC’s Claire Bolderson on OPB’s “Think Out Loud,” discussing the role of the Port of Portland in Asian trade.
"That last, bizarre, entry is part of the spatial history that White specializes in: railroads in the American West (the injury in question is part of a data set on railroad-related accidents in Colorado, 1884-1885). “Shaping the West,” as White dubs his project, is about “developing tools to represent and analyze visually how and to what degree the railroads created new spatial patterns and experiences in the 19th-century American West."
— From Fast Company.
The Columbia River system seen as a metro-style transit map; river transport as the first mode of public transport. From a Business Insider story.
The Night Mail (1936)
“Night Mail is a 1936 documentary film about a London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) mail train from London to Scotland, produced by the GPO Film Unit. A poem by English poet W. H. Auden was specially written for it, as was music by Benjamin Britten.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WO7JxYlhOM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pQJzZDIQTs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=902G8widi00
What I find personally fascinating about this film is that it illustrates the complexity of the mail-train system in what is arguably its most sophisticated form.
Sir John Bentjeman
A series of videos on YouTube of Sir John Bentjeman reading his own poetry, and also traveling the railways of England for the films.
King’s Lynn to Hunstanton via a diesel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lyp3wBqCuvE
And then Branch Line Railway, a BBC series from the 1960s. Listen to Bentjeman pine on about how the country will one day regret pulling up its rail lines, and (!) points to new urban rail lines in America as pointing the way to the future. (This being the early 1960s… was he referring to the Cleveland RTA line?) Three parts on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDrQkg8lOGc
