toponymics
-maf

I didn't quite follow all that, but I grew up in North Dakota when the Great Northern still stopped in little farm communities; I would ride the train 30 miles to visit my aunt and uncle who ran the hotel across the street from the depot. I remember the circus train (RB,B&B) coming to town in 1950 or so.

http://www.gnrhs.org/

Your little biopic started me on a new train of thought, tsuwm, one which led me to discover that I have an incredibly tenuous connection to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. It turns out that his father and my grandfather worked for the same railway company, Northwestern Railways, at the same time. While this might seem to be grasping at illusory straws, this sort of link is par for the course in New Zealand. Whenever anything of note happens involving anyone of note, our media will bend themselves into all sorts of tantric contortions in attempt to establish a NZ link to the event, many of which connections are much less substantial than my deep abiding karmic bond with the great physicist.

There's actually a connection between canals and railroads, at least topographically. Within a few hundred yards of my house here in the Denver area there is a canal called the High Line Canal. It meanders some 75 miles from where the South Platte River exits the mountains on the SW side of Denver all the way here to Aurora, where it finally disappears in the plains a bit NE of where I live. The settlers built the canal by hand to carry water for irrigation about a hundred years ago. It's still in use. I cannot imagine how they built it, but it follows a line that is a gentle drop from the mountains all the way to here, which is only about 25 miles as the crow flies.

But how does this equate to railroads? My five year old is a train freak, and I take him on train rides occasionally. Two years ago we took a narrow guage line from Chama NM to Antonito CO. The last third of it was across the plains. That train followed the same sort of line that the High Line Canal follows. Basically the path of least steepness. It was easier and cheaper to do this than to run in a straight line, because they would have had to fill in dips and cut through hills. Trains have a physical limit on how steep a slope they can climb.

Yes, roman engineers and industrial revolution engineers both had the same problems to solve, and came up with often very similar solutions-- Most of the advance in bridge building (not all) came from railroad engineers working out solutions for strong, (trains are heavy) simple (workman where not always literate--or if they were, not always in English or another common language.) flexible (so the same solution could be refitted to a variety of terrains) trestles.
They also had some of the worst disasters. The Tacoma Narrows bridge stand out-- but there have been so many failures of railroad bridges that i am sure everyone on this board can site one local to them (if you define local as 100 miles and are willing to back 100 years), or one that impacted there family...

but getting back to Words-- why are railroad bridges always called trestles? Is a trestle a specific style of railroad bridge- and non rail road people like me just use the term generically (and incorrectly) ?
NY has arched bridges, and swing bridges, and drawbridges, of course our wonderful suspension bridges-- Brooklyn is great--I can see it from windows at work--not my window-- (i don't have one)but George Washington is my personal favorite.. but RR bridges-- all of them are trestles..

A brief search turned up this definition http://members.edventures.com/terms/t/trestle/definition.html which supports Helen's observation.

However, I also found this http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=Trestle


In NZ at least we have trestle tables and trestle scaffolds, and probably others which haven't crossed my bows. So I guess you can say it is a generic term for any support which is essentially triangular in design.

Yup--I know of trestle tables--and even of trestle footbridges (sometimes called a Kings Post bridge)--and at least one avenue in the Bronx-- Kingsbridge Road-- named for its Kings(post) bridge-- the bridge used to be called the kings post bridge-- but now is commonly just known as the kingsbridge--kingsbridge road is the main access road to the bridge.
and this was very clearly different from the Post Road-- which was the old overland postal route from Boston to DC(and i guess points further south..but in the northeast, i know most of it survives..)

and i know of other trestles-- but over the firth of ???? scotland-- there is a cantelever bridge that is also a railway bridge-- but i know, i would call it, a trestle. And on Northern Blvd--a few miles east there is a huge trestle bridge -- a car bridge. (a deep eroded valley is spanned by a steel arch-- all constructed of triangular braces so i know what a trestle is...)

I have seen bridges of many forms, but if its a RR bridge-- i tend to label it a trestle*-- where i wouldn't just name every foot/car bridge a bridge--
So am i totaly out of order? and alone in this? Or so others find, trains transverse space on trestles, and other traffic crosses on bridges-- and bridges get modified into suspension ~s and draw~s, high ~, kings(post)~, iron ~?

*what is NY's 8th East river bridge? (most NY's can only name seven bridges--it's trivia game question).it is a steel arched bridge where the road bed is at the bottom of the arch-- and the answer is "Metro North's trestle" (MN is RR)

1)brooklyn, 2)manhattan, 3)williamsburg,4) 59th Street/Queensboro, 5) tri-boro, 6)whitestone, 7)throgs neck
all car bridges, and except for last 2, all have pedestrian walkways--whitesone used to have one.. but it is in the style of, and by the same engineering firm as former Tacoma Narrows. bridge...
and walkway area was used to re-enforce bridge structure since it too was a bit bouncy....

>But back to climbing--radio slave units are helpers
around this neck of the woods.

My kids are both into an English-based TV show called Thmas the Tank Engine, little trains with nasty personalities (in my opinion), I've often fantasized about writing a show in which the switch engine pulling the coal hoppers refuses to come out of the tunnel because she is embarrassed. Indeed, a shy coaltrain.

How do you suppose that locomotives, rolling stock and the like got so
easy to anthropomorphize?

Well, they do have all that pumping power...

Yes, but for more than five minutes or so, Jackie.

Just kidding guys, don't get yer knickers in a knot .

What? [confused emoticon] I understand all the individual words but I have no idea what you are saying mfa.

What? [confused emoticon] I understand all the individual words but I have no idea what you are saying mfa.

A--HAH! I knew it! Mfa is Shakespeare reincarnated!

And the crow caws thrice at midnight [interrobang]

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be gandies!


...or bindle-stiffs.

Better a bindle-stiff, then a yard-bull!

>You gotta know stuff, though. You need to watch and see which one of those three lines has got the Empty-Canadian-Returns (boxcars that can't be loaded
lawfully in the US) and. of course, the Boeing cars,
most likely from Wichita. You really need to board something in this line! because when the MStar makes
it to Auburn, they're gonna break her in two and backram the head end into the yards there. You'll be wishing you picked the denominator if you get caught
in her numerator, and the only sure way of avoiding that is to do what I said. If it's the right time of
the year, sunrise will meet you at the King Street
Station.



Awesome, MFA, simply awesome. I can almost feel the clickety clack of the wheels and the cold blowing over my rag-wrapped feet as I try not to freeze to death on the rods.

all those legendary trains-- and you left out the wabash cannonball?

Listen to the whistle, the rumble and roar..

I thought all good railroad bums treaded/hoped for a ride on wabash cannonball?
for those of you who are unfamiliar--here one link-- google had others, but i had trouble getting a server responce.
http://www.ukans.edu/carrie/docs/texts/wabash.htm

i have heard other verses, and other words.. but this version starts out right..

The New Zealand rail system is unique in that it is what most of you would regard as narrow gauge (3ft 6in). This was because of political shenanigans in the 1870s between two individuals in government one of whom is an ancestor of mine.

The weight of the tractors (engines) able to operate on a narrow gauge line is limited, and so the steepness of a climbable incline is constrained. It so happens that I used to live in Port Chalmers, just north of Dunedin. Across the bay, the main trunk line rose from sea level to about 200 feet above sea level in one one-mile long (approx) incline. It is reputed to be the steepest incline on the New Zealand rail system. All would go well unless the rails were wet or covered in ice. I used to lie in bed about three in the morning and hear the trains have a go at the incline in the frost. You could tell when they were starting to lose traction, generally about half a mile up the hill, because the engines were working harder, but the sound of their efforts did not diminish ...

They'd back down the hill to Sawyers Bay and take another run at it. Generally the second run worked, because the first run had melted the ice on the rails as far as the train had managed to get the first time. Backing down was the noisiest part for the residents because the fans on the resistance breaking units on the diesel engines would scream their heads off trying to dissipate the heat being generated in the resistor banks.

Earlier, in the days of steam, they'd have two engines on the front of the heavier goods trains and another smaller loco pushing from the back. This generally meant that the train would make it first time, every time. The pusher would uncouple at the top station and then back all the way to Dunedin, some ten miles. It was a great thing to see, three steam locos working hard. The downside was that on calm days there'd be a pall of coalsmoke hanging over the town for up to an hour afterwards and all the washing on the clothes lines would get grubby. On the days that this happened the Port Chalmers stationmaster would hurry home after work by the least populated routes to avoid the angry housewives. I remember a tale, possibly apocryphal, that one woman was so annoyed that she bundled her newly dirty washing up and dumped it on his desk, demanding that he wash it by hand and hang it out as she'd had to do.

Sorry, just seemed relevant and perhaps interesting in the context of this thread.

Very interesting, thanks CapK. I think this is the only thing I have understood in this thread in a couple of days. We should have a dazed and confused emoticon for situations like this .