A website dedicated to interesting train stations I run across, or trains perhaps, or perhaps just interesting things connected with railroads.
Wednesday, December 27, 2023
Lex Anteinternet: Monday, December 27, 1943. Seizing the railroads, ...
Tuesday, October 17, 2023
Lex Anteinternet: Sunday, October 17, 1943. The Burma Railway completed.
Sunday, October 17, 1943. The Burma Railway completed.
The German surface raider Michel was torpedoed and sunk off of Japan by the USS Tarpon. On the same day the German's lost the U-540, U-631 and U-841 in the Atlantic.
The Burma Railway, constructed with Asian slave labor and Allied POWs, was completed.
Wednesday, August 30, 2023
Lex Anteinternet: Monday, August 30, 1943. The Lackawanna Limited wreck
The Lackawanna Limited wreck occurred when a Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad passenger train, the New York-Buffalo Lackawanna Limited collided with a freight train. Twenty-seven people were killed in the collision, and about twice that number injured, many from steam that poured into the railroad cars.
Tuesday, August 29, 2023
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
Lex Anteinternet: March 24, 1941. The "Wild West Cowboys"
The last of New York's "Wild West Cowboys", mounted men who rode in front of the city's urban freight trains in Manhattan to clear pedestrians, made his last ride. After this date, the mounted riders were retired from that service, there being at that time only one left.
Monday, May 25, 2020
Lex Anteinternet: A Memorial Day Reflection on the Second World War....
Thursday, November 21, 2019
Today In Wyoming's History: November 21. Trains and Depots in the news.
Trains and depots figure in Wyoming's history for this day.
November 21
1919 Chasing Carlisle. November 21, 1919
But by the same token, by 1919 the criminal sanctuary no longer was one. There was no more Hole In The Wall Gang. Most of the former members of that group were dead, in prison, or reformed. Following the Tipton train robbery by The Wild Bunch, the authorities were no longer willing to tolerate the lack of law enforcement that allowed it to continue to exist and were willing to expend the resources necessary to penetrate it. Prior to that happening, the badmen dispersed. Some would return, and as late as the 00s, but they weren't hitting trains.
Carlisle was.
Monday, October 7, 2019
Lex Anteinternet: Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Year...
Lex Anteinternet: Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Year...:
Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Years Ago: The Last Fresh Vegetable Month
Another interesting entry on A Hundred Years Ago.
The Last Fresh Vegetable Month
I've touched on this here in the past, but one thing that's very much different from our current, refrigerated, freezer, grocery store frozen food, transportation directly from Mexico, world, is the way we eat.
And by that I don't mean the latest wacky food fetish (you know, don't eat that, eat this, no don't, no do, um,. . . ).
No, I mean that it varied seasonally, by necessity. And beyond that the seasons dictated to a certain extent what you ate at all.
On prior entries here you'll find photographs of grocery stores with signs painted on them noting that they "bought vegetables". Indeed, at the courthouse in Sheridan Wyoming there's a great photograph of downtown Sheridan in its early days with a store painted on its side with that it "buys and sells" vegetables. I.e, it was doing the locavore thing by necessity.
Indeed, that local produce history, dimly remembered and somewhat inaccurately recalled, is one of the founding mythic memories of the Locavore movement, that movement which, as an environmental ethos, demands that you "eat local".
Shoot, I might even brew my own beer.
My wife, who doesn't want to live in 1719, and prefers 2019, keeps this from occurring, although in years past I have put in a big garden (I'm on year two right now of a well failure I haven't addressed) and as we raise beef, we have a lot of grass fed beef that appears on our table. But the idea remains attractive.
Anyhow, one thing about having in the past having sort of lived that lifestyle, first by necessity and then by design, and because I'm a student of history as well as everything else, I know that the concept of "eating local" isn't quite what a person might suspect, if they really apply it.
That's because you have to eat local, based on where you live.
And that's at least partially what almost everyone did, in varying degrees, up until the 1950s.
Put another way, people had fresh vegetables in the summer and fall, as that's when they were available.
Let's consider the humble cabbage.
Cabbage probably isn't your favorite vegetable (I like cabbage, but my wife really dislikes it). But cabbage doesn't keep all winter. Planted in the spring, it's ready to eat about 80 days later. So that makes it available sometime in late spring or early summer depending up where you live. And a lot of places it would be available all summer long into the fall. But once it started to frost, that would be it.
So here, if you planted it, it would be first available in June, and last in September. That's it.
You can't keep it after that.
And this would be true of most fresh vegetables. You'd have them when they first matured. If they are a crop like cabbage, lettuce or spinach that you can keep growing, you'd have them all summer. If they were a crop like corn, peas, green beans or peppers, they'd be ready and fresh just once. In some places, you'd get a second crop in, in others, not.
Well what about after that?
Just truck it in, right?
Well, not so much.
In 1919 the road system, as we've seen, did not allow for transcontinental transportation of fresh produce. Indeed, an irony of the road system in the country is that it had deteriorated as the railroad system was so good.
Of course that would mean that shipping by rail was an option. It had certainly been done for meat, and beer, in refrigerated rail cars dating back to the mid 19th Century. I can find no evidence, however, that it was done with vegetables, and there's probably reasons for that.
If it was done, it was apparently not done much, but I'll take correction on that.
So no vegetables in the winter?
No, that was not the case at all. It's just that they were not, as the item noted, "fresh".
I'll be frank that home canning scares me and my family never did it, for which I'm thankful. I'm not afraid of canned anything at the store, and I'm rather fond of some canned items, but home canning always makes me a bit queasy. Too many stories, perhaps, that I heard as a child. Anyhow, home canning was still widely practiced when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, again all by women. I know very few people who do it now.
Other legumes and beans keep dried really readily as well. The old jokes you hear associated with cowboys and soldiers about repeatedly eating beans are based on the fact that they keep and transport readily. If you are on the trail, flour and beans are easy keepers. So "biscuits and beans" and "bacon and beans" would have been common foods out of necessity.
So during the summer you'd eat fresh heart vegetables, right?
Well, yes. At least they were available during the summer most places. If you were far enough south, they'd be available all year long.
But that's only part of the story.