Starfire Rail

When the moguls of movies decided to establish an award for lifetime achievement in film, they turned to the one person who epitomized achievement… as measured by size! In 1952, Cecil B. DeMille received the first award bearing his name. This year also saw the release of his penultimate film, “The Greatest Show on Earth”. Read More

“Let it… Snow” Oh, the snowfall’s deeper than the hedges But we have rotary plows and wedges So we’ll toss the snow off the edges And we’ll go, and we’ll go, and we’ll go… * Oh, it’s choked the mountain passes And the oil is thick as molasses And it’s still coming down in masses Read More

Thomas Devery: What do you want to go to Australia for? Jason McCullough: Well, it’s the last of the frontier country. Thought I might like to do a little pioneering. “Support Your Local Sheriff”, 1969 The land of the Southern Cross, of the Dreamtime, of the kangaroo, (and of Foster’s Lager), of “the Outback”, a Read More

The coming of the railroad was, in every place it appeared, a paradigm shift in the ability to transport tonnage over land. Before the Irons, people carried goods on their backs (or on their heads). A person could carry pounds, or tens of pounds. A team of horses or oxen could carry tens or even Read More

The building of a railroad is really the science of taming the terrain… regardless…. The railroad goes from point “A” to point “B” by the shortest route available. Going around is expensive, time-consuming and inefficient. Particularly in the case of very high-speed passenger railroad lines, “going around” may well defeat the purpose of the rail Read More

IN 1899, THE GAME OF FOOTBALL WAS STILL A NOVELTY. Only a couple dozen colleges and universities fielded teams, and the majority of these were all but unsanctioned, being affiliated with their eponymous school in name only. Into this hazy world of sport came the plucky gridders of Sewanee, Tennessee. The team from The University Read More

A NEW ERA IN LAND TRANSPORT WAS INAUGURATED IN 1830 when the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company began revenue service on the Shiny Irons using a steam powered locomotive to move cargo. One hundred years ago, American Class 1 railroads earned $3.6 billion dollars hauling lading (lading is the cargo a rail car Read More

The story of the Shiny Irons is a story of speed. In 1805, a locomotive designed by Richard Trevithick of Cornwall, England first threw down the gauntlet, running at the pace of 5 miles per hour. Lest we scoff, we in our 150-mph-capable automobiles, remember, this was a time when most travel was done in Read More

ON HER 2002 ALBUM “SWEET TALK AND GOOD LIES”, country music artist Heather Myles sings; I like big cars, Like the one that’s sittin’ in my Grandpa’s yard. He’ll say: “they don’t make ’em like that no more, “Not Pontiac, Cadillac, Chevy or Ford.” Big cars. Yeah, I like big cars. Myles’ lament of bygone Read More

As immigrant America traveled over the waters from innumerable foreign ports, many times they brought only what they could carry. Nevertheless, they carried, in their heads and hearts, a tradition of music we have come to call folk songs. The term Folk music came from England, where they took the German word “volk”, meaning people, Read More