Sad pictures here of the single track 1867 UP transcontinental mainline being plowed up and scraped off to provide a drainage pond for a plastic housing development.
HOW do we get people to realize the import of what they are doing?????
I have tried presentations and postings and media..... This is the earliest evidence of human occupation in Cheyenne (i know that sounds sad, especially coming from the UK) BUT history it is and once its destroyed it becomes another bloomin.. site of ....on a tourist route.

Mr Angry
Mike Pannell
Cheyenne

Mike,

I am totally onboard with preserving the original transcontinental row, but me thinks there are native Americans who might argue that humans were in Cheyenne long before the UP. :-)

Rob

Point taken about native americans, however evidence here is scant to say the least. This is major evidence of the white mans first footprint.

mike

But if it's someone else's property, heaven forbid someone else should have an opinion about it... John Galt would get all miffed!

History is all relative. There are plenty of things we'd dig up and remove from our land that would mean nothing to us but others would be horrified. Nobody here would dream of tearing up this right of way if it were on OUR OWN property, but the bottom line is that it’s their land, and people have the right to do whatever they want with it (as long as they’re not breaking laws, such as dumping toxic waste or something like that) and we should be thankful for that fact.
A friend of mine just finished dealing with the flip side of this. A drunk teenager flipped his car on an embankment and it landed in my friend’s back yard, killing himself. After the investigation, he thought that was the end of it, until people started hopping his fence and building an impromptu “shrine” for the deceased. He would see people in his yard at all hours of the day or night and called the police so often, he only had to say who was calling and they’d respond, “We’ll go kick them out” and hang up the phone. People would bang on his door at all hours, demanding to be let into the back yard after he strung barb wire over the fence. They’d get pretty aggressive with him and more than once he had to go to the door armed. It came to a head when he decided to build a large BBQ on the site, and the kid’s friends and family went ape. They SUED him, saying it was no longer his yard but a “site” that needed to be preserved, citing some precedence a lawyer found for preserving the site a Civil War General was shot at on private land in the 1970s. Thankfully the judge threw the whole thing out of court but my pal was vilified in the media and people protested his house when he suggested that the grave site was a far better memorial anyway.
He would never have dug up this grade on his land as he’s into history (not RR stuff, though), but after hearing his tales of woe, I’m very strongly pro landowner now.

Another flip side of this is that in Britain and much of Europe, you can't even throw a rock anywhere without it landing on the site of some past settlement, historic occasion, atrocity, battle, burial site, religious shrine, or whatnot. I remember years ago walking on a harbor front near Aberdeen, Scotland with a rail friend, and noticed that I was walking on very old stones.
"How old is this harbour, anyway, Neil?"
"Oh, thet's the auld harbur there, they think it goes back to 1100 or 1200 or so. That side aurr there [pointing] wis built oon roond 1600 er so......"
There were ordinary fishing boats tied up, unloading. Just an ordinary working dock.

Later that week, we attended a folk-rock concert festival held on the site of a 1644 battle of the English Civil War.

"We can't save everything." That phrase gets uttered around this forum too often for some folks, but as negative as it is, it's true.