The past future of high speed rail (come along if you can)

Mgoldman · **Posted:** Mon Jan 07, 2013 7:18 pm

Found a cool video featuring one of my all time favorite subjects: The United Aircraft Turbo Train!

Clips and some rare footage presented with the Amboy Duke's "Journey to the Center of the Mind" hit song.

Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhlh7JJVc50

/Mitch

Alexander D. Mitchell IV · **Posted:** Mon Jan 07, 2013 7:38 pm

Can I torture you now?

Somewhere in my pile of stuff, I HAD a 45-rpm record of two songs recorded by some wannabe country singer railfan, one side with "Turbo Train," and the B side "Southern Crescent."

Anyone else know who performed these two (probably self-produced) ditties from the early 1970s?

UPDATE: A cursory Internet search turns up that it was released on Lucas & Harmon Brothers, or L&H, not top be confused with Hal Lewis' later L&H Railsonics which released a bunch of commercial rail recordings in the 1980s.......

And apparently there were other releases by them, and a proposal to reissue them in 2012: http://www.trainweb.org/capt/Minutes_06162012.htm

J3a-614 · **Posted:** Mon Jan 07, 2013 10:12 pm

Interesting that the movie on YouTube is "sponsored" by a high-speed rail advocacy group in Canada. Nothing like looking at what you once did that you don't do now to make for embarrassment for modern "leaders," and sometimes actually able of goading them into action.

Some other films from this advocacy group:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETYDiT4h4oU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qegIRh9DFHc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iLBP0qPg_k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-ght8Zzf3k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsoiULzbrBI

Man, what stands out about all of these is how dated they look and sound, particularly the music in the soundtracks! Of course, I'm a big Blue Grass fan, and that music's sound hasn't changed much since Bill Monroe's band of 1947 (and indeed, it actually sounds older!), so you may not want to rely too much on my opinion of such things! And of course, from a preservation standpoint, none of this equipment survived at all, even though it was in service for something like 15 years or so.

Which reminds me--we have a new future preservation project to keep in mind:

http://articles.philly.com/2012-12-15/b ... t-corridor

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-0 ... rains.html