Here in my home town there is a place called the LINCOLN HIGHWAY GARARGE. It was made in 1921 on the Lincoln Highway which was America's FIRST transcontinental highway. The federal government chose a young Dwight D. Eisenhower to create it. He was to organize a caravan of US Army cars and trucks and find the best way to get from the East Coast to California. In those days there still were not too many cars. Towns were being paved for cars but there were still long areas of land that were still dirt road. He was to follow the already paved roads and then see to it that the unpaved parts got paved. The 'highway' was not what we know think of as a highway, it was just a two lane road that went through cities and had plenty of crossroads. But they didnt even have stop lights then due to the small traffic they had so it was, by far, the best highway for a long time. Naturally there were many places like the Lincoln Highway Garage all along it that were open all night, repaired cars, offered ALL the different types of gas there were and could house people over night.

When in 1944 the Allies were going to need a man who was known as a great organizer, the one best known in the US Army was Eisenhower for what he had done with the Lincoln Highway caravan. So he was pushed way up in rank to put him in charge of organizing all the necessities for the invasion. Note that he was never to actually lead fighting armies.

When Germany was invaded Ike went to see the AUTOBAHN he had heard so much about. He love dit and wanted the USA to have one. But he was in no position in the 1940s to do such a thing.

Then Ike got elected president in late 1952. He then pushed to cover America with AUTOBAHNS. The American railroad system was still the best way to go long distances but it was really run into the ground during WWII when the military ran it around the clock for all the men and "materiel" without repairing it as they went. But Congress then started passing bills designed to weaken the railroads and subsidize the building of an Autobahn. The new rules were so draconian that the railroads were being bankrupted. (There was a great issue of REASON MAGAZINE in the 1970s that had all the details and even photostats of what Congress did for the auto, steel, and oil companies against the railroads.)

It was NOT free enterprise that caused cars to replace trains, it was a deliberate government attack on trains while helping automobiles. The RAILROAD UNION was powerful and fought against it but the AUTOWORKERS UNION, STEEL UNION, and OIL COMPANIES UNION outnumbered them. So the Democratic Party, which was very pro-worker in those days (unlike now when its in the spoiled brats pockets) had to stay neutral.

Highways were built all over America and the railroads slowly died. I took long rides on PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD and NEW YORK CENTRAL trains in 1967 but the trains were now deliberately as uncomfortable and slow as possible as the companies now WANTED to get rid of passenger travel as it lost them billions while they were still making a little money on FREIGHT TRAINS. In 1968 the PENN-CENTRAL appeared but it went bankrupt quickly. WHAT CAUSES THE LACK OF TRAINS TO THIS DAY IS NOT THAT THEY ARENT BEING SUBSIDIZED ENOUGH BUT THAT THE DRACONIAN RULES THAT RUINED THEM ARE STILL ON THE BOOKS. If they went back to the 1940s rules they would be back, even with the American fascist-economics Autobahn to compete with.

If you look into old microfilms you will see that most people SUPPORTED the building of the American Autobahn. In this town the microfilm of 1964 showed support by mens clubs whose members pushed for it as they could not wait to whiz quickly to Baltimore, Washington DC, Philadelphia and New York City. It would now be so fast without traffic lights and stop signs that it would be as if the big cities were much, much closer. These were the places about which they always said, "GREAT PLACE TO VISIT BUT I WOULD NEVER WANT TO LIVE THERE!! They didnt seem to realize that an Autobahn goes BOTH ways. And in every case, the opening of the highway at the next town then ruined that town within a few years as all the inner-city Big-City problems jumped onto those Autobahns and RUINED all those towns. If you look at a state map now you will see that the safest cities are now those farthest from the National Autobahn.

Incidentally, the 6am news in my town is almost always the same every morning: THERE WAS ANOTHER TERRIBLE TRACTOR TRAILER CRASH LAST NIGHT. Because what happened to this country was that the freight was taken out of the boxcars and each boxcar is now a tractor trailer. And the plastic little cars on the roads are MUCH smaller than the huge steel cars people drove in the pre-October 1973 era . When European countries made their own Autobahns they started with small cars AND did NOT but the huge boxcars (T-T's) on the highways with the little cars. No, Europe did NOT deliberately destroy its trains as the USA did. We have T-T's that get bigger all the time while Congress keeps demanding better milage in cars and the easiest way to get better milage is to keep making the cars smaller and lighter while the tractor trailers get bigger and heavier. The mandatory seatbelt law of the 1980s was a vain attempt to make cars safe but it was a drop in the bucket compared to the ever-growing T-T's.

Watch some old movies of the USA just before the forcing of people out of trains and into cars. The late 1940s movies show trucks but there were NO TRACTOR TRAILERS!! In the days before the INTERSTATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM all long haul freight went by TRAIN and trucks only worked LOCALLY. The trucks in those days were only SLIGHTLY bigger than cars and the cars were larger than now and made of metal.

For some reason the supporters of trains never bring up the vast number of DEAD PEOPLE who would now be alive if not killed in TRACTOR TRAILER ACCIDENTS. This carnage has been going on for decades and it did not happen before the INTERSTATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM put boxcars on the roads nxt to cars and then ordered the cars to get flimsier while telling the truckers to get bigger and carry more tons on the roads. 7-19-2005