Americans Used to Take the Train Everywhere, So Why Did They Stop?

A traveling salesman could eat breakfast in Chicago and step off a train in Cincinnati before supper, and if the next stop held only six hundred people, the train stopped there too, at a depot with an agent behind the window and a fire in the stove. That was how America moved in 1950, and nearly every town of any size was on the timetable. Come back to the platform while the rails still reach everywhere, and see why they stopped reaching at all. In this video: ✓ Small-town depots and the morning train ✓ The crews behind the service ✓ What towns lost when the trains left ✓ Depots that became something else ✓ What the train age built that is still here Distance, for a while there, was honest. It cost money and hours, and you paid it sitting in a moving room with your hat on the rack and the country turning outside the glass, town after town, until the towns were yours. The rails go on behind it, past the edge of town, and they are still pointed at the world they used to take you to. # TrainTravel #1950s #AmericanRailroads #GoldenAgeOfRail