theatlantic:A Gorgeous Photographic Elegy to the Last Great Steam TrainFew things dictate our bu
theatlantic: A Gorgeous Photographic Elegy to the Last Great Steam Train Few things dictate our built environment as much as the technology of transit — what we use to move people and things. Over the course of the 20th century, that technology shifted dramatically, from horses and trains to cars and planes, but it did so gradually, with jumps and starts, unevenly, with older technologies persisting in certain pockets longer than in others. One of those holdouts was the region stretching from the coal mines of Ohio, West Virginia, and western Virginia, out east to the Norfolk port, from where the coal was shipped around the country and around the world. There, the Norfolk and Western Railway continued to run on steam — not the more newfangled diesel-electric — until May of 1960, surviving both because of an allegiance to the coal mines that fed it, and because it ran classes of locomotives that were some of the finest ever made. See more. [Image: © Conway Link; courtesy of the O. Winston Link Museum] -- source link