Spain's Bullet Train

Spain's system of 218-mile-an-hour bullet trains, the AVE -- meaning 'bird' in Spanish -- has increased mobility for many residents, though critics say it has come at the expense of less-glamorous forms of transportation.











To sell his vision of a high-speed train network to the American public, President Barack Obama this week cited Spain, a country most people don't associate with futuristic bullet trains.

Locomotive as Artistic Inspiration

No application of the harnessing of steam power rattled the status quo so much as the steam-powered locomotive. With each improvement, its speed and reach shattered limits of space and time. Millions of acres of wilderness were cleared for hundreds of railway lines. Timetables enslaved travelers to the clock as never before. (By 1883 American railroads had divided the country into four time zones, decades before the government made the concept official.) Stations and railroad cars forced people together even as they reinforced their division into classes.

Slide show.

G. Caillebotte - Le pont de l'Europe









Caillebotte - Landscape With Railroad Cutting
Edouard Manet - The Railway (The Gare Saint Lazare)," in which a seated governess looks up from her book to study us while a young girl in her care gazes through iron bars at a Parisian rail yard."

Thomas Talbot Bury: Coloured Views on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway









John Cooke Bourne - View of a steam locomotive crossing the Knaresborough viaduct, in Yorkshire.


O. Winston Link - "Hot Shot Eastbound at the Iaeger Drive In, Iaeger, West Virginia, 1956"