Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

One thing that always catches my eye is seeing from satellite views the oddly shaped ghosts and footprints of long-gone railroad tracks and byways, which for decades after (if not a century), leave their mark on a city's streets and blocks. And then happening to walk by it in person on the ground. Like for example, https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7545858,-122.4138878,311m/da... , or https://www.google.com/maps/@37.404972,-122.137255,913m/data...

You can see this in SF Mission and the old Southern Pacific lines, and why some blocks are so oddly shaped, and why there are parks that have the strangest configurations. Out of place diagonal lots, parks, roads. Very hard to erase those legacy shapes.

Similarly, seeing long stretches of green or empty space and realizing that there's a giant water pipe underneath stretching from the Sierras, and that's why there will never be a house built on that <xyz> lot.

(Funny, and I never seem to find among my friends anyone else who takes interest in it.)

I also take interest in the scars you can see on satellite view. Besides the lines themselves there are many disused buildings. Like this MBTA station outside Boston which has had no service in 50 years, https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3801645,-71.2466532,3a,75y,2... or this long-defunct passenger depot in Homestead, FL https://www.google.com/maps/@25.4712072,-80.4890484,3a,26.4y... ... https://www.google.com/maps/@29.4488141,-82.21584,3a,75y,138... McIntosh, FL (discovered this one following old grade on the satellite view)

I find this fascinating, too. I'm in western Ohio near an abandoned line that connected Indianapolis, IN to Springfield, OH. The line is still very apparent in satellite photos nearly 50 years after the last bits were retired. Likewise, in the property records, the "scar" the line left on the land is clearly visible.

In a few places landowners purchased the parcels on both sides of the line and "reconnected" them, but mostly the line's legacy is a bunch of oddly-shaped property lines cutting across a grid of 80 or 160 acre fields. In those "reconnected" places it's interesting to see how the crops and soil have a slightly different appearance (or not-so-slight, in some cases).

Many of the little towns along the line have a "Railroad Street", too. The town I grew up in did, but I'm old enough to remember when the abandoned rails were still there.

Similar to the railroads leaving their mark, a few years ago I got a bit obsessed with the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct. I spent a few evenings laying in bed "flying" the line with Google Earth, seeing where the pipes diverge and following their separate paths, and seeing where they meet up again. Seeing how San Jose and Palo Alto are situated on top of the line is interesting. I'm resolved to visit the Pulgas Water Temple and any public spaces I can walk on top of Hetch Hetchy next time I'm in the Bay area.

The Pulgas Water Temple is such a strange, strange place. It feels so out-of-place. I tend to stop by during my annual-ish Filoli visit.

I always get a little sad when I go looking for things like this. Today it costs a billion dollars per mile to build rapid transit, and yet there are cities where they just tore up their rapid transit system. My favorite is probably a branch off the Green Line in Chicago. You can start here: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8220133,-87.6169737,3a,60y,2... and zoom out and follow the entire route. A transit desert with lots of space for development, that way because the rapid transit route got torn up. (Info about this particular line: https://www.chicago-l.org/operations/lines/kenwood.html There are a lot of them in Chicago.)

With the changes in rail technology, and the effects of weather, would disused lines not have required a complete replacement anyways?

Much of the system dates from the same era and handles 2000s era passenger loads. But yes, deferred maintenance has its cost; a coat of paint prevents the superstructure from rusting away, once that paint is gone and the superstructure has rusted, then it has to be replaced entirely.

That was the sticking point for this particular branch. It needed money in an era where trains were boring and the glorious automobile was our savior, so wasn't going to get any money. It turned out that was not the best long term solution, and that's the sad part. People were onto something with this whole "streetcar suburb" and dense ubran rapid transit system. But, it hit some rough patches, and here we are today. (Overrun by cars and their pollution, but without a transit system that would let people get rid of their car.)

There's a stretch of disused railway near here which is still clearly visible in aerial photos over 170 years after it was closed... (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newmarket_and_Chesterford_Ra... -- the line from Six Mile Bottom to Chesterford closed in 1851. This is about where it diverged from the still-existent Cambridge-Newmarket line: https://maps.app.goo.gl/qXRZ84sd97A5gK4Q8 -- if you turn on the satellite-image view it's easy to see curving off to the south.)

I came in here to say as much. I even had a railroad spike I found from a (pre-?) Civil War era railroad line when I was 13 or 14, but my mom threw it away at the time because it was "junk".

These marks are all over Seattle too. Anywhere you see a weird diagonal street, a 5-way intersection, etc, is probably the ghost of a rail line.

It's sad to me that we lost so much to turn cities into a grid of highways.

I was out for a walk in Kirkland (across the lake from Seattle) the other week and found a little paved path that ran about 1/4 mile through a wooded area. I could tell by the amount of engineering they would have had to do to raise the grade that it wasn't just some 50s foot path. So when I got home, I looked at the King County Parcel Viewer (Google it if you live around here, it's worth it) with the 1936 aerial photo basemap...and couldn't find it. Some more digging revealed that it was a railroad built in the late 19th century to service the Great Western Iron and Steel Company, which was partially built but never finished. So even to all the people looking up and pointing at that airplane in 1936, the railroad was still something only their grandparents would have seen being built.

There's a shelf in a hill nearby in the woods. I eventually found out it is the remains of a "skid road" used to clear the logs out when the old growth was all logged out.

Sometimes you can find a gigantic tree stump here and there.

I've always enjoyed the weird odd lots and the parks that fit in some of them in the Mission. Still hoping that eventually something gets done with the one by the Atlas Stair building [1]. I've also always wondered why Treat doesn't seem to line up with the rest of the line farther south, and this site says that it's because a small rail yard was there [2], which makes it look like Treat was a siding and the main line ran down Harrison.

Fun fact: this was also the line that used to take bodies to the cemeteries in Colma, which is why there are still a couple mortuaries around, e.g. the one right off 17th and Valencia amidst all the fancy restaurants, and apparently a working crematorium at 17th and Folsom?

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7558183,-122.412433,3a,75y,1...

[2] https://www.abandonedrails.com/colma-branch

Edit: much better article about what's going on with the abandoned lot on 22nd: https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Forgotten_Railroad_R...

We too have similar views in Columbus, OH.

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9714622,-83.004088,3a,75y,18...

When I was in New York for a week 15 years ago, I bought this book https://forgotten-ny.com/book/ and had real fun walking around to spot all the places in the book. Not sure how many survive still…

I used to visit Utsubo Park in Osaka. Walking the long corridor with the dividing hedge, it was easy to envision the airstrip it once was. But it isn't so obvious to me from aerial photos.

(Thanks for bringing back good memories.)

There's some of these in Paris along the historic route of the abandoned "Petite Ceinture" railway.

Here's one example where buildings have been built in the way: https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Petite+Ceinture+du+12%C3%A8...

There's tons of spots like this just east of the mission, downhill from Potrero.. lots of oddly shaped buildings and parking lots too.

Near San Bruno Ave near division you can still see railroad tracks on some of the streets, partially covered by street asphalt.

What’s the easiest way to tell the difference between a buried-under-the-asphalt old freight line and a buried-under-the-asphalt old streetcar line?

That's an interesting question. The area north of Potrero didn't become residential until quite recently and I don't think they ran streetcars in the specific place I'm thinking of. They were basically tracks in an industrial part of town headed in the direction of Southern Pacific rail.

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