Transportation
Once a popular recreational pilot fly-in airport, Agua Dulce Air Park, north of Los Angeles, is hardly used at all as an airport anymore, but has been used as an airport location for several film productions. The small terminal building has been renamed by art departments a number of times,...
This may be the largest and busiest railway yard in the world, where more than half of Union Pacific's rail traffic passes through at some point. Throughout the 150 parallel tracks at the 8 mile long yard, trains are assembled, reconfigured, and loaded at a rate of around 120 trains and 9,000...
Barstow was founded as a railway town, and continues to be a major logistical center for material entering and leaving Los Angeles. The Burlington Northern Santa Fe rail company maintains one of its largest railway yards here, with 48 classification tracks, and the company's transcontinental route...
Inside the anchorage of the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge is a cavernous complex of eight 50-foot tall spaces. These cathedral-like rooms were walled off and used for storage for many years, until 1983, when an arts organization installed an exhibit there as part of the bridge's centennial....
Chicago's main airport is usually cited as the busiest airport in the world, with around 2,300 take-offs and landings a day.
Located at 11,153 feet in elevation, the Eisenhower Tunnel is the highest vehicular tunnel in the nation's interstate system, and and probably the highest in the world. Built in the 1970's, the 1.7 mile and long tunnel has two bores, one for eastbound and one for westbound traffic of Interstate 70...
The Fillmore and Western Railway, an hour north of Los Angeles, once connected Ventura and Castaic, serving the citrus groves and packing houses of the Santa Clara Valley, as well as tourists at the turn of the century, seeking the romantic "Mission Era" California landscape much touted a hundred...
The point at which the eastbound and westbound tracks for the first transcontinental railroad met. A visitors center has been built here by the National Park Service, at this remote site, at the northeastern edge of the Great Salt Lake. Initially, the Union Pacific, building the westbound track...
This rail tunnel through the Berkshires, completed in 1875, connected eastern Massachusetts to the industrial and transportation centers in upstate New York and the Great Lakes. At the time of completion it was the longest tunnel in the world, at 4.75 miles, and nearly 200 lives were lost during...
A Canadian crude oil pipeline that brings oil 1,775 miles from Edmonton, Alberta. 13 pumping stations along its course move 8.3 million gallons a day of crude through this pipeline, the longest crude oil line in the world (though the Trans-Siberian pipeline will eventually be 2,319 miles long).
A natural gas pipeline that runs from the Canadian border (at Waddington, NY) to South Commack, on Long Island, supplying over 3 million homes, as well as industries and power stations, in six northeastern states with gas from western Canada. The company that hurriedly built the line in 1991 has...
An extensive collection of artifacts relating to early development and transportation in Alaska. Displayed indoors, but mostly outdoors, in a rambling exhibit of curious and ordinary vehicles including an array of early snow mobiles, outboard motors, old emergency vehicles, trains, aircraft, boats...
Built in 1881, before the age of the automobile, this "oldest concrete street" in America is still in use outside the courthouse in Bellefontaine, though the street is restricted to light traffic (no trucks). A statue of the leading proponent for the paving of the street, a local cement salesman...
A 25-acre earthen promontory built for the Southern Crossing Bridge (which was never constructed) is now Heron's Head Park, so named because its shape resembles the head of a heron. The incompleted bridge project, dating from the 1960's, was going to retrieve more bay fill material from the slopes...
This steel bridge, carrying cars on U.S. Route 64,650 feet above the Rio Grande River, is the fifth highest bridge in the USA, and is otherwise notable for its dramatic location, 10 miles northwest of Taos, New Mexico. It opened in 1965. The four bridges in the USA higher than this one are the...
The Bay Bridge is one of the most impressive bridges in the country, though, like the City of Oakland it serves, it is usually upstaged by it's flashier neighbor, San Francisco's Golden Gate. The bridge's four mile span is composed of two halves. The Oakland side is supported on pilings resting on...
Cape Vincent marks the interior end of the St. Lawrence Seaway, a network of canals and locks adjacent to the St. Lawrence River, built between 1954 and 1959, that made it possible for large commercial ships to travel from the interior of the continent -- Great Lakes -- to the Atlantic Ocean. It...
The Transportation Technology Center is a field test site for the railroad transportation industry, located in a remote site in the plains of central Colorado. It is probably the largest railway R&D center in the country, with over 48 miles of dedicated, looped track for developing and testing...
The first use of Union Station, before it even opened to the public, was for a promotional event for a Hollywood movie called Union Pacific. Since the beginning, special events and filming seem to overshadow the structure's use as a train station. It was built as the main Los Angeles passenger...