Good infrastructure left to rot and then turned into a "rail trail" combined with abandoned industry. Welcome to St Louis.
The Trestle is a perfect symptom of the way capital paints a pretty picture over poverty and dead industry. See? There's nothing wrong! Everything's fine!
It would look better if they'd just left the metal bare. What soul there was, they killed it.
In my city we have one of these former rail bridges as a bike bridge now. While it's sad that it used to carry trains and doesn't anymore, it is hand-painted and weathered so it looks a lot nicer than this obnoxious branding. Pretty good trail too. I wish cities would be planned properly so there can be railways and bike paths instead of this zero-sum thing.
I remember how bike friendly SNCF was in France. You could spend you day riding and taking the trains between more distant villages. I maintain :france-cool: , but SNCF is a lovely thing.
If you live in an high population density area of the US and want to make yourself sad, find a map of the abandoned rail lines in your area.
Doesn't need to be a high population area, i lived in a little farm town in the Midwest for awhile, the rail line wasn't just abandoned, they dug it up :sadness:
There was rail line turned into a trail 5 minutes from my house in my tiny rural hometown. There used to be multiple trains a day coming through that would take you to nearby cities.
:deeper-sadness:
I imagine people would drive past this and go "wow this looks like communism"
Every time I see a rails to trails trail I cry a
littlea lot on the insideHey it's still being used for something not cars, so I call it a win.
And the street begins.
The dark street that winds and bends. ...
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow...
We'll go where the chalk-white arrows go...
To the place where the sidewalk ends.
That's how zoning regulations tend to play out. In most US cities, the onus to build sidewalks is on developers, since pretty much every city is broke. Older code didn't require it, so now it's only going to get built if the property gets redeveloped, and sometimes not even then if it doesn't trigger the right regulations.
I live literal feet away from a rail trail. Sometimes I think about what could have been and just make myself feel
Emotions
