I am reading a book from the Bestseller list called “The Devil in the White City“, by Erik Larson (Vintage Books, 2004). It is a non-fiction book about the creation of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. It contains the simultaneous story of a serial murderer who stalked the streets of Chicago while the fair was being built. It is well written and gets a 
.
I do recommend reading the book, but this is not really a book review. There is a paragraph in it about a train trip that caught my eye. At one point in the story, the architect of the fair, Daniel Hudson Burnham, took a train from New York back to Chicago during the historically bad Winter of 1890 – 1891. Keep in mind when reading this, that it was 1890, 124 years ago, when trains were powered by large men shoveling coal into a boiler and were scheduled by men with mechanical pocket watches.
“Burnham left New York the next morning on the North Shore Limited. Throughout the day his train pushed through a landscape scoured by snow as a blizzard whitened the nation in a swath from the Atlantic to Minnesota. The storm destroyed buildings, broke trees, and killed a man in Barberton, Ohio, but it did not stop the Limited.”
Last week, I witnessed the total disintegration of the MBTA Commuter Rail system by two inches of snow and some drizzle.
What else is there to say?
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