Quote:
Originally Posted by jsbrook
Maybe so. And I suppose there were many practical reasons for it. But not all cities. Here or abroad. That's also not true with respect to our highways, many of which were put in place well into the 20th century. I-95 didn't cut the city off from the Delaware waterfront until 1979.
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I suppose it depended on the terrain whether the riverside was a convenient place to put rails. In Philly it made lots of sense since the Schuylkill was a very filthy, industrial river below the Fairmount Dam at the time, and the Reading mainline was built to compete with the Schuylkill Navigation Co. Most Midwestern cities have rail lines hugging their rivers: the Scioto in Columbus, Mississippi in St. Louis, all three rivers in Pittsburgh, Missouri and Kaw in Kansas City, and so on. Rivers' scenic potential is only a relatively recent development.