Top 10 Demolished US Railway Stations

Great article on the Infrastructurist blog on the top 10 demolished train stations in the USA.

I particularly agree with the comment from Eric, now we should focus on an article listing the top 10 great train stations to save. He suggests Detroit and Buffalo.
I totally agree about Buffalo's Central Terminal having taken one of the last trains that stopped there on my way to college at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Pannobile - Austrian Wine

One of the great things about moving to Austria has been learning about the different wines and regions here. For example, Grüner Veltliner wine ... wow, I never tasted anything like that in California.


One of the first wine events I attended wasn't actually a wine event, but rather a tasting arranged after a, well, fairly interesting transportation conference. Instead of the normal beer and wine, the organizer invited a representative of the Pannobile group of winemakers to present various different wines from the area. Cool idea. Anyway I was hooked ...

Today the Pannobile group had a tasting of their 2007 vintage. Most of the vintners focus on red wines made from local grapes Zweigelt, Blaufränkish (AKA Pinot Noir) and St Laurent, but they also make white wines from Weissburgunder (AKA Pinot Blanc) and Chardonnay. They all make a blend (Curvee) called Pannobile - each winemaker uses a different blend of grape types.


I focused on tasting the Pinot Noir (or Blaufränkish) and the Pannobile blends. Although all the wines I tasted were good, my favorites were the Judith Beck 2007 Pinot Noir and 2006 Blaufränkish Altenberg, the Heinrich Blaufränkish Alter Berg 2007, the Anita and Hans Nittnaus Blaufrankish "Kalk and Schiefer" 2007 and their single vineyard Blaufränkish 2006, the Leitner Ungerberg 2007 and Zechun 2007 (both curvees), and finally the Pittnauer Pinot Noir Reserve 2007. In my opinion they are all young, but quite enjoyable now, probably even better over time.

It's really nice to live in a place with a local wine tradition. Last spring we took a bicycle trip through parts of Burgenland (the province that includes the Pannobile region). We stopped at a couple of Heuriger ("taverns" that serve wine made by the owners with generally simple - but excellent - food).


We were even lucky enough to be in Burgenland during a "Kellergasse Fest." A Kellergasse (celler street) is a short stretch of road with numerous wine cellars dug into the side of a hill. Many towns in the wine producing parts of Austria have these streets located in the fields outside the town. It's a very unique architecture (the photos on this page are from our visit). The fest is a big party where all the vintners offer samples of their wine, there's lots of different food and musical entertainment. Great fun.

Stockholm Transport Museum

On my recent trip to Stockholm I visited the Stockholm Public Transport Museum. It's a pretty large museum in the Sophia area of the city with lots of old vehicles and exhibits. They have an English brochure and a Xeroxed description of some of the exhibits in English, but otherwise everything is in Swedish (website - Swedish).

Here's the Stockholm Transport Museum webpage in English from a good website with information on most museums in Stockholm. You can take bus 2 or 66 - which stop right outside the museum. The exact address is Tegelviksgatan 22 for Google Maps.

The English website for Stockholm's public transport operator has good information on the system and links to descriptions of Stockholm's outstanding art in the metro stations along with a downloadable metro art map.


The Stockholm Transport Museum had several cool features: a mini train for children to ride through some of the exhibits, a "pit" so you could go under a bus and look at the mechanics (watch your head), a ticket sales booth with a hat and ticket punch (on chains) that children could use to pretend to buy/sell tickets and a huge play area for children (with Brio trains, naturally).

Only one exhibit puzzled me. During World War II there must have been a fuel shortage and Stockholm seems to have experimented with alternative fuels. There was a model of a quite involved bus storage yard where trailers with cylinders were attached and detached from the buses. Nearby there were three actual trailers. I couldn't find anyone to ask about them, so they are a mystery.

In summary, very nice museum. My Stockholm Transport Museum flickr photos show the museum.

Saving money with dogfood?

Tim Harford is a great source of practical information based on economic research. Today he reports on a experiment where participants were given six "pates" ... well, two real pates, two cheap ones and two made from dogfood. Read the results in Tim's FT column Dear Economist: Should I eat cheap food to save money?.

Oh Lord, won't ya buy me a cobra tram?

Finally a new music video. Just before heading out to dinner with friends in Zurich I heard Janis Joplin's Mercedes Benz song. All I can say is that it was inspiring ... and I am not the only one, there's lots of versions on YouTube.

We went to dinner at a great little neighborhood restaurant with big windows on one of Zurich's public transport priority streets. All night long trams passed by until finally it clicked ...

Cobra trams are Zurich's new low floor streetcar. They were a bit undependable when they first arrived although seem to be doing well now. They are quite elegant: big windows, lots of room around the doors to move in and out, nice seats, clean lines and quiet. Their wheels are independent (in other words there is not a common axle between wheels on either side of the streetcar) which make them very quiet.

Unfortunately as the public transport vehicle manufacturing industry has consolidated over the last few years the major manufacturers have discontinued the "cobra" design, so Zurich's are unique. Here's a press release by the manufacturer Bombardier describing the cobra trams (PDF).

Spanish Riding School

Last Sunday we attended a performance of the Lipizzaner stallions at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. I remember seeing them on the Walt Disney Show in the 1960s, but that's no comparison to seeing them in person.

The show lasts just over an hour. First music, then a moderator walks out on the floor and explains the next act in German and English. Then the horses and riders enter. The riders take off their hats in unison to honor the Spanish Riding School founder, Emperor Charles IV (whose painting is on the wall facing them). The first exercise was for the young stallions and riders to show the elementary steps.

What's most striking is realizing that these are living animals, they have personalities and minds of their own. The horses and riders work closely together, riders train their own horses for years. Actors never want animals on stage because you can never be sure what they will do. But here, horses and riders work together as partners.


At the end of each act the horses and riders leave, the moderator walks back out onto the floor and explains the next act. Then another set of riders and horses comes out. The program (pdf) is great, it lists the horse's names first (on the left side) and then their riders. In true Austrian style the riders have titles based on their experience.

We went with my wife's godchild (10 years old) and her mother Susan. They both love horses and Susan is an expert trainer. After the show she said that it was clear that the horses were extremely well cared for and trained. She seemed most impressed with the time the school takes; many "sport" horses end their career after only a few years.

In the second act a set of more experienced horses and riders performed all the main steps. Third was hand work, in this exercise the 'riders' walk along side the horses as they go through their steps. Fourth was Pas de Deux, two "senior" horses with riders performed a dance together, mirroring or complimenting each other in time with the music.

All the acts are set to recorded music by Mozart, Handl, Chopan, Schubert and others. Interesting to me was that the audience is almost silent during the performance - often more silent than in some classical concerts I have attended.

The fifth act was "on the long rein," in this exercise the riders were once again on the ground and the horses performed a set of stands and jumps. The sixth act was a highlight, five horses and riders performed a series of stands and jumps. Again, as the moderator pointed out, it is fascinating to see the horses react to each other; when one horse made a jump or stand you could see that the others wanted to do one too.


The final act was the Quadrille. Eight horses and riders performed a choreographed set of movements. This is what you often see on television, but it's fascinating in person. Amazing to see eight horses and riders dancing as if they were as light as a feather.

I highly recommend this show, even for a non horse person it was truly impressive. You are witnessing history, no where else can you see this type of riding in such a beautiful hall. It's expensive; we paid over 80 Euros for a children's ticket (with 20% discount) and we adults stood for 26 Euros each. But, it's worth it. They have full performances a couple times a week, but they are open Tuesday to Saturday morning from 10-to-12 noon for morning exercises, not a real show, but accompanied by music (I will try to go and blog on it again). They also have tours of the stables and "back stage" areas during the afternoon. Book ahead for a performance on the internet if at all possible and I recommend splurging on good seats (our standing place view was obstructed a bit), how many times will you have a chance to see living history?

After the show we enjoyed a nice coffee in the courtyard cafe. My wife said she needed to simply sit calmly so she could absorb the beauty and harmony we had just experienced before heading back out on Vienna's bustling streets.


My Spanish Riding School flickr photos are from this visit and also a dinner I attended several months ago in the building, so they give a horse's eye view. Here's a YouTube video of the Spanish Riding School building. Note that there are no horses in any of the photos or video since taking photos disturb them during the performance.

A failure to adapt: demographic problems to newspapers

Tim Harford has a nice column in the FT today It’s time to stop being shy about retiring – we can’t afford it about the "problem of demographics". As he puts it,

An ageing society is not, primarily, a demographic crisis. The problem is a failure to adapt – a failure that afflicts politics, management and society.

It's interesting because this failure to adapt is also true of so many other things. For example, in the railway industry it's not the lack of new technology that's the problem in many cases, it's the institutions that fail to adapt effectively to the new technologies. Slate's Jack Shafer in (The Beginning of the End for Newspapers) describes a similar failure of newspapers to adapt to new markets in the 1960s, with the results being felt in today's newspaper crisis.