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Index to recent news postings Rail Travel News is a twice-monthly print publication, published since
Dec 10, 1970.
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Summer Solstice, Berlin, 1971 By Robert Rynerson In northern latitudes, the shortest night of the year is often the occasion for staying out all night. Berliners do not always need that excuse, and particularly in the era when the U-Bahn had no all-night service, it was not uncommon for people to stay out till the first trains ran. On the evening of the summer Solstice in 1971, a friend and I went "downtown" to the Ku'damm at midnight on one of the last inbound trains, and then worked our way from dinner through the Tiergarten and the near-abandoned foreign embassy and consular district to the Soviet war memorial (the one in the British sector), the Brandenburger Tor, and finally, the Reichstag. In that era, some protective maintenance had been carried out on the Reichstag building to save it from exposure to weather. I had toured it after that work was completed. Now, as in this photo taken just before sunrise, we were alone in the great square in front of it -- a place where too much history had happened -- in near silence. Traffic noise was far away and the GDR border guards were out of sight, blocked by the building and rubble. In high school, I had read William L. Shirer's "Berlin Diary" and he had described our walk on the same paths in the nights of 1939 and 1940 (for German readers, he was the Berlin correspondent for CBS radio news). He had to walk these streets to get to the broadcasting studio for live news reports on U.S. Eastern Standard Time, as tape delayed news had not been developed. We stood there for a bit, thinking about what had happened since the nights when he had come that way and wondered what the future for this building would be. The outcome of the Cold War in Berlin was not as obvious as it seems now. GDR media warned against thinking that the building would someday host the Bundestag. Then, the city woke up around us. First the milkmen
went to work. The sun came over the horizon as we walked up to the
British checkpoint north of the Reichstag. An early morning Line
6 tram turned back on the East Berlin side. A Line 86 bus turned
back on the West Berlin side in this street, over the amputated tram tracks.
Free transfer privileges were discontinued a decade earlier. We went
to find a place for coffee.
Amtrak President Talks of Acela and Food Service (see complete article) Amtrak computer outage creates problems with trains, reservations,
tickets
RailPAC endorses Amtrak-Laney funding proposal with reservations
Sources of hostility to Amtrak funding: Analysis AMTRAK VERSUS MINETA IN MONTANA:
THE STRANGE BATTLE OVER THE EMPIRE BUILDER
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