Transport
Discover facts about transport. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Transport
The city that raised its railways above hurricane floods
After a hurricane nearly wiped them off the map in 1900, the city of Galveston didn't just rebuild—they literally jacked up their entire transit…
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Egypt flooded ancient routes and supplied bad ferries
When the Aswan High Dam drowned the historic region of Nubia under a colossal artificial lake, millennia-old land trade routes vanished overnight. The…
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The indoor railway built for Norway's winter
The Bergensbanen railway operates in a climate so consistently hostile it makes Hoth look like a tropical resort. To stop passenger trains from being casually…
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Évian built a funicular for spa guests
French President Émile Loubet wasn't about to make rich socialites walk uphill after drinking fancy mineral water. The Évian funicular was birthed in 1907…
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NASA once dreamed of 300-mph hovering trains
When he wasn't designing the literal Lunar Rover, NASA genius Georg von Tiesenhausen spent his free time trying to make terrestrial trains levitate. He drew…
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Why rural rail lines were abandoned
In 1980, the US government deregulated railroads to save them from total financial collapse. The cynical byproduct? Railroad monopolies immediately realized…
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How a railroad merger became the biggest bankruptcy in US history
In 1968, two massive rival railroads merged to form Penn Central, hoping to solve their money problems. Instead, they created a corporate nightmare where…
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The 1892 monorail powered by its passengers
In 1892, an entrepreneur built a pedal-powered monorail in New Jersey to carry workers between towns. You still had to do all the agonizing physical labor of…
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Driving a primitive automobile across trackless sand
In 1930, Muhammad Asad decided that riding a camel on his overland pilgrimage to Mecca was too comfortable, so he drove a rugged automobile through the…
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The fastest train was built by a zeppelin engineer
Franz Kruckenberg was a zeppelin engineer who despised the clunky, heavy dynamics of standard railways, so he started building aluminum trains using strict…
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Proposing subway stations with high-speed conveyors
Early planners for the London Underground wanted to eliminate train doors entirely, proposing continuous, fast-moving conveyor belts that commuters would step…
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The store where labor became money
Long before crypto bros tried to reinvent currency, Josiah Warren decided standard money was a scam and opened the Cincinnati Time Store. He priced goods and…
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He won the race—and was disqualified for his car
During the 1895 Paris–Bordeaux–Paris race, Émile Levassor drove like a maniac for 48 hours straight, completely obliterating the competition. Upon finishing…
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Victorian trains dropped carriages while moving
Stopping a train at every small-town station is tedious, so 19th-century British rail operators invented the "slip coach" to essentially ghost their…
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The highway built for Alaska's oil pipeline
If you want to drive 414 miles through completely barren, freezing wilderness with absolutely zero medical facilities or cell service, the Dalton Highway is…
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Cadillac engines powered giant desert land trains
Long before luxury SUVs dominated the suburbs, the US military strapped multiple Cadillac V8 engines into a series of highly articulated, tracked land trains.…
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The airplane built with 200 wings
If two wings are good, surely two hundred wings are a masterpiece of aviation logic. Horatio Frederick Phillips was obsessed with airfoil shapes in the early…
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One ship straddled two dates and two hemispheres
Navigational trolls existed long before the internet. On December 31, 1899, the captain of the passenger steamer SS Warrimoo realized his ship's exact…
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Military flying platforms required leaning to steer
The US Office of Naval Research looked at the Segway decades before it was invented and thought, "Let's make it fly and arm the rider." The Hiller VZ-1 Pawnee…
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How efficient tunnels turned a mine disaster deadly
Efficiency is a double-edged sword, and in 1906, it proved fatal. The Courrières mining company in France prided itself on an incredibly efficient underground…
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Before IKEA, railways came as build-it-yourself kits
Before IKEA forced us to build our own bookshelves, Robert Hudson was out there letting corporations assemble their own rail networks. Sensing a boom in…
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Daredevils once parachuted from moving trains
Early 20th-century daredevils looked at perfectly safe train rides and found them unbearably boring. Their solution was to climb atop the roof of a speeding…
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The underground cable built to tow cyclists uphill
After the original Trampe bike elevator proved successful, engineers upgraded it to the CycloCable. It's an entire underground mechanical wire-rope system…
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The steam boats that destroyed their own canals
Before railways ruined their monopoly, British canal operators fought back with 'steam packet boats.' These aggressively fast steamships ripped through the…
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