The Canadian Government indirectly created the only real competitor to the Canadian Pacific Railway in the early 20th century. The Canadian National Railways (CNR) was incorporated on June 6, 1919, comprising several railways that had become bankrupt and fallen into Government of Canada hands, along with some railways already owned by the government. The railway was run under government supervision until 1995 when it was privatized.
After privatization, it expanded rapidly, moving south into the United States to acquire several other railroads that were in financial difficulty, and is now a significant part of the US rail network with trackage either owned outright or rights granted through partnerships that span the country from coast to coast, and as far south as Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico.
The U.S. Surface Transportation Board classifies railroads based on their annual revenue, with “Class I” railroads being the largest. There are currently eight Class I railroads in the United States and Canada, most of which are the result of numerous rounds of mergers and consolidations of smaller railroads:
Canadian Pacific Railway
Canadian National Railway
Union Pacific Railroad
BNSF Railway
CSX Transportation
Norfolk Southern Railway
Kansas City Southern Railway
Amtrak
The first seven are freight railroads, while Amtrak is a passenger railroad company. Canadian National is currently in the process of purchasing Kansas City Southern; if that sale goes through, this will reduce the number of Class I railroads by one.
President Joe Biden, famously an Amtrak passenger for many years between his home in Delaware and his Senate office in Washington, D.C., has proposed in his first budget that the quasi-public rail line receive $80 billion. Amtrak has rarely received more than $6 billion per year in direct U.S. government spending since its establishment in 1971.
Delaware has the lowest average altitude of any state. Its average altitude is about 60 feet above sea level. Ebright Azimuth at 442 feet is the highest point in Delaware. Only Florida has a lower highest point, Britton Hill, at 345 feet above sea level.
In terms of lowest elevation to highest elevation, Alaska ranks at the top of the list. The lowest point is sea level, while the highest point is Denali, at 20,310 feet. The state with the highest mean elevation is Colorado; it also has the ‘highest low point’ of any state.
The Eisenhower–Edwin C. Johnson Memorial Tunnel runs along Interstate 70 in Colorado and is the highest auto tunnel in the United States. It is also the highest point on the U.S. Interstate Highway System reaching a point of 11,158 feet. Interestingly, the westbound bore, completed in 1973, is named after former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, while the eastbound bore, opened in 1979, is named for Edwin C. Johnson, a Colorado governor and U.S. senator who pushed for the Interstate Highway to cross the state.
The English name “Dwight” can be traced linguistically to the Greek name “Dionysus”, and thus is cognate to the name “Dennis”, which entered English from the French name “Denis”, also descended linguistically from Dionysus.
“Edwin” is a shortened version of the Anglo-Saxon name “Eadwine”, which means “rich friend”.
“Johnson” is of course the long form of the nickname “Dick”.
The tunnel features in the extended edition of Stephen King’s end-of-the-world novel The Stand, too.
In play:
Dennis Kucinich, 74, served a single tumultuous term as Mayor of Cleveland from 1977-79 and later was elected to the Ohio legislature and U.S. House of Representatives. He ran unsuccessfully once for Governor of Ohio and twice for President of the United States, and is widely rumored to be considering another run for mayor of the city this year.
The first woman to be elected to the office of mayor in the United States was Susanna Salter. She was elected mayor of Argonia, Kansas, on April 4, 1887. Because candidates did not have to be made public before election day, she did not know she was on the ballot before the polls opened. But a coalition of women and Republicans voted for her, and she was elected with a two-thirds majority of the vote. After serving for one year, she declined to seek re-election. She was paid one dollar for her term of service.
Dodge City, Kansas Regional Airport is the least busy airport in the entire state. In 2019 it had 4,905 passengers, or about 14 per day. It offers two flights a day to Denver, Colorado.
Lord Peter Wimsey, in the detective series written by Dorothy L. Sayers, is the second son of the Duke of Denver. Sayers allowed as how Lord Peter eventually succeeds his brother as Duke, after his nephew Gerald (nicknamed “Gherkins” by Lord Peter) is killed in WWII. However, she never wrote that part of the story.
Gale Sayers was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977 at the age of 34. To date he remains the youngest person to have received the honor.
The “Duke of Denver” was a fictional title of nobility, created by Dorothy Sayers for her Lord Peter Wimsey books. Sayers worked with C.W Scott-Giles, an expert on heraldry and an officer of arms, on detailing the lineage of the family, and its heraldry:
Arms: Sable, three mice courant, argent
Crest: A domestic cat, crouched to spring, proper
Motto: “As My Wimsey Takes Me” (or “I Hold By My Wimsey”)
The Hartford Courant is the largest daily newspaper in Connecticut, and is generally understood to be the oldest continuously published newspaper in the US. It was founded in 1764 as the Connecticut Courant.
The Courant’s Robert S. Capers and Eric Lipton won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism for their series on how a flawed mirror built at Connecticut’s Perkin-Elmer Corporation immobilized the Hubble Space Telescope.
ETA — ninja’d so … Courant is pronounced like current.
Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth was a United States Army officer and law clerk who was the first Union officer to die in the American Civil War. He was killed while removing a Confederate flag from the roof of the Marshall House inn in Alexandria, Virginia. Before the war, Ellsworth led a touring military drill team, the “Zouave Cadets of Chicago”. He was a close personal friend of Abraham Lincoln, who as President later eulogized him as “the greatest little man I ever met”. After his death, Ellsworth’s body lay in state at the White House.
I concur with this assessment. Also on the complex grounds is the boyhood home of Ike, which has been meticulously maintained, and the final resting places of Ike, his wife Mamie, and their son Doud, who died in 1921 at the age of four.
In play: the remains of two individuals were laid in state at the US Capitol in 2020: Representative John R. Lewis in the Capitol Rotunda, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the National Statuary Hall.
