fantine was beautiful, and remained chaste as long as she could. she was a lovely blonde with splendid teeth. she had gold and pearls for her dowry, but her gold was her head of hair and her pearls were in her mouth. she worked to keep herself alive. then, also to keep herself alive, she l o v e d, for the heart has its own hunger. (x)
Enjolras cried: “Listen to me, you, Feuilly, valiant artisan, man of the people. I revere you. Yes, you clearly behold the future, yes, you are right. You had neither father nor mother, Feuilly; you adopted humanity for your mother and right for your father.“
A map of about every primary passenger railway in the USA for 2016, commuter rail included.
Surely there are more trains lines about than this ?!
Nope. We’re animals. I’ve only trailed by train twice in the U.S., and it was the same line, once DC to Philadelphia, and once DC to NYC for work once I discovered the train was two hours faster than flying and cabbing back into NYC.
I do forget though that you guys fly everywhere and trains might not be practical. I live on an island the size of one of your states !
Fun fact: the busiest railway station in America (Penn Station in New York City) gets fewer passengers than Liverpool Central.
I knew the US had a much less extensive rail infrastructure than us, but bloody hell, the fact that there are ENTIRE STATES that literally don’t have passenger rail is madness.
I’d still love to travel on it some time, mind.
Just imagine the jobs you could create by building a decent railway system!
Behold, the end result of graft and political corruption.
I had no idea most of the US had no regional lines? Like, I live in tiny little MA with one of those clusters of red. Does everybody else have to DRIVE???
yes. we drive. and it’s terrible.
D: This is actually distressing.
to be fair some cities do have good bus systems
but….yeah.
what the shuddering fuck? That’s IT?!
actually we used to have a lot more, but as far as i’m aware i’m pretty sure the car companies bought a lot of railways and then destroyed them to force people to buy cars
Also some of those states that don’t have rails also have more cows than people.
Also our trains are slow and it’s usually much faster to drive than to take a train. We don’t have those speed rail things.
When you suddenly understand Sheldon’s train enthusiasm
And then there’s Europe:
And because that looks a tiny bit cluttered (and because we’re a German blog), here’s a railway map of Germany:
In red are the high speed InterCityExpress lines, blue are the InterCity lines and the grey ones are smaller regional lines.
And for Americans who don’t know how large Germany is: It is half the size of Texas.
Consider that this map does not show local lines, for example: This is Hamburg
This is Berlin
This is Cologne
And this is Munich
(Aesthetic.)
Munich’s network deadass has more lines than the entire state of MA
like the one thing i miss about australia is the public transit (and meat pies ngl)
I live in MA, which multiple people here have pointed out is unusually good in comparison to the rest of the country. I live about 10 miles from Boston, my town does not have a train.
The only thing I can access by train, and this still would require me to walk a mile to the nearest bus stop that barely ever has on time buses, to take THAT to the subway and if I want to use the commuter rail to the other parts of MA I have to take the subway into Boston first. in other words to get to my friend who is accidentally accessible by public transport (only one friend is) I must walk a mile to the bus, take the bus to the subway, take the subway to north station to transfer to the commuter rail, then take that 40 miles instead of 30 because I had to go 10 miles south to access the train that goes north and the whole thing I think takes around 4 hours?
It’s a 30 minute drive.
So yeah, if the other countries want to complain about gas prices, WE REALLY FUCKING NEED THEM THAT LOW. Public transport is non-existent outside of major cities even if you are fairly close to one. It’s not just trains my town only has the ONE BUS and it goes down ONE ROAD ONLY it has less range then the FUCKING SCHOOL BUSES DO.
and this is a big deal because millennials can’t afford their own cars. Any job that requires reliable transport DOES NOT mean public transport (because ours is poorly maintained and usually late/broken even if you have access) so that means almost every job requires “owns a car”
I have wondered why I never hear people from the US talk about taking the train, this explains it 😮
Okay but soulmate au where Marius has “put your hands up or I shoot” and courfeyrac has “oh thank GOD, you must be my soulmate. Also, do you always take laser tag this seriously?”
And Marius spends most of his life unbelievably terrified bc his soulmate is going to try and KILL HIM.
And courf just goes to play laser tag a lot.
I just want Ahsoka on the ground pointing and laughing at the Sand-Dance oF GET IT OFF Anakin makes afterwards.
No but this is especially spectacular, because they spend most of their lives on ships and missions. Do you realize at some point Obi-Wan literally grabbed a handful of sand and carried it around for this moment?
Think about that. Think about how fed up he’d be, that he would specifically take time to get some sand, ok? Not every planet has sand. Coruscant sure as heck doesn’t, it’s a giant city! He just…
This implies Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Negotiator, went and dedicated time to gathering sand for this express purpose. I can’t even. This needs fic. I may have to fic this.
Also, Anakin is taller and probably stronger than Obi-Wan, imagine how completely *done* Obi-Wan must have been to succesfully grab Anakin by his collar, yank down, and just shove hanful of mysteriously acquired sand.
I’d bet that Obi-Wan manages to pull this trick off more than once – Anakin would be convinced that he’s on guard but no, sneaky Obi-Wan would save it for days that his former Padawan is just stomping on his last nerve.
And also, Anakin would never find that stash of sand.
eirenical17 