"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains."
And I heard that story and said 'pfft,
surely I can do better than that sucker.'"
There are now two vast and trunkless legs of stone in the desert.
one comically larger and more crumbled than the other.
Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
That's basically the story of the former Pan Am building, which sits right next door to and overshadows the former New York Central's Terminal building in Manhattan.
The building of the mighty airline overshadowed the majestic terminal of the formerly mighty railway, but then the mighty airline itself faltered, and the building now belongs to almighty finance...
Are you thinking of the right list? The original DJIA components had multiple companies that still exist today such as General Electric and Domino Sugar. The only railroad company was TCI, but they were primarily in the steel business and have been US Steel for over 100 years.
The merger of NYC and the Pennsylvania - the Penn Central - was the biggest bankruptcy in US history before Enron. <i>The Wreck of the PennCentral</i> is a great business book on why.
I love websites like this. It’s an obsessive collection of information, neatly formatted. No JavaScript or elaborate backend systems. Just a plain information dense webpage. A reminder of what the web used to be
Is "fallen flag" a phrase I should recognize? I realize the site is probably not for me, but I would have appreciated a paragraph explaining what is being presented here
> The term "Fallen Flags" describes those railroads whose corporate names have been dissolved through merger, bankruptcy, or liquidation. At one time the United States boasted nearly 140 Class I's.
> In the United States, railroads are designated as Class I, Class II, or Class III, according to size criteria first established by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) in 1911, and now governed by the Surface Transportation Board (STB). The STB's current definition of a Class I railroad was set in 1992, that being any carrier earning annual revenue greater than $250 million. This has since been adjusted for inflation and most recently set to $504,803,294 in 2019.
The audience of the site are railfans - and these terms are common in the jargon of that hobby. We don't define cpu on pages about speculative execution, do we?
I work in the rail industry (different country) and didn‘t know what this is about. That page seems to have no explanation what it is about, what it does or what the intent is.
Something about that photo (aliasing? cleanliness of the sticker?) makes it look photoshopped, but it actually does have that sticker: https://youtu.be/9eOYUYSXzi8?t=56
I think it's the JPEG compression ratio being different on that region compared to the rest of the picture. That video is great though; just how many containers do you want?!
ArchiveBot regularly grabs sites of that size and uploads them to IA, its not a big deal. The Imgur/Reddit archiving was at least an order of magnitude or two larger.
Of course it is always good to have multiple copies of a site, especially personal ones for things you care about.
Will that work? The site mentions that it's not indexed by search machines. So I guess it has a robots.txt (on my phone and did not check...) Would the archive respect that?
Annoyingly, Internet Archive doesn't respect robots.txt. I specifically excluded ia_archiver from my site which worked for a number of years until they decided to ignore it because robots.txt "do not necessarily serve our archival purposes." They do remove your site if you email them though.
Personally, I'm with the Internet Archive on this one. If they were to respect robots.txt, it wouldn't be long before a whole host of websites exclude the Internet Archive for dubious reasons such as lost advertising revenue, copyright concerns, exclusivity deals etc. I am curious to know if you've found the Internet Archive's activity to be exceptionally taxing on your servers, or whether you have another reason to wish to exclude them?
Mainly I just feel I should be in control of the sites I make. They're personal in nature that I don't mind sharing with the world, but if I want to change something or make them disappear completely it irks me that there's a website out there violating my express wishes.
How interesting! That's a completely different way of looking at the Web; I don't think I've thought about it like that before. I view the Web as a kind of library where you can add books as well as borrow them.
When I read something online, I sort of feel that it becomes a part of me as it informs me and shapes my perspectives. I like to think that I could re-read it if I ever forgot the details; as a result, I've downloaded quite a few websites. Common facts don't really apply here for me, as they'll be accessible as long as encyclopaedias exist, but personal anecdotes and niche catalogues are worth their metaphorical weight in gold.
Additionally, I download things that I one day hope to read, but think that the website might disappear before that time comes (due to the author not renewing a domain name etc.)
My province has the ultimate fallen flag the entire railroad system here was dismantled in the mid 1980s.
At the time I never knew of its history or my family history with it until my Dad gave me a metal box. In it were old family documents, pictures, mementos mostly from my great-grandfather. He worked on the railroad but I had never know about it I barely even knew his father my grandfather.
Even more historically powerful my province which at the time was not a province of Canada had massive debt due to railroad construction costs. We only joined Canadian Confederation to get the debt paid off and since it is an island a promise to have year-round access to the mainland.
Is this Nova Scotia? I ask because I've often wondered over Stan Rogers' song "Guysborough Train" which seems to be about a planned but never completed railroad line.
Things I never expected: reference to Stan Rogers on HN.
I believe your interpretation is the generally accepted one. Stan was from Guysborough and as I understand it, the rail line was started, quite a lot of progress made, and then never finished so there was a lot of displeasure from the locals at the constant reminders of the failure of the government to make good on their promise to deliver the railroad.
49 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] thread- The Pennsylvania Railroad, the Standard Railroad of the World.
- The New York Central Railroad, their main competitor.
- Railway Express Agency, the FedEx of its day.
That's basically the story of the former Pan Am building, which sits right next door to and overshadows the former New York Central's Terminal building in Manhattan.
Pennsylvania Railroad's "Progress on the Rails".[1]
New York Central's "The Big Train", featuring the CEO.[2] He's lobbying for deregulation and less federal funding for airports and roads.
Both include sections on the data processing systems of 1950.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8TM-LGDt5M
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZUXNs8ts9I
Of the original list (which is mostly railroads) I think only Union Pacific and Western Union still exist under their own name.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Jones_Industrial_Average Is the correct link
Relevant: Bureau of Labor Statistics data for American railroad jobs from 1947 to today: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES4348200001?amp%25253bdata...
But this page still is here and is seemingly even being updated. So the web that used to be still is.
https://www.vintagestreetlights.com/
https://www.deviantart.com/tpirman1982/art/Celebrating-10-Ye...
https://www.angelfire.com/planet/tpirman1982/index.html
http://douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/museum.htm
and
http://douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/locoloco.htm
> The term "Fallen Flags" describes those railroads whose corporate names have been dissolved through merger, bankruptcy, or liquidation. At one time the United States boasted nearly 140 Class I's.
https://www.american-rails.com/fallen-flags.html
OK great, but what's a "Class I"?
> In the United States, railroads are designated as Class I, Class II, or Class III, according to size criteria first established by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) in 1911, and now governed by the Surface Transportation Board (STB). The STB's current definition of a Class I railroad was set in 1992, that being any carrier earning annual revenue greater than $250 million. This has since been adjusted for inflation and most recently set to $504,803,294 in 2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Class_I_railroads
https://www.rr-fallenflags.org/amtk/amtk.htm
Amtrak still exists, though, maybe since it's a different logo?
"Southern Pacific Railroad (SP): The SP was a prominent railroad company that operated in the western United States from 1865 to 1998."
It's actually 1996, not 1998. I checked multiple sources.
How does the bot draw in data? does it parse for numbers first? Dates? How does it eval data?
[1] https://www.rr-fallenflags.org/bnsf/bnsf4723bf20.jpg
http://archivebot.com/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot
Of course it is always good to have multiple copies of a site, especially personal ones for things you care about.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/internet-archive-rob...
When I read something online, I sort of feel that it becomes a part of me as it informs me and shapes my perspectives. I like to think that I could re-read it if I ever forgot the details; as a result, I've downloaded quite a few websites. Common facts don't really apply here for me, as they'll be accessible as long as encyclopaedias exist, but personal anecdotes and niche catalogues are worth their metaphorical weight in gold.
Additionally, I download things that I one day hope to read, but think that the website might disappear before that time comes (due to the author not renewing a domain name etc.)
At the time I never knew of its history or my family history with it until my Dad gave me a metal box. In it were old family documents, pictures, mementos mostly from my great-grandfather. He worked on the railroad but I had never know about it I barely even knew his father my grandfather.
Even more historically powerful my province which at the time was not a province of Canada had massive debt due to railroad construction costs. We only joined Canadian Confederation to get the debt paid off and since it is an island a promise to have year-round access to the mainland.
I believe your interpretation is the generally accepted one. Stan was from Guysborough and as I understand it, the rail line was started, quite a lot of progress made, and then never finished so there was a lot of displeasure from the locals at the constant reminders of the failure of the government to make good on their promise to deliver the railroad.
I dont know what to do with them per se... I bought the collection at an estate sale, but I have some famous pieces. I just love trains.