It's a life of planes and trains.

I sought trains; I found passengers.

A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn't have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it.

Increasing values again brought increasing values. As with the canals and turnpikes, it was transportation, this time the railroads, that was the focus of the speculation. Here the horizons seemed truly without limit. Who could lose on what was so obviously needed?

The roads […] fly from the city of confusion.[…] No other road looks so resolute in flight as the rail.

Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death.

As a former pilot in World War I, Walter had always preferred flying as a means of travel, rather than going by sea. Whenever he was in the Dakota, flying over to Northern Ireland, he always asked for the front seat, joking that if it crashed then he wanted to die first.

A thousand ardent oilers swung the long spout 'twixt their nods, And tried to glimpse a meaning in the challenge of the gods. And then one night there landed on a Mineola swale A plane that looked like pewter, with a carrier of mail. Its wings were tinged like tea-box skins, each truss of shadow gray, Its cabin but an alcove slung beneath a metal ray. The Spirit of St. Louis was inscribed upon the lee; It came from out a province that had never seen the sea.

In these 20 years transport aviation has become a tremendous force in the international life of our nation. So rapidly that we have yet to realize it fully, it has reduced the world to one-fifth its former travel size. Its mission has everywhere been one of peace, friendship, of aid in developing mutual benefit of trade and commerce. It has within a single decade swept away forever the age-old barriers of time and distance between this nation and its neighboring republics and the lands beyond the seas. It has already proved itself a vital force for the protection and extension of this nation's world commerce. Equally important it has proved itself the means by which those friendly nations are being woven into a great community of good neighbors.

She had preferred being on the plane, detached from the earth, the illusion of sitting still.

"An iron railroad would be a cheaper thing than a road of the common construction." Here lay in a few words the idea from which our railway system has sprung.

If the right people can be put in the right places, we would be able to float an airline that would be successful.

Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities.

One final thing worth noting on the subject of rail: From 1890 to about 1920, American localities managed to construct hundreds of local and interurban streetcar lines that added up to a magnificent national system (independent of the national heavy rail system). Except for two twenty-mile gaps in New York state, one could ride the trolley lines from New England clear out to Wisconsin. The story of the conspiracy by General Motors and other companies to destroy the U.S. interurban system is well documented. The salient point, however, is how rapidly the system was created in the first place, and how marvelously well it served the public in the period before the automobile became established.