121–130 of 218 posts
He has a little festival every year on his property:
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Isn't that standard though? If I get a flat, I hop out and replace it with a spare. Then I drive to a shop to have that flat tire either patched or replaced entirely. I know some new models don't include spares, but they often have run flats and temp sealant kits included. What are the other options?
The problem was less that we had to replace it and more that it was a fairly significant distance away. (A distance made longer because we weren’t on the freeway but heavily trafficked roads in a tourist-heavy area.) We were near downtown Gatlinburg, and there were places that were closer, but they were all closed because it was a Sunday. We also would have had a better shot at not having our tire blow out if the clo…
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It seems the music note emoji were stripped out. The first line is a quote from one of her songs.
In the same way that "hold me closer Tony Danza" is a quote from one of my favorite Elton John songs. You're looking for "Life is as peaceful as a baby's sigh ": https://genius.com/Dolly-parton-my-tennessee-mountain-home-l...
https://www.madhousemagazine.com/elton-john-confirms-tiny-da...
I grew up in a town called Seymour, which is in the same county as Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge. It's Dolly country. She's a hero - she's done so much for her community. Much of the money you spend at Dollywood goes to help so many public causes. One of them is the Imagination Library, which gives out free books every month from birth to 5 years of age. I was one of the first families that got to take a part in it. I cert…
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It's a great park with some surprisingly enjoyable rides. Lightning Rod is one of the most intense coasters I've been on. Definitely a little rough at times, but man it does not hold back at all. And it's kind of hidden in the layout of the park, with a lot of the track over the top of a hill. A visit to the Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg area and the Smoky Mountains is great trip, especially with kids. Lots of quirky nonse…
I live in Atlanta and have not been up there. I have kids. I should probably fix that. (That is, I should "fix that" by going up to the Smokies with them, not by getting rid of the kids!)
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When they started getting rid of passenger service had a lot less to do with losing ridership and money and lot more that cargo contracts paid a lot more and with a lot more regularity. The "Robber Barons" get that nickname for a lot of reasons, but one of them was using public land and eminent domain tactics under the "public utility" excuse of providing passenger service for a time for an area, while negotiating fo…
I kinda doubt that the RR's - especially the long-established ones of the north-east - would have spent the vast sums on opulent passenger terminals, fast luxury trains, and high-density passenger service if passenger service was merely a legal necessity for their freight businesses. Flip-side, I have heard that the phase-out RMS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mail_Service ) cut the RR's passenger train reve…
I was talking most specifically about the early "oil rush" ones in a lot of "rollover country" (or yes, "flyover country" being the modern term because indeed, air travel also disrupted train travel a lot) that didn't live long enough to be long-established, in the North-East, or bother much at all with opulent terminals and luxury cars. Many of those companies really did exist just long enough for eminent domain to do its job and launder public lands into private hands that cared a lot more about cargo contracts than any of the places the trains stopped along the way.
Most of those rail company names are also kind of lost to time, too, and the tracks are owned by cargo-oriented mega-conglomerates like CSX today. Not to pick on any one in particular by naming names, but also the easiest one to anecdotally name because it owns the dilapidated station I regularly walk past that is today an awful, unsafe shelter for the unhoused that sometimes cargo trains sit on top of for hours at a time, and wasn't particularly "opulent" (outdoor and entirely exposed to the elements) even during the exactly 10 years it operated as a passenger station. (It closed to passenger travel before both most highways had been built and air travel became common, weird huh? Surely just a coincidence that 10 years was the required passenger contract by the eminent domain seizures that opened the land for rail development?)
I still believe that if Dolly ran for President, she would win. She's probably one of the most liked people in the country, percentage wise. I've actually asked quite a few random people what they think of her and I've never met someone that had anything bad to say.
Many political pundits are still convinced that it's not possible to elect a woman as US president. Thus far the two that have tried have both managed to lose to Donald Trump.
In real life freight trains have the right of way in the U.S. In other words, the Dollywood Express would be a lot less fun if it spent half the day waiting while trolls unload corndogs from two-person handcars randomly distributed along the track.
With nationalized rails, the US could set standards for rail-sharing which could help passenger rail and invest in improved rail connections between cities which would improve both freight and passenger rail service.
Currently, each railroad company gets to maintain their own little fiefdoms in certain parts of the US
https://public.railinc.com/about-railinc/blog/who-owns-railr...
BUT the fact that we're all still so impressed by steam engines that we decided that 1000 tons of coal a year ( 622 cars worth of co2, the annual energy use of ~250 US homes a year) was a good value just to see an antique demo at the US's 30th (!!) most popular theme park bodes pretty poorly for us and our priorities.
Might not be nostalgic, but these things have huge steam stacks and exhaust output seemingly; is capture at all possible?