The Forgotten Big Rail City Just Across the Border

 

At one point around eleven rail lines met in Winnipeg as the center of North American transportation.  Most of these lines still exist for freight, but only one going east west carries passengers. The Fort Garry hotel is reminiscent of the grand Plaza hotel in New York  Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons


 have dreams of sustainable futures and most of them involve us doing a better job of designing the way we live. In a nutshell, the future needs to be less individualistic and more collective, which is more like most of human history.  Part of that is making our travel and transport more of a shared experience and more efficient. There is nothing less efficient that one person driving in a car whether gas or electric.

Winnipeg at the center of a continent is a convenient nexus between the cities of the U.S. and Canada. It used to be just that. The grand Union Station is a site to behold and the grander Fort Garry Hotel beside it is a Victorian gem that used to host the entire continent. It has similar style to the much more famous Plaza hotel in New York and is a lot of historic fun to stay at. Hopefully, one day Winnipeg will be the nexus of a reinvigorated rail network. I need to write more about this interesting, huge city that sits just north of some of the least populated parts of the United States.