No Arctic Railway, you said? Let’s make our own
With the Lapland regional council rejecting the Arctic Railway project, a local tourist provider in Finland’s northwestern arm decided to make their own variant. For fun, the staff of tour operator Kilpisssafarit put together their own Arctic Railway train, a replacement that doesn’t need tracks. The 12-sledges snowmobile train crossing over lake Kilpisjärvi is the longest sledge-train in the world. [thebarentsobserver.com]
The daunting challenge of saving Lebanon’s storied rail network
The course of Elias Maalouf’s life changed in 2005, when he saw Syrian soldiers burning the archives of Lebanon’s railway system in an abandoned train wagon. Soon after, he started a campaign to revive the country’s’s rail system. In the years since, Maalouf has founded an NGO, called Train, Train, and through it gathered a group dedicated to returning railway travel and transport to Lebanon. They have encountered obstacle after obstacle from the government. But Train, Train has continued to lay the groundwork for a future return of the railways. [atlasobscura.com]
In London, rail-side gardening blossoms during pandemic
A busy commuter train station is an unlikely place to find a haven for flowers, bees and hedgehogs. But a decade-old project in London bringing an eco-friendly combination of gardening, horticulture and so-called rewilding to the urban jungle is bearing fruit during the pandemic. Hiding in plain sight, 34 solar-powered sites created by the community-led project Energy Garden are dotted around the British capital, adjacent to train platforms used daily by commuters. [newsinfo.inquirer.net]
Toronto’s 1973 TTC subway map shows the stations never built
When the TTC subway was first unveiled in Toronto in 1954 as Line 1, it had 12 stations running from Union and Eglinton. More than half a century later, the subway system has four lines, 63 more stations, with more on the way – but it would have looked a lot different if things had gone according to plan. In 1973, the TTC released a new plan for its subway that proposed two new lines, including the Queen line, which we never got. The only part of the Queen line to materialize is the abandoned streetcar subway station we know as Lower Queen. By 1980, the Queen Line had disappeared from TTC plans. [blogto.com]
