Opinion
Historic Dreams of Big Trains: Supertrain, Superliners, Taggert Comet, Breitspurbahn — Cameron on Transportation
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What do Ayn Rand, Hollywood and Adolph Hitler have in common? They all dreamed of building super-trains. Maybe it was because their visions for giant, high-speed trains came before the era of cheap flights moving large numbers of people over great distances, but each of them had a grandiose vision of fast, luxurious rail travel. In her 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand made the construction of a coast-to-coast train, “The Taggart Comet,” central to the plot of her dystopian America set some time in the future. In an era of crumbling infrastructure, the construction of an 8-mile rail tunnel under the continental divide saw mismanagement lead to a fatal passage, killing all on board.