photographed outside Lander, Wyoming on September 28, 2006

Before the automobile and the bus and truck supplanted them, steam locomotives, streetcars, and steamships held sway as our transportation of choice for over a century. They were fast and efficient; clean and modern. And while one might argue that the smoke and soot from coal-fired boilers was far from clean, we must remember that they came into a world of horse-drawn wagons and rutted mud roads. So what was a little soot? After all, a horse couldn’t whisk you cross-country in palatial comfort at seventy miles per hour!

Unfortunately we are not a patient people, so the airplane killed the ocean liner. And we are a self-centered people, wanting to travel when and where we please, so the car and truck killed the train. And, unfortunately, we are a trusting people, so that when companies fronting in secret for the automobile, rubber, and petroleum industries bought up and dismantled the streetcar lines—explaining, sadly, that they were no longer profitable and had to go—and replaced them with diesel busses, we believed them.

Excerpted from Ghostly Ruins: America’s Forgotten Architecture by Harry Skrdla. Published by Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2006.