#public transit appreciation

[metrotransitposter]

take the 3 metro transit local bus route to the great minnesota get together and take in the sights of downtown mpls, both mpls and st paul umn campuses, many cool mpls and st paul neighborhoods and also the knowledge that you could stay on the bus and go to union depot and get on a train to chicago or portland or seattle and not tell anyone and just disappear with no warning and imagine how easy it would be like just think about it i know you’re thinking about it wouldn’t it be fun to see if you could pull it off and while you’re thinking about it you can explore the minnesota state fair

[littleturtle99]

bus stop clouds :)

[shitty-proendo-blackout-posts]

on this platform

[tovarishfungus]

The Class E11 was the first electric locomotive class built in the GDR, with production starting in 1961. Pictured here is 211 001-3 in the Deutsche Bahn Museum in Nuremberg.

The factory where it was built carried the name of Hans Beimler, who among other things served as a political officer in the famous Thälmann-Batallion for the International Brigades in the spanish civil war, where he was killed in action. In his earlier life he was working in a locomotive factory in Nuremberg, where he was part of the works council. His Grandson (also called Hans Beimler) lives in the USA and most notably wrote for Star Trek TNG.

@valtionrautatiet-official

@punalippulaiva

@femboytrain

[honeyednotes]

An Ode to the City Bus

before i could walk, you carried me

you rocked me through traffic like a cradle, your arms have always felt safe

I have been on many a subway, streetcar, skytrain,

but none can compare to you

you hold me tightly, as if I am a doll in your dollhouse, until I reach my little doll destination, and go about my little doll life

and when I am through with all my little doll errands, I slide back into your familiar seats and allow you to cart me home, watching familiar scenes roll by as if this is a movie I know by heart

headlights flicker past like fireflies through your screens and i count them one by one

when we arrive at my stop, I call my thanks to the driver and navigate the small streets of my neighborhood home, knowing you will be there again every 30 minutes or so between the hours of 6:30a.m. and 10p.m.if I need you

just as you have always been

by Brie Thomson

[touch-starved-lurker]

Favourite public transportation?

my city’s public transport is kinda awful and i live in suburbia where there isn’t any, so… sidewalks? love me a nice smooth wide sidewalk with ramps up n down the curbs

oh and i was on a nearby city’s metro once, that was pretty nice!!

[courfeyracs-swordcane]

helloo. 💫🎀🌸🌠🌙💙🌟!

HELLO!! I have lost the ask game but UNO REVERSE

[jimmystrudel]

5 year dog plan updates: I think I've identified a breed (and 3 potential breeders), I have more clearly figured out what I don't want and what my life style will not fit and most important I need more experience with dogs in general

[zzyriphian]

Fortune Cookie: "An Important person will offer you aid."

Bus: *arrives at the bus stop late, but at the exact moment I am walking by*

Me: "Ah. Just as the cookie foretold."

[metrotransitposter]

important reminder for the twin cities: bus and train have air conditioning! can take bus and train to places that are free and also have air conditioning, like libraries or malls!

[littleturtle99]

taking the bus is excellent I get to see all my different friends (the bus routes)

[simpforcatsystem]

Love letter to my bus route and the drivers that, despite their best, most concerted efforts, always end up a few minutes late to my stops, no matter where on the route they are.

They are trying their best and also their tardiness is welcome and appreciated, as I am somehow chronically late to the bus stop that is 5 feet (exaggeration) from my apartment and without them I would be late to class every day and my professor would dislike me and I would be sad.

[dreamingofbabylon]

everyone say happy 100k miles to my dumb idiot subaru yaaaaay wheee

[cowboyhorsegirl]

me in the clean, well-lit public transit with my friend: 🤪😄😘

me 20 minutes later walking to my apartment by myself: 😰😶🫣

[tovarishfungus]

I miss my little camera baby. He is called Feliks and it's now almost a year since I had to send him to a repair shop because of issues with his shutter brakes. Unsurprisingly there's a dwindling supply of spare parts and all that. Get well soon, Feliks!

[therisingnight]

In early April I took the train from Chicago to South Bend to visit a friend and to get a better view of the eclipse and to take a load of my mind, and on the way down I listened to caroline—the self-titled record by British post-rock octet caroline—for the first time in a while.

The South Shore Line is an interurban, an endangered species of American transit infrastructure. The rails run along the southern edge of Lake Michigan, setting out from downtown Chicago, passing through the Indiana Dunes, and finally alighting at the airport in South Bend. The better half of this course cuts through a heavily industrialized stretch of Chicago's South Side and Northwest Indiana—steel mills, warehouses, railyards, landfills, highways, factory towns of modest single-family homes.

[image taken from the South Shore Line's website.]

In early April it rained, and the clouds threatened to overpower the eclipse, at least in my corner of the Middle West—but there, on the train, the pale clouds drew out the melancholy of that terrain. It has always intrigued me. I live in a dense, walkable urban neighborhood with a lot of office jobs and bus routes and fusion restaurants and things of that nature. This has been the fabric of my adult life. Thus the American Rust Belt, the industrial small town, the contrast between the vastness of manufacture and the smallness of those houses—it has a certain romance. It feels wrong, almost political, to say that about something so ordinary and ubiquitous, but I mean it as well as I can.

There's something wonderful and terrible about the way these man-made things become the very landscape. There's something uncanny about these artificial topographies.

In the afternoon, there was a pale, dreary light, and raindrops ran down the windows of the train, and I listened to caroline, and I meditated upon the vast and small things, on space and on spaces.

caroline was my favorite record of 2022—the year it came out—in large part because it sounds like so few other records. It's an odd melange of folk, minimalist-classical, and rock music, built on repeating musical phrases and gradual crescendi. Its lyrics are sparse but they gesture towards broad, elusive emotional landscapes. It is a record more suggestive than anything else, full of elisions and unrequited tensions.

The vast spaces of caroline's songs are composed of small gestures. Rituals, almost. There is, I think, a counterindustrial impulse in that record, which manifests as text (i.e. distinct yet vague allusions to leftist political organizing), subtext (the preeminence of acoustic instruments on what is ostensibly a rock record) and, I think, metatext (the artificial megaliths, half-abandoned spaces, and distant, incidental cityscapes that underpin the visual language of their music videos and record covers). More than anything else it is a profoundly communal album. It lives upon the patient interplay of its performers. It defies immediacy, flashy showmanship, and conventional songwriting. It has its own self-contained, self-sufficient logic.

(caroline, it also turns out, know a good train ride when they see one. It was meant to be.)

There's something to be said for letting a sound grow loud while the train rolls fast beside the built-up river basin. caroline is a record of grey clouds and sudden color, like the landscape of the industrial Great Lakes. Chords cycle, ringing again and again and again, and the view changes constantly.

That contrast of change and stasis intrigues me most of all. There is a contrast between the organic structures of the music—slow patterns, gradual swells of volume, odd syncopations—and the hard presence of the built industrial environment; there is a contrast between the forward momentum of the railroad—blurred landscapes, glimpses of other lives, the accidental intimacy of running rails between strangers' backyards—and the circular movements that dominate the album.

There's something to be said, too, for listening to such slow music while moving quickly. Have you noticed the relativity of things, how objects in our foregrounds slip in and out of view faster than things that are farther away? You can hear it in songs like "IWR," when individual chords slip by while the whole piece passes over slowly, or in "Skydiving," where countermelodies creep about the edges of the song's main motif. You can see it from the windows of a train, too: the smokestacks are motionless while the gates of the factory whiz past the window.

That afternoon caroline was as much of a journey as the train ride itself. It transported me in its own way. The record has a fixed form that becomes familiar to us, in the same way a train, bound to its rails, runs the same right-of-way over and over. It, too, has its rituals, and god, I love a ritual. I love to learn a place, a path, an experience over and over and draw meaning out of it.

What I'm saying is the train whistle sang at the perfect peak of the chorus of "Good morning," and it felt right.