BUTLER COUNTY — Snow drifts, frigid temperatures and cutting winds hardly slowed a Carhartt-clad Dave Reed of Iowa Northern Railway on Monday as he chipped ice from tracks No. 9 and 10 in their expanding rail yard northwest of Shell Rock....
http://thegazette.com/subject/news/rail-vital-part-of-the-transportation-system-in-iowa-20141129
From the press article--"The additional tracks will increase capacity at Butler Logistics Park and also spur off directly to fertilizer and animal feed plants that export around the country."
I knew of spurring horses (and people) to induce them to go faster; I did not that tracks spurred anything.
Johnny
Deggesty From the press article--"The additional tracks will increase capacity at Butler Logistics Park and also spur off directly to fertilizer and animal feed plants that export around the country." I knew of spurring horses (and people) to induce them to go faster; I did not that tracks spurred anything.
Build it and they will come!
Sort of like 'Field of Dreams'
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Railroads have been vital to Iowa's economic development since around April 21, 1856. That's the day the Rock Island Railroad completed the first bridge across the Mississippi at (where else?) Rock Island, IL. The bridge connected rails already laid in Iowa with Chicago, the rest of the US rail network, and with steamships on the Great Lakes.
As for any government economic development plan, I'd be very skeptical.
Remember this sentence:
"A central theme of this book is that railroads, throughout their history, were so important to the US economy that politicians could not leave them alone, and when governments did intervene in transportation markets, they usually made a mess of things."
That's from "American Railroads: Decline and Renaissance in the 20th Century" by Gallamore and Meyer. They're two Harvard trained economists who understand transportation economics. (Meyer died in 2009.)
If only the politicians and bureaucrats will leave this one alone, things will work out fine.
You are thinking of a different definition of "spur"... the meaning in the article is that of "branching off"... a "RR spur" off of one track to reach a customer's location.
Semper Vaporo
Pkgs.
Yes, I have long known what a railroad spur is--a track that leads off from another track and then ends without connecting to another track. I was commenting on the use of a noun that describes a spur as though it was a verb.
I like Balt's response--"Build it and they will come!"--so the track will spur people to come and use the facility.
greyhounds first bridge across the Mississippi at (where else)
first bridge across the Mississippi at (where else)
Deggesty Yes, I have long known what a railroad spur is--a track that leads off from another track and then ends without connecting to another track. I was commenting on the use of a noun that describes a spur as though it was a verb. I like Balt's response--"Build it and they will come!"--so the track will spur people to come and use the facility.
It's called 'verbing.' Calvin, of CALVIN & HOBBES fame, told Hobbes (approvingly), "Verbing weirds the language!"
It certainly does (did Calvin coin the verb?); I fear the practice is practiced by people who do not know the commonly accepted way to describe an action.
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