Forgotten Lands, Places and Transit

We live in an incredibly interesting age of information - made even more interesting by one of the most advanced chatbots that exist. Chatbots have been around for awhile now, but there are very few that have captured the amount of information and artificial intelligence that have been shown by ChatGPT . To demonstrate this, I asked it to write me an article on abandoned railroads with 1200 words in it. After this paragraph, you'll see what ChatGPT wrote. I will provide relevant links in its paragraphs and make any errors that I can see in brackets "[]". What I've noticed is that ChatGPT is great when it comes to general ideas about a particular historical topic, but largely gets facts, dates, and context wrong. Thus, we're still a little ways away from being taken over by computer overlords . Otherwise, thanks as always for reading my material, the rest is by guest blogger ChatGPT! Abandoned railroads are railways that are no longer in use or service. This can ha...

There may be a lot of potholes in your town/county/state, but it's unlikely that they inspired a line in one of the most famous songs in rock history. Far from Abbey Road, but just up the road from Penny Lane, the terrible road conditions of Blackburn, Lancashire in the UK were newsworthy in the mid-1960's. This newspaper article was one of the inspirations for a new song by the Beatles at the height of their popularity after they stopped touring. "A Day in the Life" is a song by The Beatles, released on their 1967 album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." The song was co-written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and is considered one of the most innovative and experimental pieces in the Beatles' catalog. Hand-written lyrics by John Lennon to "A Day in the Life". Image via Reuters. Image A short article in the Daily Mail, "The holes in our roads" noted the prevalence of potholes in Blackburn. That prompted the line "Fou...

Growing up, video games were a big part of my life. From my very first console, the SNES, I loved all sorts of different games and genres. Long before I would visit railroad museums and historic railroad bridges , I also loved seeing railroad tracks in video games, and in pretty much every open world game that had a rail system in it, I would explore all I could. Usually though, while railroad tracks were a common trope in games, even as early as the 1980's,  they rarely featured working trains, other than in backgrounds, which always left me a little disappointed. Ford Racing 3 had a railroad crossing that was permanently lit, which always distracted me even if it was just a set piece. That being said, some developers and games have found unique ways to integrate railroad tracks into the design of games, adding to the environment and universe within the game, much like they do today. Here are some of my favorite examples of railroad tracks in some of my favorite video games,...