Margin Notes: Parking, Smoots, Cactus

Look carefully--this track car's wheelsets had been borrowed for other purposes on 3-October-2009

TORONTO, ONTARIO - You can't park anywhere anymore. The Toronto Railway Historical Association's track car for use on its miniature railway was locked to the tracks inside a fenced-off area of Roundhouse Park, but I found it without wheels on Saturday. It turned out not to be a crime; the switch construction team had borrowed the wheelsets to test new switches under construction.

* * * * * *

There was a crime of sorts on the subway that day. As I was riding the Bloor-Danforth subway eastbound into High Park station, the train abruptly stopped with most of the train still off the platform, and soon the train was evacuated through the front cars off the emergency exits from that platform instead of the main entrance to the station. It was never announced, but put together those observations, the fact that the power was turned off between Keele and Jane stations, and the number of paramedics arriving on scene, and it's not hard to piece together that there was a suicide jumper in front of our train.

* * * * * *

I have no pictures of that incident or really any others to share in these notes this week, but a picture on the Spacing web site caught my eye this week. When I saw this article's opening picture, I immediately thought "that isn't Toronto--it looks like Winnipeg." I'm not sure what is more amazing--that Winnipeg has such a distinctive identifying look, or that I so immediately identified it.

* * * * * *

Boston is another urban area with which I am quite familiar. If you've ever walked across the Harvard Bridge (which like many mis-named things around there goes from Boston to MIT, not Harvard) to Cambridge, you know that the bridge is marked in Smoots, or the length of one Oliver R. Smoot whose body was used to measure the structure in 1958. I had read before that Smoot had since become the president of the International Organization for Standardization (appropriate for someone that is a standard himself), but what I didn't realize until this week is that a smoot is a recognized unit in Google--take this conversion, for example.

* * * * * *

It wasn't the Charles River crossed by the Harvard Bridge but the Hudson River that US Airways flight 1427 landed in on 15-January-2009, making a hero of Captain Chesley Sullenberger for landing in a fashion that allowed everyone to survive. One irrelevant detail that caught my attention in coverage of Sullenberger's first flight (again, flight 1427 from New York LaGuardia to Charlotte) on 1-October-2009 was that the flight was identified by Air Traffic Control as "Cactus 1427." The airline may be called "US Airways," but it is the result of the merger of the old US Airways and America West, which used the "Cactus" call sign as a result of its headquarters in cactus-laden Phoenix, Arizona. "Cactus" may not be as cool as "Speedbird" (used by British Airways) or "Shamrock" (used by Aer Lingus), but it is distinctive. America West may be a fallen flag airline, but its call sign now is heard all over the world as the call sign of successor US Airways.