6 thoughts on “Traveling this year (1902)?”

1. I was puzzled by the reference to the “Burlington Route,” since I didn’t think that the Burlington (in any of its iterations) ever reached as far as Salt Lake City. And, if a quick search online can be believed, it didn’t.

   The Burlington did, however, reach as far as Denver (the first direct line from Chicago to Denver was theirs, completed in 1882), so my guess is that the “Burlington Route” from the Bay Area went through Salt Lake City, then southeast along the Denver and Rio Grande line through Price, Utah, to Grand Junction, Colorado, and then across the Rockies to Denver. In Denver, the line connected to the tracks owned by the Burlington (which in 1902 was the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad).

   The other route from Oakland (what was it called in the railway agents’ advertisements?) would have followed the old Central Pacific/Union Pacific lines, bypassing Salt Lake City altogether. Until the trestle bridge over the Great Salt Lake was completed in March 1904, that route went around the northern end of the lake, then through Ogden and northeastward into Wyoming.

2. Thanks for mapping that all out, Mark.

3. Lots of linguistic fun in the past couple day’s posts, i must say, including here, with through being spelled thro’ (as opposed to the more usual shortening thru).

   Even better that it’s thro’ sleeper—a quick non-systematic scan of newspaper archives shows that collocation appearing in railroad ads from that time period, but not really all that frequently.

4. I can never tell what direction a conversation may go — lots of fun, David.

5. David B’s note got me wondering, so I Googled my good friend Robert Burns, and found that he liked “Comin’ thro’ the rye.” Of course, the rest of the poem is full of violence against the English language and commonly accepted spelling, so I’m not sure if his spelling of “thro'” is probative evidence. Of anything.

6. On Scotland’s national day, Mark, I must take issue with your allegation of Robert Burns’ crimes against the English language – he was not writing in English, but in Scots, which is a dialect of English, or in some scholars’ views, a distinct Germanic language.

   Happy St. Andrew’s Day, everyone 🙂

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