On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Crossposted from viarail_fandom

This is a six-year-old project. Call it mapping of ambitions. I doubt that the Canadian government of 2019 shares them, but here they are.

1. The magazine Railfan Canada's looking for stories and pix to fill out future issues. Apparently, their finances are pretty good right now, but they need content. Big time. If the website doesn't provide their contact info, give me a shout and I'll type up the stuff from the masthead for you.

2. I am seeing Avengers tonight at Silver City Gloucester. Some of you who know this have already said "yes" or cited prior commitments. If you want to join in the "watching movies as a group" fun, be at the east-facing front doors of the cinema by 6 PM. I'll be out of the house by 4:30 PM EST at the absolute latest and will NOT have my computer with me to do last-minute e-mail checks.

Although I might have one of my sketchpads and some pencils packed away when I get there. Maybe.

3. Have not been forced onto Facebook's "Timeline" yet. Hoping it never happens.

4. Committed to attending the Saturday instalment of the Ottawa Comiccon as one of the regular fen this year. So that's a chunk of tomorrow spoken for. I'll know which chunk of tomorrow when I actually get there. Not sure of how much walking from the closest bus stop I'll have to do, to be honest.

5. Mitt Romney's proving to be a bigger willful idiot by the day, it seems, in my POV.

6. I hate dial-up speeds being sabotaged these days.

7. spacing_ottawa has just announced an extension on the Spacing Creative Mapping Contest deadline to May 31st!

8. The cuts to CBC's budget are still a mistake to me.

9. There is no ninth item. Yet.

First, three new people to belatedly welcome aboard. Not entirely sure why some of them are adding me to their contact lists here, to be honest, but the new faces are welcome if they bear honest intentions. "ciriaex", "zoeyli" and "ulkogol": Greetings, and best wishes for the future! Here's hoping it works out well for everyone, huh?

Second: Getting ready to post those Railfest 33 pix later tonight to my Flickr account. The ones I took whilst running my table at the book fair are already uploading as I type this posting. There's a lot of the Railfest photos, though, so a dial-upload will take a little while. Please bear with me on this.

Third: Congratulations again to warrenellis on the news re: the box office returns from Red's opening weekend. Hoping to take in at least one showing myself before the next week goes by!

Again...more to come.

You should've known I'd find a way to tie the two subjects together yet again.

*evil laughter follows for a few seconds...*

Okay, now that the perfunctory mad-science cackling's done...you know of my interest in and support for VIA Rail and its US counterpart Amtrak. I like to keep up with news about both services and the issues affecting them.

To tie in the DC Universe fictional geography...well, I've been wondering on occasion how - and in some cases, if - given DCU-specific cities and towns would be served by the latter(or its fictionalized equivalent, likely renamed to avoid lawsuits over intellectual property usage, whether ill or well-intended).

So I find this map on Wikipedia marking up the high-speed rail corridors as defined by the US Department of Transportation back in 2001. Go ahead and look. I'd recommend opening up a tab on your browser window to make referring back a little quicker for you.

I think we can safely assume that no matter which states you believe Metropolis and Gotham to be located in for the writers' and editors' purposes, they're both in the Northeast Corridor. That won't be an issue of argument for this posting.

There's at least one other question I do want to ask, comics nerd and railfan that I am right now: Keystone and Central Cities, the home towns of the Flashes. Should they be considered the far end of the Chicago Hub Network, given their proximity to Kansas City?

Or.

Or should they be at the hub of a network of their own? If the latter, which cities, real and DCU-specific alike, ought to be at the far end of the spokes?

I've some thoughts of my own, and will likely share them in time. For now, however, I'd like your opinions.

(Two extra links of some interest:

http://www.dot.state.mn.us/passengerrail/onepagers/midwest.html#mwmap - the Minnesota DoT map of the Midwestern Rail Corridor Network.

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009028.html - Worldchanging.com's coverage of the high-speed network being pushed in California right now.)