Buff's Stuff: LANDSCAPES TRAINS AND SATELLITES

Thursday 4 October 2012

LANDSCAPES TRAINS AND SATELLITES - SIGNIFICANT MOMENTS

4th October memory:

Mount Rushmore, showing the full size of the mountain and the scree of rocks from the sculpting and construction.

Sometime between August 1951 and March 1952 travelling across the United States the following picture was taken.

This picture was taken from the same vantage point as the top colour photograph - perhaps a little closer. I have no doubt there are many such photographs in existence, although I wonder whether any of the subjects subsequently became presidents of the United States or were even elected to office. Sixty years down the line, I cannot say that I can even remember standing at the foot of Mount Rushmore.

Some ten years earlier the sculpture at Mount Rushmore was completed on the 31^st October 1941. The work began 85 years ago today, on the 4^th October 1927 on the face of Mount Rushmore near Keystone, South Dakota. It was sculpted by Danish-American Gutzon Borglum with his son Lincoln Borglum. They worked together with 400 workers on the colossal 60 foot (18m) high carvings of United States Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln to represent the first 150 years of American history. These presidents were selected by Borglum because of their role in preserving the Republic and expanding its territory. The image of Thomas Jefferson was originally intended to appear in the area at Washington's right, but after the work there was begun, the rock was found to be unsuitable, so the work on the Jefferson figure was dynamited, and a new figure was sculpted to Washington's left.

The first Orient Express in 1883

The 4th October is also the day of the first run of what was to become the Orient Express in 1883. The original route, which first ran on 4^th October 1883, was from Paris, Gare de L’Est, to Giurgiu in Romania via Munich and Vienna. At Giurgiu, passengers were ferried across the Danube to Ruse, Bulgaria to pick up another train to Varna, from where they completed their journey to Istanbul (then called Constantinople) by ferry. In 1885, another route began operations, this time reaching Istanbul via rail from Vienna to Belgrade and Niš, carriage to Plovdiv and rail again to Istanbul.

In 1889, the train's eastern terminus became Varna in Bulgaria, where passengers could take a ship to Istanbul. On 1^st June 1889, the first non-stop train to Istanbul left Paris (Gare de l'Est). Istanbul remained its easternmost stop until May 19, 1977. The eastern terminus was the Sirkeci Terminal by the Golden Horn. Ferry service from piers next to the terminal would take passengers across the Bosphorus to Haydarpaşa Terminal, the terminus of the Asian lines of the Ottoman Railways.