Mikhail A. Reutern Quotes

Railways are my politics.

You and I come by road or rail, but economists travel on infrastructure.

America’s history is the history of her transportation.

A transcontinental railroad will not be built in my lifetime, or my children’s lifetime, or their children’s lifetime.

We seem to be committing ourselves to an eye wateringly expensive railroad for the few. High speed rail plan is madness.

Like the railroads that brought us together in the 19th century, these trails will bring us together in the 20th and 21st centuries. (at launch of the National Millennium Trails Program, 1999)

We were also able to do a great deal of work to improve highways, airports and airways, waterways, and railways, all of which are important and have provided a better quality of life and economic development opportunities for my constituents.

I think what initially attracts many kids to trains are the 'cool' things: strength, size, agency, speed. But trains also operate within a world of systems, schedules, codes, and fine distinctions. Enter the geeks. What I personally love most about trains is that they are transporting, that they take us places - literally and otherwise.

If was, increased by a lack of railways in Russia - for bringing up supplies to our advancing troops.

Build the roads and the jobs follow.

The rail service is important for my district.

The railroads were built at the expense of the destruction of agriculture.

… a people occupied as we are in opening rivers, digging navigable canals, making roads

No nation owes more to the steel wheel on the steel rail though it is not always clear whether railways were built to unite Canada, or Canada was created to justify the rail building.

The future of a Nation will be shaped by its ability to produce planes, cars, electronics ... not by how slick its financial markets can shuffle paper assets around.

Much as I prize railroads, I am unwilling to see my constituents taxed to build them, except by their own representatives in the State Legislature, at such time, in such manner, and to such extent as they deem wise and prudent

The situation in transport is catastrophic in the most literal sense of the word, as testified to by the accelerating frequency of railway disasters

Railways, multiplied and spanning the continent, are essential domestic institutions -- more powerful and more permanent than law, or popular consent, or political constitutions... They thoroughly complete the grand system... which fraternizes us into one people.

The railways of the world, except in those countries where they have been held under the strict regulation and supervision of the government, have proved themselves arbitrary, extortionate and as opposed to free institutions and free commerce between states as were the feudal barons of the middle ages.

It is not the owner of stage-coaches who builds railways.

Among the means of advancing the public interest the occasion is a proper one for recalling the attention of Congress to the great importance of establishing throughout our country the roads and canals which can best be executed under the national authority. No objects within the circle of political economy so richly repay the expense bestowed on them; there are none the utility of which is more universally ascertained and acknowledged

In 1818 I had the pleasure to congratulate the Legislature on the auspicious commencement and successful progress of the contemplated water communication between the great western and northern lakes and the Atlantic ocean, and I now have the peculiar gratification to felicitate you on their completion. On the 26th of October last, the Western Canal was in a navigable state, and vessels passed from Lake Erie to the Atlantic Ocean. In about eight years, artificial communications, near 428 miles in length, have been opened to the Hudson River from Lake Champlain by the Northern Canal; to Lake Ontario by the Oswego River and the Western Canal; and to Lake Erie and the other western lakes by the latter Canal – thus affording an extent of inland navigation unparalleled in the experience of mankind. The expense of these works and of some auxiliary, connected, and incidental operations, amounts to $9,130,373.80 …

Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those of the neighborhood of the town. They are upon that the greatest of all improvements.

A railroad is a ravenous destroyer of towns, unless those towns are put at the end of it and a sea beyond, so that you can't go further and find another terminus. And it is shaky trusting them, even then

A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.