Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
November 19, 1921 A recently completed railway station was officially opened in the village of Bjorli, which is located along the Rauma river in southern Norway. Bjorli Station was built as the western terminus for the first section of the Rauma Line. That section covered 35.3 miles (56.8 kilometers) between the village of Dombås and... Continue Reading →
The State Board of Public Roads of Rhode Island was established in 1902 to oversee the construction, maintenance, and improvement of the Ocean State’s highways system. Up until the establishment of this board, there had been no state-level entity in place to supervise and monitor work on public roads within Rhode Island; those duties were... Continue Reading →
November 17, 2007 A “rededication” ceremony was held for the McKinley Bridge, which crosses the Mississippi River and links St. Louis, Missouri, with Venice, Illinois. This bridge had been designed by renowned engineer Ralph Modjeski and it first opened in 1907. Contrary to a widespread assumption, the bridge was not named after President William McKinley; the... Continue Reading →
November 13, 1940 In western Kentucky, the Livermore Bridge was officially opened. This through truss bridge starts at the city of Livermore in McLean County, crosses over the Rough River, spans a small part of Ohio County, and then ends up on the south bank of the Green River back in McLean County. That design for... Continue Reading →
November 12, 1901 Industrial designer Alexis de Sakhnoffsky was born in the Ukrainian city of Kiev in what was then the Russian Empire. He fled his homeland by 1920 in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and ended up pursuing a wide-ranging design career that included many transportation makes and models. Throughout a large part of... Continue Reading →
November 10, 1949 The first flight of the multi-purpose Sikorsky S-55 helicopter took place in the skies above Bloomfield, Connecticut. This helicopter was built by Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, which had been established by aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky in 1923 and originally known as Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation. (Sikorsky Aircraft has been part of Lockheed Martin... Continue Reading →
November 6, 1998 The Raftsund Bridge in the northern region of Norway was officially opened to traffic. This structure provides a road route across the Raftsundet strait between Austvågøya and Hinnøya, which are among the larger islands of the Lofoten archipelago in Norway’s Nordland county. The Raftsund Bridge measures 2,333 feet (711 meters) in length and... Continue Reading →
November 5, 1893 Industrial designer Raymond Loewy was born in Paris, France. Loewy would spend most of his professional career in the United States, and his wide range of design efforts included many with a transportation theme of some kind. These efforts started at an early age. When he was only 15 years old, for example, Loewy... Continue Reading →
In 1968, construction began on Puerto Rico Highway 52 (PR-52). This project was completed seven years later. PR-52, which is maintained by the Puerto Rico Department of Transportation and Public Works, covers 67.4 miles (108.5 kilometers) between Puerto Rico’s capital of San Juan in the north and the city and municipality of Ponce on the... Continue Reading →
November 3, 1900 The first major automobile show in the United States opened on a Saturday evening at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The next day’s edition of the New York Times reported, “From the hour the doors of the big building swung inward until midnight a throng of spectators variously estimated at from... Continue Reading →
Transportation History 