For Italian food in St. Louis, missed opportunity not to try St. Louis-style pizza or toasted raviolis! The history behind toasted raviolis is that in the early 1940s, a ravioli was accidentally dropped into the fryer at Mama Campisi's by a drunk chef. Mickey Garagiola, older brother of Major League Baseball Hall-of-Famer Joe Garagiola (who played for the Cardinals, Pirates, Cubs, and NY Giants for nine seasons), was actually at the bar during the mishap and was the first to taste the accidental treat. Shortly thereafter, the item began appearing on menus across The Hill. St. Louis-style pizza is made without yeast and rolled thin, which allows it to have a crisp cracker-like crust. Instead of the larger pie-like wedges, it is cut into three- or four-inch squares, known as a party cut or tavern cut. It is said the square cut was inspired by Ed Imo’s former profession as a tile-layer. The smaller slices and rigid crust help support the weight of its toppings. It's typically made with Provel cheese rather than mozzarella. Provel is a white processed cheese made from cheddar, Swiss, and provolone, developed by Costa Grocery in St. Louis during the 1950s. It’s made in Wisconsin by a Kraft Heinz subsidiary, primarily for the St. Louis market. The tomato sauce is also seasoned with more oregano than other styles of pizza and is sweeter due to the influence of Sicilian immigrants. Didn't mention regarding Cortex but it was shown outside the windows of the train that Cortex serves an IKEA as well! Besides the transit at the Red Hook IKEA you and Jeremy went to, and the IKEA outside Cortex, other IKEAs in North America with great transit options include Bayamón, Puerto Rico (the Tren Urbano's Deportivo station), Hicksville on Long Island (a walk from Hicksville station on the busy LIRR Main Line as well as a bus hub for NICE), Portland, Oregon (Portland's IKEA is served by Cascades station on the MAX Red Line, located in a mixed-used shopping center, offices, and hotel complex outside the airport built around the station), downtown Toronto (served by College station on Line 1 as well as the 306/506 Carlton streetcar and the 505 Dundas streetcar is nearby too), North York, Toronto (served mainly by Leslie on Line 4, there's also Oriole on GO Transit's Richmond Hill line), Coquitlam, BC (outside Vancouver; you can take the Skytrain to Braid on the Expo Line, and there are different buses to take you there for the final stretch), Encuentro Oceania mall in Mexico City (next to Romero Rubio on Mexico City Metro's Line B and served by many buses as well), Elizabeth, New Jersey (served by the 62 which serves EWR and Newark Penn, and the 111 which goes to NYC's PABT), Burbank (walk from Downtown Burbank station, served by Metrolink's Ventura County and Antelope Valley Lines, as well as limited Amtrak Pacific Surfliner service), and San Francisco (Powell St is served by four BART lines, multiple Muni lines including the F Market PCCs, and Powell-Mason and Powell-Hyde cable car lines). Interestingly, besides the Gateway Arch attracting tourists, Walt Disney wanted to build an indoor theme park on the St. Louis riverfront as well, Walt Disney's Riverfront Square. After Disneyland was completed, Walt Disney publicly stated that he had no intentions of opening parks elsewhere (of course the Florida Project eventually came along...), but in March 1963, Disney met with the mayor of St. Louis to discuss plans for a riverfront theme park. The park would have stood in the two city blocks north of the former Busch Memorial Stadium. The entrance to the park would have been similar to Main Street USA, with one side of the street based on Old St. Louis, and the other based on Old New Orleans. Disney planned to utilize the Audio-Animatronic technology that had been developed by his company for the New York World's Fair at the time. The top floor of the park would have housed a banquet hall, restaurant, lounge, and bar, overlooking the Mississippi River, in addition to having concession stands and shops throughout the park. Several classic Disneyland and Disney World attractions were originally conceived for the St. Louis park, including what would later become Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, and a "Western Riverboat" ride, whose design was later incorporated into Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. So why wasn't the park built? It was never built due to a combination of financial disagreements, ownership disputes, and differing visions between Disney and the city of St. Louis, notably regarding the role of alcohol in the park. August Busch Jr. publicly called Walt crazy for thinking his park would succeed without selling beer. Disney proposed that St. Louis fund the construction of the dome-like building that would house the park, while Disney would cover the costs of attractions and rides. St. Louis, through the Civic Center Redevelopment Corporation, was hesitant to bear the full cost of the building, leading to a stalemate. And some preservationists were concerned that Disney's vision for the park would not authentically represent the historical riverfront area. By July 1965, Disney announced that plans for the park would not move forward, because of a dispute over the financing and ownership of the park, and Disney's desire to focus his attentions on Florida
The MetroLink reminds me of the Basel tramway system in a way. MetroLink goes through two states, Basel serves three countries, Basel's Line 3 goes to a commune called SAINT-LOUIS in France, and the Illinois section goes through farm fields similarly to the westernmost part of Basel's Line 10! The Eads Bridge was the first bridge across the Mississippi south of the Missouri River. Earlier bridges were located north of the Missouri River, where the Mississippi is narrower. However, none of the earlier bridges survived, so the Eads Bridge is also the oldest bridge on the entire river. The Eads Bridge's construction pioneered the large-scale use of steel as a structural material, which led to the shift from wrought-iron as the default material for large structures like that. Its foundations, more than 100 feet below water level, were the deepest underwater constructions at the time. They were installed using pneumatic caissons, at the time, by far the largest caissons ever built. Its 520-foot center arch was the longest rigid span ever built at the time. The arches were built suspended from temporary wooden towers. These engineering principles were used for later bridges, including the Brooklyn Bridge. The Gateway Arch is the tallest monument in the whole Western Hemisphere! It's 630 feet tall and is 75 feet taller than the Washington Monument! It's the smallest park in the NPS system with the designation National Park (but Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial in Philly is the smallest unit in the NPS system in general), when it was redesignated and renamed from the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in 2018. Honestly a National Monument, which is what the Statue of Liberty is, is a better designation for it because the status of a full-on National Park is meant to be land set aside to protecting the country's different kinds of gorgeous landscapes like Arches in Utah, Everglades in Florida, Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Acadia in Maine, or Hawaiʻi Volcanoes. When St. Louis Union Station first opened in 1894, the station was the largest in the world. Traffic peaked at 100,000 people a day in the 1940s. In 1903, Union Station was expanded to accommodate visitors to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. In the 1920s, it remained the largest American railroad terminal. At its height, the station combined the St. Louis passenger services of 22 railroads, the most of any single terminal in the world. The Richardsonian Romanesque station was designed by Theodore Link who also designed buildings for the 1904 World's Fair, the historic Decatur Wabash Railroad Station in Illinois, the Wabash Pittsburgh Terminal (demolished in 1954), Louisiana State University, and the Mississippi State Capitol. Union Station's headhouse and midway are constructed of Indiana limestone and initially included 32 tracks under its vast trainshed. The trainshed was designed by civil engineer George H. Pegram, known for patenting the Pegram truss bridge. Yup, Panera Bread is only called St. Louis Bread Company around St. Louis, and Panera Bread everywhere else. Though in September 2022, Panera announced that legacy St. Louis Bread Co. locations outside St. Louis City and St. Louis County would be rebranded as Panera when remodeled, with locations in the inner core of the metro retaining the Bread Co. name. Ken and Linda Rosenthal founded the St. Louis Bread Company in 1987 with the first location in Kirkwood. Au Bon Pain once owned Panera Bread. They purchased it in 1993 and when they did, they were the ones who changed the company name to Panera in 1997, taken from the Latin word for "breadbasket" (pānārium). This is somewhat similar to Carl's Jr/Hardee's and how the names are such depending on where you are, or Edy's and Dreyer's ice cream with Edy's sold in the eastern and midwestern states and Dreyer's sold in the western states and Texas. MetroLink should have airport express service! The HBLR has rush-hour express service, the Bayonne Flyer, which first started in May 2000, the year HBLR began operations, initially the express ran between Exchange Place and 34th St. Flyer service was then extended between Newport and 22nd St in November 2003, and Hoboken service (Hoboken Terminal station opened in 2002) began with select AM trips only in 2005 before full Hoboken service on the Bayonne Flyer was introduced in February 2006. The Bayonne Flyer runs express in both peak and reverse peak directions during rush-hour. Southbound Bayonne Flyers use the northbound track as the northbound track is straight while the southbound curves out for the platforms and exits crossover the southbound track. Because of this when the Bayonne Flyer operates, that means northbound trains have to use the southbound track. Bayonne Flyer service stops at all Bayonne stations, Liberty State Park (southbound only), Essex St, Exchange Place, Harborside, and Newport. While the HBLR doesn't have day passes like MetroLink, NJT does offer different ways to pay (without fare gates like those). You can use the NJT app, get a ticket from the machine, or you can tap your contactless card on the validator and that's it! Besides the streamlined Hudson Go Pass for NY Waterway service from Port Imperial and participating NJT bus services (also includes the free NY Waterway buses you can take from the Midtown terminal), there are monthly passes, reduced fare for seniors and people with disabilities (military personnel and veterans can also use this), student tickets for NJ students that they get through the school (25 percent discount off adult one-way fares), Family SuperSaver (on weekends and holidays, two children ages five through 11 may travel free with a passenger paying any valid fare), you can use a NJT monthly or weekly rail pass (imprinted with a zone number) for any light rail trip at no additional charge, and you can use a two-zone or greater NJT bus pass to travel on HBLR at no additional charge.
MidAmerica....they're definitely right about the *MID* part. Basically, the airport opened in 1997 and the reason MidAmerica St. Louis Airport exists is because it was created to alleviate crowding at St. Louis Lambert International Airport, but because Lambert stopped being a TWA and American Airlines hub, there wasn't a need for it. MidAmerica's additional runway saved Scott AFB from closure during the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure process. As Rice/Royce mentioned at the end, Lambert was once a hub for TWA and later a hub for American Airlines after the purchase of TWA. TWA bought Ozark Air Lines in 1986, which had a hub at Lambert, which increased TWA's traffic at Lambert from over 56% of boardings to over 80%! By September 1999, Lambert was TWA's main hub, with 103 destinations served by 515 daily flights. The city decided to build a 9,000-foot (or 2,700 m) runway, dubbed Runway 11/29, parallel to the two larger existing runways. At 1.1 billion, it was the costliest public works program in St. Louis history, and resulted in destroying about 2,000 homes, six churches, and four schools in Bridgeton. Service at Lambert was reduced to 207 flights by November 2003. In 2008, Lambert's position as an American Airlines hub faced further pressure due to increased fuel costs and softened demand because of the state of the economy at the time and in 2009, American Airlines closed the hub. Before the airport, Kinloch Park had a balloon launching base called the "Permanent Aviation Field and Dirigible Harbor". In 1910, an international air meet was held, and it was there where Teddy Roosevelt became the first US president to fly! The Wright Brothers brought six airplanes and their Exhibition Team to the meet. This wasn't planned for Teddy to do that as he was in Missouri to help the state's GOP but saw the Wright Brothers' air show in St. Louis and wanted to join on the fly...pun intended. Teddy was also the first President and first American in general to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize which he got in 1906 for resolving the Russo-Japanese War, the first (and only) president to have earned the Medal of Honor which he got for serving in Cuba (however it took all the way until 2001 for this to happen), and the first president to go down and pilot a submarine, which he did on the Plunger in August 1905 in the Long Island Sound. St. Louis Lambert International Airport was named for Albert Bond Lambert, an Olympic silver medalist golfer in the 1904 Summer Games that St Louis hosted, president of Lambert Pharmaceutical Corporation (which made Listerine), and the first person to receive a pilot's license in St. Louis. It was first called the St. Louis Flying Field, but because of Lambert's ambition to promote St. Louis aviation, in 1923, it was renamed "Lambert-St. Louis Flying Field". He purchased the field outright in February 1925 and in the late 1920s, the airport became the first with an air traffic control system, which communicated with pilots via waving flags. The first controller was Archie William League. Charles Lindbergh's first piloting job was flying airmail for Robertson Aircraft Corporation from the airfield. He stopped at the airport during his cross-country San Diego to New York flight about a week before his record-breaking flight to Paris in 1927. In 1928, St. Louis leased the airport for just a dollar. Later that year, Lambert sold the airport to the city after a 2 million dollar-bond issue was passed, making it one of the first municipally owned airports in the country. To handle increasing passenger traffic in the 1950s, Minoru Yamasaki (known for designing the original World Trade Center in NYC before they were destroyed) was commissioned to design a new terminal. The three-domed design preceded terminals at JFK and Charles de Gaulle, and a fourth dome was added in 1965.
The HBLR and MetroLink are similar in that a majority of both systems use repurposed ROW, in cities with similar populations, and some section of tunnel. Both systems also go similar speeds (HBLR can go 55 mph, MetroLink goes 65 mph, but the Bayonne section of HBLR was designed for 80 mph). Much of the HBLR is grade-separated, even in downtown Jersey City except for street-running on Essex Street. Much of the HBLR is repurposed ROW, though the downtown Jersey City segment was built brand-new. At-grade crossings are equipped with transit-signal priority signals to automatically change traffic lights in favor of the light rail. When the HBLR wraps around the western side of Hoboken, that was once the NY Central's New Jersey Junction Railroad, which became part of Conrail's River Line. To obtain the ROW north of Hoboken, NJT paid for the River Line ROW, while also paying to upgrade the Northern Running Track so freight operations could shift. That section also includes the Weehawken Tunnel, built in 1883 and once used by West Shore Railroad trains (which went to Buffalo) to reach Weehawken Terminal (the site is now Port Imperial), home to the HBLR's only underground station of Bergenline Ave at 160 ft below the Palisades. The 4,014 ft long tunnel was widened to create room for two tracks and made even wider for the station. The Bayonne portion of the HBLR (and the highway Route 440) was once the six-track CNJ main line, and the stations on the West Side Ave (West Side Ave portion was once the Newark and New York Railroad) and Bayonne portions were built on the sites of former CNJ stations. In the Bayonne section, not only does the HBLR not only serve drivers on Route 440 to the east but also cater to those living in the neighborhoods west of the stations. 8th Street was done in the style of the CNJ station that was there before it. It was originally a Central Railroad of NJ station between 1834 and 1978 when Conrail discontinued service. Besides 8th Street, 22nd St was once Centerville or East 22nd St, 34th St was built just north of the former East 33rd St or Bayonne station, 45th St was once Pamrapo or East 49th St station, and Danforth Ave and Richard St in Jersey City were Greenville and Van Nostrand Place respectively! The HBLR goes where people wanna go, whether it's Hoboken Terminal, a state park, JC Medical Center, the mall, university, etc! The HBLR's most popular stop is Newport for the Newport Centre shopping mall. Newport participates in a NJ government Urban Enterprise Zone program with reduced sales tax, encouraging New Yorkers to do their shopping in NJ! The West Side Ave station is walking distance to the New Jersey City University campus and are right by the Jersey City Board of Education and Social Security offices as well. Hoboken and JC has Citi Bike infrastructure by HBLR stations. Liberty State Park station is right next door to the Liberty Science Center, home to the largest planetarium in the Western Hemisphere! When they repurposed the Conrail River Line/NJ Junction ROW in western Hoboken, they built an elevator off the cliffs so those on top can access 9th/Congress St station! The station in Hoboken has TOD and is near a Shop-Rite, so people in Jersey City can not only take the elevator down to the station but can also use the elevator as part of walking to Shop-Rite. So it acts as an accessible way for people above in Jersey City can reach things in Hoboken like Shop-Rite. If there's something the MetroLink could learn from the HBLR, it's the connections. The HBLR is peak light-rail that feeds into heavy rail. The HBLR has connections at multiple stations. Bergenline Avenue is a busy shopping corridor and not only a bus hub for seven routes but is a jitney corridor as well. The HBLR serves Hoboken Terminal which is a hub for NJT rail, NJT buses, PATH, and ferries. Newport is a short walk from the Newport PATH station, and on the other side of the mall is a terminus for the NJ jitneys. Exchange Place is a hub for PATH, NJT buses, and ferries. Port Imperial and Lincoln Harbor both have ferry connections, with Port Imperial having different bus routes as well. In Bayonne, there's the MTA S89 bus which goes between Bayonne and Eltingville and allows Staten Islanders access to the HBLR. 34th Street station is also close to the Cape Liberty cruise port. And TOD! Port Imperial in Weehawken was designed as a big TOD with its ferry operations upgraded to a terminal when the HBLR station opened. Many luxury apartments with a supermarket have been built by the station. Outside downtown JC, developments have gone up by Liberty State Park station. And the West Side Ave portion being extended to the new Bayfront development complex revives the ROW further, with new TOD, eight thousand units, with 35 percent affordable housing! The largest mixed-income community in the NY Tri-State. Jersey City has been experiencing an Austin-level housing boom, and it's more admirable for Jersey City to do it as Jersey City is much smaller than Austin! Now to be fair, JC is next to NYC, but it's still a lesson for other cities like St Louis and Austin. In Q1 2024 for US light-rail weekday riders per mile, the HBLR had 2,964 weekday riders per mile, second place behind Seattle's Link system (Link had 3,461 weekday riders per mile in Q1 2024), while the Newark Light Rail was in third place with 2,643 weekday riders per mile. The HBLR is just 17 miles in 2024, and had FY2023 ridership of 13,400,000. Meanwhile, MetroLink had an average 490 weekday riders per mile (worse than Baltimore's 436 riders per mile, but better than Pittsburgh's 357). To be fair that number being that low for MetroLink, the farmland in Illinois definitely doesn't help, but as shown, a big key to having great LRT ridership is having TOD and a ton of connections. And that's not mentioning the pedestrianization that has taken place in downtown Jersey City. The HBLR and NY Waterway offer a joint ticket for Port Imperial, the Hudson Go Pass. NJT bus routes 156R, 158, and 159R also participate in this. So people could take the bus or HBLR to Port Imperial, get off to take the NY Waterway to Manhattan, and when in Manhattan, there are free connecting buses at Midtown W. 39th St. Ferry Terminal! Jersey City and Hoboken are both examples of a transit city in North America done right. And Jersey City and Hoboken are both role models for Vision Zero. Hoboken has experienced zero traffic deaths since 2017. Hoboken adopted a Vision Zero plan in 2021 after an executive order by Mayor Ravi Bhalla in 2019, and since then, they've been doing things like daylighting intersections with flexible posts or rain gardens, creating curb extensions to reduce crossing distances and improve visibility, and painting high-visibility crosswalks. In 2023 alone, Hoboken installed 78 daylighted intersections, 61 high-visibility crosswalks, 1 raised crosswalk, 9 curb extensions, and 14 multi-way stops. They also reduced the speed limit from 25 mph to 20 mph in 2022. In 2021, Hoboken had 21 pedestrian injuries, 18 cyclist injuries, and 51 motorist injuries. Compare these injuries and the zero fatalities to the Crown Heights in Brooklyn in 2021, Crown Heights had three fatalities, and over 400 injuries in total! To combat flooding, as a response to Hurricane Sandy, Hoboken turned to a Dutch firm, Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, to create a design that won a contest sponsored by then President Obama. The contest was about looking for innovative designs to reduce storm impact as a response to Sandy, and Hoboken alongside Jersey City and Weehawken won, awarded 230 million dollars total, and the state contributed an addition 100 million. They designed resiliency parks around Hoboken, inspired by Louisiana's response to Hurricane Katrina and Dutch water management systems, using a combination of above-ground green infrastructure and below-ground gray infrastructure to store stormwater. Expanding the capacity of the sewer system. A pump station allows water to be collected underground in a cistern, and then pumped out to the Hudson River. These parks include recreational space, rain gardens, porous pavers, and cisterns for rainwater harvesting. Jersey City was the first in New Jersey to implement Vision Zero with an executive order signed by Mayor Steven Fulop in 2018, and in 2022, the city realized zero car crash-related fatalities on city-owned streets, the first city of its size in the country to accomplish this! Rather than concentrate pedestrian safety improvements in a single area downtown, Jersey City worked with Street Plans and pursued interventions across six corridors, one in each of Jersey City’s six wards. Thus, they not only built trust across different constituencies, but was able to experiment and did it fast through tactical urbanism and committed local leadership. So Jersey City has been able to make rapid, transformational improvements through daylighting intersections, narrowing lane widths to reduce speeding, converting to one-ways to remove left-turns and reduce conflicts, building a growing protected bike lane network, and adding numerous stop signs and speed humps. Under Fulop, Jersey City also became the first in NJ to have a bikeshare system when Citi Bike expanded to Jersey City in 2015, while it expanded to Hoboken in 2021. To go with this, Fulop worked with community activists to implement a comprehensive Bike Master Plan that includes a complete protected bike lane system and has implemented the steps to create a safe environment with miles of safe corridors!
Except HBLR is like every 3-5 minutes combined and 7-10 on the branches instead of every 10 at best on the combined metrolink sections and every 20 elsewhere 😭 seriously like I always see people praise metrolink (and it is a fairly cool system) but those headways are just atrocious
This is one of the best videos you have ever published. It’s like you had a documentary presenter with you just giving SO much great information. Outstanding vid as always. Just even better.
This is one my favorite videos you've ever done! Royce is such a good co-host and so knowledgeable. You toured so many interesting areas too. I LOVED the old tunnels! The St. Louis tourism board should pay yall for this 😂
If you want to check out another cool water tower like at 1:22, check out the Weehawken Water Tower on Park Ave in Weehawken on the border with Union City, a short walk from the Weehawken Dueling Grounds site. It was built in 1883, designed by Frederick Clarke Withers (an architect known for his Gothic Revival designs; he also designed Chapel of the Good Shepherd on NYC's Roosevelt Island and the Victorian United States Daughters of 1812 headquarters in DC) and was modeled after Florence's Palazzo Vecchio. Water was pumped from the Hackensack River, 14 miles away. Yeah, Ted Drewes is famous! Fun fact, the reason Dairy Queen flips their Blizzards upside down is because of Ted Drewes! Samuel Temperato, the DQ franchise owner who came up with the idea for Blizzards, was inspired by the frozen treats sold by Ted Drewes, who termed them “concrete”. In 1959, Steve Gamber, then 14, would stop by Drewes’ Chippewa Street location for a sandwich and chocolate malt, asking Drewes to make it thicker and thicker each time. Drewes had enough and one day flipped the malt upside down to show its thickness, assuring Steve that if it fell out, it was free. Temperato picked this up for Dairy Queen! The Siemens SD-460s have also been used on the Valencia Metro in Venezuela. The Valencia Metro opened in 2007 under Hugo Chávez. Like MetroLink, the Valencia Metro is a light metro (with its own underground section too), the Valencia Metro is completely grade-separated (other than within its yard) and is 7.7 km long in 2025. An extension of the north-south route and an east-west route to connect mainly the Valencia Municipality with San Diego Municipality of the same city have been planned (though they haven't given new info about it since 2014). Interesting fact about University City-Big Bend: The Francis Gymnasium and Francis Olympic Field are by University-Big Bend station, and these were venues during the 1904 Summer Olympics (which were quite the dark games because of human zoos and forcing Filipinos, Native Americans, and Africans to compete). The three-medal format of gold, silver and bronze was introduced at the 1904 Olympics. Those Olympics was the first time an African-American medalist took the podium, as hurdler George Coleman Poage won bronze. And in gymnastics, an American with a wooden leg won six medals (three gold, one silver and one bronze). The Francis Olympic Field once had a 19,000-person seating capacity, but stadium renovations in 1984 reduced the capacity to 3,300 people. Because it opened in 1904 for the Olympics, it is one of the oldest sports venues west of the Mississippi River that is still in use! Francis Olympic Field was used for athletics, cycling, archery, lacrosse, roque, tennis, tug of war, weightlifting, wrestling, gymnastics, and association football/soccer, Francis Gymnasium was used for boxing and fencing, while Forest Park was used for diving, swimming, and water polo. Chicago was supposed to host, but the organizers of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis didn't want another international event held in the same time frame, told the Chicago organizers they'd be planning their own sporting events if they weren't moved, so Pierre de Coubertin intervened and awarded St Louis the games. Due to the Russo-Japanese War and difficulties traveling, out of over 650 athletes, only up to 74 of them came from outside North America. Cuba was the only Latin American country that participated in those games, with Cuban mailman/marathon runner Andarín Carvajal having an interesting story of losing all his money to gambling in New Orleans, forced to walk the rest of the way, showed up in street clothes and had to create shorts out of his trousers quickly, stole peaches from a spectator's car, ate apples from an apple orchard that turned out to be bad, took a nap to recover, and still managed to finish fourth. The downtown tunnel opened in 1874 (as well as the Eads Bridge, dedicated on July 4th by President Ulysses S. Grant), not 1875, but yeah, it's insanely cool that it was repurposed for MetroLink! Istanbul's Tünel, an underground funicular, opened in January 1875, making it the oldest in continental Europe, beating the Budapest Metro since Budapest's didn't open until 1896. As Royce stated in Classy Whale's MetroLink vlog, if the DC Metro is a Brutalist cathedral, Skinker is a Brutalist chapel, and yeah that adds up! When they were constructing Skinker and University City-Big Bend stations, they faced opposition because that section was gonna be street-running, so they opted to build them underground! So thanks to NIMBYs, they ironically made the Blue Line a better and quicker service through no street-running! Skinker is named after Thomas Skinker, a lawyer who moved to St. Louis in 1838. He moved to St. Louis from Fauquier County, Virginia to practice law, forming the firm of Skinker and Skinker with his brother, Peter. The Gateway Arch is quite controversial as 40 blocks and 486 buildings were demolished for it. The Arch's unique trams are operated by the Bi-State Development Agency as well. Richard Bowser developed with his father elevator equipment that could travel horizontally, diagonally, and normal vertical. He visited an elevator company in Moline, Illinois to see a friend when by chance, the company got a call from architect Eero Saarinen that they were looking for a group to take on the big project. Bowser made a return call. When Eero called back, he gave Bowser two weeks to design and present in front of the team. He knew a normal system of course wouldn't do, so for the Arch he combined elevator and Ferris wheel elements to create a unique system where a tram of eight elevator pods that by rotating, allows the visitors inside to remain leveled the entire way.
@@LewisYamanoteAintRealYeah, I was thinking about the other one but I couldn’t remember. This is ironic considering that I just watched a video about LA Metrolink this morning 😂
Fun Ted Drewes trivia, in 1986 the New York Times did a story on the Dairy Queen Blizzard and in the second to last paragraph, the company credits the franchisee in St. Louis who the paper then asks about his creation to which he basically says, “oh, yeah, that’s just a concrete from Ted Drewes.” Shake Shack also has concretes and their founder is from St. Louis too.
As an Indianaian who regularly flies out of STL, I was extremely vindicated in saying out loud "STL is such a chill airport, he'll totally make it" when the idea of Miles being late was introduced. Also: Schnucks has expanded past St. Louis! There's several of them in Evansville, Indiana, though they thoroughly hold onto their STL roots by having sections of STL-produced food and ALWAYS stocking the ingredients for St. Louis style pizza in the cold cases.
Amazing video! Royce was a great guest, they have so much good knowledge about the system and city!! Wild to see a lightrail going through this kind of rural territory. Also those old subway tunnels are incredible!
2:29 to add to the compliments on screen, your camera work is great and you don't need any higher quality for your videos. Everything you film has that distinct Miles charm to it and its fantastic. That was a great shot too haha
Maybe cover to cover the best highest quality MiT video (which is saying something). Royce was a fantastic local guide, your guests are always so fun and knowledgeable and this is no exception.
1:16 2 more old water towers in North St. Louis also close to Grand. NOT a FUN fact...when the first sections of Metrolink was being planned in the early 1990's, it was intended to go into nearby St Charles County but race-baiting politicians fought against it and stopped it. As if people from the city would take the train out there, steal your t.v. and take it on the train with them. St. Charles County to this day has NO public transportation, not even buses, and some of the worst traffic in the area and with more that 400,000 people is the most populous area of the state lacking public transit.
Funny to hear about the old railway flyover next to the IKEA “just being approved” for conversion. When I went to SLU from 2016-2020 I kept hearing the same thing and was excited about potentially having a new walking route! Maybe this time it’ll finally happen!
Furries and urbanism go hand in hand! I'm sure urbanist creators are well aware a lot of their fans are furries, as shown by CityNerd judging convention centers. Or secretly a furry...in May 2024, Miles did tweet that he visited Aleena the same weekend as Anthrocon the year prior ;)
My last visit (over the winter holidaze) made me think that they are, really, working on doing that, at least wrt coverage. (That was a lot of family stuff, so I didn't get much chance to poke around, but I'll be back for longer in March.)
The Metrolink was always envisioned to go to Mid America Airport since it's opening. Back in the early 2000s I took Metrolink when it used to just go to SWIC "college" station as the terminus and as the marquee scrolled back to "Lambert Airport" it scrolled past "Mid America Airport." Also college students used to get a free metro pass. Not sure if they still do, but it was included in their tuition to incentivize them to use it. The Metrolink has the second highest ridership for light rail in the Midwest after Minneapolis (which isn't hard to do considering there are only two light rail systems).
My hope is you’ll “Ride The Tide” in Norfolk VA, light rail partly employing old NS right of way. The entire video could be a “short”, the route is so truncated, running (for all intents and purposes) between two hospitals. Convenient to Amtrak, though. Y’all come!
Oh hey its this day! Rice and I talked about me tagging along that day but i was at my internship in downtown clayton too late in the afternoon to make it worth coming by. Hope to meet you next time you come into town!
I see you responded to my previous comment about Utah but now for some Utah Transit history like every other US state we had a really good streak on that way in the 1900s then it got ripped up and replaced with road on the more positive and there are some new plans that might be put into effect such as the Rio grande plan which would a re-establish the Rio grande Depot for passenger service and also run all trains underground in the City
13:47 - I hate to be the bearer of potentially bad news, but that Delmar Loop trolley service almost never runs these days. I don't think they've completely thrown in the towel, but… it's a trolley on a two-way, one-lane-each-way road, it wasn't really engineered all that well, and it was a tourism solution in search of tourists. Digging into *why* it failed may still be a valuable (to you and your audience) video in the future, but I wouldn't count on being able to ride it.
Yes!!! Finally a MetroLink video. Genuinely a great service to get to the airport or a Cardinals or Blues game. Come back to St. Louis and ride our travesty of a trolley, the Loop Trolley! It's technically one of the services administered by Metro Transit.
How about a Muni Metro Monday from San Francisco (especially that new section that cost a ton and only add 3 stations (reminds me of the 2nd avenue subway.)
Having driven through and visited St Louis way too many times, I’m thoroughly enjoying the St Louis history/foaming! Also, you have to visit City Museum next time you’re there!
I actually also love jank old highways. They can have really interesting, unique designs, and in some ways it feels like in the early days of highway building they actually cared about not completely destroying the neighborhoods they built through
Tower Grove park is definitely the MVP imo. I remember back during the 2008 economic crisis, gas prices were so crazy, my dad would take a bus from STL county to the nearest Metrolink station to work downtown. Wish STL had the funds to create an overall better and more efficient public transit experience that isn't just focused on bringing folks to baseball or hockey games, but everyday stuff like commuting and grocery shopping.
What a great guest co-host! I used to go to St Louis for a work meeting annually, for about 6 years. One year I added on an extra day to ride what there was of the Metrolink back then and I took it from Clayton to downtown, mainly to see the Arch. I wish it went all the way to Cahokia Mounds. It definitely seems underused, which is a shame.
That’s funny, on my visit last year I rode the Red Line nearly end-to-end and I do specifically remember one of the underground stations had a STANK and now I know which one!
I hope you didn't miss the chance to do some off-train infrastructure-foaming of Union Station & Eads Bridge. Structures worth appreciation side-trips Sent from a MARC station
DUDE!! You literally walked right by my apartment when ya'll went to Pizza Head. I am glad you got to come experience the oldest subway in America though! :] You should make a Y.T. community post next time you are coming to the Lou and I would definitely like to join the adventure! Maybe you can come ride the Delmar Loop Trolley soon?! :D
WOAH SIR, Honestly I made this comment mid video because I was so blown away you walked down my street recently, but how could you call it the Delmar Stupid Thing?!?! The Loop Trolley is an amazing start to a new rail transit line for StL! It just needs to be extended and given priority.
Also, the extension the Mid-America Airport is a mostly good thing. Obviously I would rather the U.S. invest in h.s.r. but perhaps it can be turned into a station for that when that does happen. I have flown out of there before though and it is a very nice facility. I root for Lambert because it is somehow city owned so its our only exclave , and as Royce pointed out, it does run under capacity. Yet, if the state of MO refuses to invest in expanding rail transit why should we criticize IL for trying to steal some of that existing air travel from us by doing so.
The last thing I want to add, is that the secure platforms program (adding fare-gates to all stations) is a great development for Metrolink. Not only will it make trains safer, but most importantly it will allow us to more accurately measure how many people are using our amazing metro. :D I hope you enjoyed your time here in Mound City though and definitely make a Community Post on here when you are coming back, I would love to show off more of the most underrated city in the world! ⚜
Oh and I just noticed that at 1:37 you are on Arkansas and while ya'll are walking down it for awhile you can see some of my foamer ( pro-rail ) graffiti on the stop signs behind you guys. lmao
@@StLouis-yu9iz as a guy from “Skunk River City” (shikakwa) what’s up with you all calling yourselves “Mound City” when the Cahokia Mounds are on the Illinois side? 🧐 Let’s rename St. Louis “Anticahokiaville!”
OMG PIZZA HEAD! My friend works there! Also you gotta try Brasillia, Montebellos, Truc Lam, Mozay's, and Sugarwitch next time you are in town! Also go down to Cherokee Street and get some tacos from the grocery store on the corner of California ave!
Great and interesting video! Nice of Royce to show you around on and explain various things about Metrolink and to film the last bit you weren't able to ride. Glad you made your flight. You were really pushing it there!
As someone who grew up near St. Louis, I loved this video and learning some history from Royce. St. Louis is a very underrated city. Back in my Uber driving days, I was proud to show tourists around St. Louis. Excellent video!
It's always enjoyable to watch a miles in transit video. 😎 St Louis Metrolink is definitely an underrated system, it's all on a dedicated right of way, serves major destinations and has plans to expand. I know many find it odd that there's light rail amongst the fields, but I'm a huge fan of the Illinois section. It serves the Town of Belleville, will soon serve MidAmerica Airport and gives rural and suburban St Clair county rail service, and an electrified line that runs every 20 minutes and links to work and leisure across St Louis is much better than a diesel commuter rail running old bi-level cars that only runs 3 times a day and only in rush hour directions. BTW if you ever come back to St Louis, I recommend the Drury Inn Union station, it's an old railway hotel built in the 1900s and there's lots of model locomotives on display. It also has free breakfast and dinner and was where a young 13y/o Brit learnt to use a waffle maker and the amazing taste of biscuits and gravy. I was on a route 66 road trip from Chicago-Los Angeles.
7:20 Microsoft loves helping pay for transit projects if it can help them (which then has the knock-on effect of helping the community simply by improving transit availability). In the Seattle they helped fund the Link 2-Line to get it opened to their HQ faster and get a new pedestrian bridge across the freeway there.
woah, Royce appearance!!!!! as usual, they end with a correct take, the Maryland flag is one of the best state flags. anyway, Metrolink seems pretty neat and I have to eventually make it to St. Louis to also do Metrolink Monday with the always wonderful midwestern marsupial. also, to Miles, I'm glad you made your flight, I would've had a heart attack cutting it that close
Oh shoot I think I haven't even gotten around to finish the trolley video, you've been putting out so much good content recently. 0:51 Grand is really Grand for foaming. 2:01 Cheap, not ugly and works. 3:40 Same way that Burger King is Hungry Jacks in Australia due to licensing issues. The cut and cover subway screams European Light Rail/Stadtbahn/pre-Métro. 9:25 are there any Marilyn Monroe-esque ventilation shafts? 15:05 Transit oriented military industrial complex. Thanks Royce and Miles in 99% of transit, fun video
For Italian food in St. Louis, missed opportunity not to try St. Louis-style pizza or toasted raviolis! The history behind toasted raviolis is that in the early 1940s, a ravioli was accidentally dropped into the fryer at Mama Campisi's by a drunk chef. Mickey Garagiola, older brother of Major League Baseball Hall-of-Famer Joe Garagiola (who played for the Cardinals, Pirates, Cubs, and NY Giants for nine seasons), was actually at the bar during the mishap and was the first to taste the accidental treat. Shortly thereafter, the item began appearing on menus across The Hill. St. Louis-style pizza is made without yeast and rolled thin, which allows it to have a crisp cracker-like crust. Instead of the larger pie-like wedges, it is cut into three- or four-inch squares, known as a party cut or tavern cut. It is said the square cut was inspired by Ed Imo’s former profession as a tile-layer. The smaller slices and rigid crust help support the weight of its toppings. It's typically made with Provel cheese rather than mozzarella. Provel is a white processed cheese made from cheddar, Swiss, and provolone, developed by Costa Grocery in St. Louis during the 1950s. It’s made in Wisconsin by a Kraft Heinz subsidiary, primarily for the St. Louis market. The tomato sauce is also seasoned with more oregano than other styles of pizza and is sweeter due to the influence of Sicilian immigrants.
Didn't mention regarding Cortex but it was shown outside the windows of the train that Cortex serves an IKEA as well! Besides the transit at the Red Hook IKEA you and Jeremy went to, and the IKEA outside Cortex, other IKEAs in North America with great transit options include Bayamón, Puerto Rico (the Tren Urbano's Deportivo station), Hicksville on Long Island (a walk from Hicksville station on the busy LIRR Main Line as well as a bus hub for NICE), Portland, Oregon (Portland's IKEA is served by Cascades station on the MAX Red Line, located in a mixed-used shopping center, offices, and hotel complex outside the airport built around the station), downtown Toronto (served by College station on Line 1 as well as the 306/506 Carlton streetcar and the 505 Dundas streetcar is nearby too), North York, Toronto (served mainly by Leslie on Line 4, there's also Oriole on GO Transit's Richmond Hill line), Coquitlam, BC (outside Vancouver; you can take the Skytrain to Braid on the Expo Line, and there are different buses to take you there for the final stretch), Encuentro Oceania mall in Mexico City (next to Romero Rubio on Mexico City Metro's Line B and served by many buses as well), Elizabeth, New Jersey (served by the 62 which serves EWR and Newark Penn, and the 111 which goes to NYC's PABT), Burbank (walk from Downtown Burbank station, served by Metrolink's Ventura County and Antelope Valley Lines, as well as limited Amtrak Pacific Surfliner service), and San Francisco (Powell St is served by four BART lines, multiple Muni lines including the F Market PCCs, and Powell-Mason and Powell-Hyde cable car lines).
Interestingly, besides the Gateway Arch attracting tourists, Walt Disney wanted to build an indoor theme park on the St. Louis riverfront as well, Walt Disney's Riverfront Square. After Disneyland was completed, Walt Disney publicly stated that he had no intentions of opening parks elsewhere (of course the Florida Project eventually came along...), but in March 1963, Disney met with the mayor of St. Louis to discuss plans for a riverfront theme park. The park would have stood in the two city blocks north of the former Busch Memorial Stadium. The entrance to the park would have been similar to Main Street USA, with one side of the street based on Old St. Louis, and the other based on Old New Orleans. Disney planned to utilize the Audio-Animatronic technology that had been developed by his company for the New York World's Fair at the time. The top floor of the park would have housed a banquet hall, restaurant, lounge, and bar, overlooking the Mississippi River, in addition to having concession stands and shops throughout the park. Several classic Disneyland and Disney World attractions were originally conceived for the St. Louis park, including what would later become Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, and a "Western Riverboat" ride, whose design was later incorporated into Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. So why wasn't the park built? It was never built due to a combination of financial disagreements, ownership disputes, and differing visions between Disney and the city of St. Louis, notably regarding the role of alcohol in the park. August Busch Jr. publicly called Walt crazy for thinking his park would succeed without selling beer. Disney proposed that St. Louis fund the construction of the dome-like building that would house the park, while Disney would cover the costs of attractions and rides. St. Louis, through the Civic Center Redevelopment Corporation, was hesitant to bear the full cost of the building, leading to a stalemate. And some preservationists were concerned that Disney's vision for the park would not authentically represent the historical riverfront area. By July 1965, Disney announced that plans for the park would not move forward, because of a dispute over the financing and ownership of the park, and Disney's desire to focus his attentions on Florida
Thank you Supreme Leader
yeah, but pizza head is fantastic
The MetroLink reminds me of the Basel tramway system in a way. MetroLink goes through two states, Basel serves three countries, Basel's Line 3 goes to a commune called SAINT-LOUIS in France, and the Illinois section goes through farm fields similarly to the westernmost part of Basel's Line 10! The Eads Bridge was the first bridge across the Mississippi south of the Missouri River. Earlier bridges were located north of the Missouri River, where the Mississippi is narrower. However, none of the earlier bridges survived, so the Eads Bridge is also the oldest bridge on the entire river. The Eads Bridge's construction pioneered the large-scale use of steel as a structural material, which led to the shift from wrought-iron as the default material for large structures like that. Its foundations, more than 100 feet below water level, were the deepest underwater constructions at the time. They were installed using pneumatic caissons, at the time, by far the largest caissons ever built. Its 520-foot center arch was the longest rigid span ever built at the time. The arches were built suspended from temporary wooden towers. These engineering principles were used for later bridges, including the Brooklyn Bridge. The Gateway Arch is the tallest monument in the whole Western Hemisphere! It's 630 feet tall and is 75 feet taller than the Washington Monument! It's the smallest park in the NPS system with the designation National Park (but Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial in Philly is the smallest unit in the NPS system in general), when it was redesignated and renamed from the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in 2018. Honestly a National Monument, which is what the Statue of Liberty is, is a better designation for it because the status of a full-on National Park is meant to be land set aside to protecting the country's different kinds of gorgeous landscapes like Arches in Utah, Everglades in Florida, Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Acadia in Maine, or Hawaiʻi Volcanoes.
When St. Louis Union Station first opened in 1894, the station was the largest in the world. Traffic peaked at 100,000 people a day in the 1940s. In 1903, Union Station was expanded to accommodate visitors to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. In the 1920s, it remained the largest American railroad terminal. At its height, the station combined the St. Louis passenger services of 22 railroads, the most of any single terminal in the world. The Richardsonian Romanesque station was designed by Theodore Link who also designed buildings for the 1904 World's Fair, the historic Decatur Wabash Railroad Station in Illinois, the Wabash Pittsburgh Terminal (demolished in 1954), Louisiana State University, and the Mississippi State Capitol. Union Station's headhouse and midway are constructed of Indiana limestone and initially included 32 tracks under its vast trainshed. The trainshed was designed by civil engineer George H. Pegram, known for patenting the Pegram truss bridge.
Yup, Panera Bread is only called St. Louis Bread Company around St. Louis, and Panera Bread everywhere else. Though in September 2022, Panera announced that legacy St. Louis Bread Co. locations outside St. Louis City and St. Louis County would be rebranded as Panera when remodeled, with locations in the inner core of the metro retaining the Bread Co. name. Ken and Linda Rosenthal founded the St. Louis Bread Company in 1987 with the first location in Kirkwood. Au Bon Pain once owned Panera Bread. They purchased it in 1993 and when they did, they were the ones who changed the company name to Panera in 1997, taken from the Latin word for "breadbasket" (pānārium). This is somewhat similar to Carl's Jr/Hardee's and how the names are such depending on where you are, or Edy's and Dreyer's ice cream with Edy's sold in the eastern and midwestern states and Dreyer's sold in the western states and Texas.
MetroLink should have airport express service! The HBLR has rush-hour express service, the Bayonne Flyer, which first started in May 2000, the year HBLR began operations, initially the express ran between Exchange Place and 34th St. Flyer service was then extended between Newport and 22nd St in November 2003, and Hoboken service (Hoboken Terminal station opened in 2002) began with select AM trips only in 2005 before full Hoboken service on the Bayonne Flyer was introduced in February 2006. The Bayonne Flyer runs express in both peak and reverse peak directions during rush-hour. Southbound Bayonne Flyers use the northbound track as the northbound track is straight while the southbound curves out for the platforms and exits crossover the southbound track. Because of this when the Bayonne Flyer operates, that means northbound trains have to use the southbound track. Bayonne Flyer service stops at all Bayonne stations, Liberty State Park (southbound only), Essex St, Exchange Place, Harborside, and Newport.
While the HBLR doesn't have day passes like MetroLink, NJT does offer different ways to pay (without fare gates like those). You can use the NJT app, get a ticket from the machine, or you can tap your contactless card on the validator and that's it! Besides the streamlined Hudson Go Pass for NY Waterway service from Port Imperial and participating NJT bus services (also includes the free NY Waterway buses you can take from the Midtown terminal), there are monthly passes, reduced fare for seniors and people with disabilities (military personnel and veterans can also use this), student tickets for NJ students that they get through the school (25 percent discount off adult one-way fares), Family SuperSaver (on weekends and holidays, two children ages five through 11 may travel free with a passenger paying any valid fare), you can use a NJT monthly or weekly rail pass (imprinted with a zone number) for any light rail trip at no additional charge, and you can use a two-zone or greater NJT bus pass to travel on HBLR at no additional charge.
Theodore Link, you say?
MidAmerica....they're definitely right about the *MID* part. Basically, the airport opened in 1997 and the reason MidAmerica St. Louis Airport exists is because it was created to alleviate crowding at St. Louis Lambert International Airport, but because Lambert stopped being a TWA and American Airlines hub, there wasn't a need for it. MidAmerica's additional runway saved Scott AFB from closure during the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure process. As Rice/Royce mentioned at the end, Lambert was once a hub for TWA and later a hub for American Airlines after the purchase of TWA. TWA bought Ozark Air Lines in 1986, which had a hub at Lambert, which increased TWA's traffic at Lambert from over 56% of boardings to over 80%! By September 1999, Lambert was TWA's main hub, with 103 destinations served by 515 daily flights. The city decided to build a 9,000-foot (or 2,700 m) runway, dubbed Runway 11/29, parallel to the two larger existing runways. At 1.1 billion, it was the costliest public works program in St. Louis history, and resulted in destroying about 2,000 homes, six churches, and four schools in Bridgeton. Service at Lambert was reduced to 207 flights by November 2003. In 2008, Lambert's position as an American Airlines hub faced further pressure due to increased fuel costs and softened demand because of the state of the economy at the time and in 2009, American Airlines closed the hub.
Before the airport, Kinloch Park had a balloon launching base called the "Permanent Aviation Field and Dirigible Harbor". In 1910, an international air meet was held, and it was there where Teddy Roosevelt became the first US president to fly! The Wright Brothers brought six airplanes and their Exhibition Team to the meet. This wasn't planned for Teddy to do that as he was in Missouri to help the state's GOP but saw the Wright Brothers' air show in St. Louis and wanted to join on the fly...pun intended. Teddy was also the first President and first American in general to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize which he got in 1906 for resolving the Russo-Japanese War, the first (and only) president to have earned the Medal of Honor which he got for serving in Cuba (however it took all the way until 2001 for this to happen), and the first president to go down and pilot a submarine, which he did on the Plunger in August 1905 in the Long Island Sound. St. Louis Lambert International Airport was named for Albert Bond Lambert, an Olympic silver medalist golfer in the 1904 Summer Games that St Louis hosted, president of Lambert Pharmaceutical Corporation (which made Listerine), and the first person to receive a pilot's license in St. Louis. It was first called the St. Louis Flying Field, but because of Lambert's ambition to promote St. Louis aviation, in 1923, it was renamed "Lambert-St. Louis Flying Field". He purchased the field outright in February 1925 and in the late 1920s, the airport became the first with an air traffic control system, which communicated with pilots via waving flags. The first controller was Archie William League.
Charles Lindbergh's first piloting job was flying airmail for Robertson Aircraft Corporation from the airfield. He stopped at the airport during his cross-country San Diego to New York flight about a week before his record-breaking flight to Paris in 1927. In 1928, St. Louis leased the airport for just a dollar. Later that year, Lambert sold the airport to the city after a 2 million dollar-bond issue was passed, making it one of the first municipally owned airports in the country. To handle increasing passenger traffic in the 1950s, Minoru Yamasaki (known for designing the original World Trade Center in NYC before they were destroyed) was commissioned to design a new terminal. The three-domed design preceded terminals at JFK and Charles de Gaulle, and a fourth dome was added in 1965.
that's pretty bad when you take into consideration how Mid Lambert is
likewise...why were they shutting down bases in 2005? there were 2 wars going on
Does Royce have a channel? You guys are great together and Royce is very knowledgeable..
The HBLR and MetroLink are similar in that a majority of both systems use repurposed ROW, in cities with similar populations, and some section of tunnel. Both systems also go similar speeds (HBLR can go 55 mph, MetroLink goes 65 mph, but the Bayonne section of HBLR was designed for 80 mph). Much of the HBLR is grade-separated, even in downtown Jersey City except for street-running on Essex Street. Much of the HBLR is repurposed ROW, though the downtown Jersey City segment was built brand-new. At-grade crossings are equipped with transit-signal priority signals to automatically change traffic lights in favor of the light rail. When the HBLR wraps around the western side of Hoboken, that was once the NY Central's New Jersey Junction Railroad, which became part of Conrail's River Line. To obtain the ROW north of Hoboken, NJT paid for the River Line ROW, while also paying to upgrade the Northern Running Track so freight operations could shift. That section also includes the Weehawken Tunnel, built in 1883 and once used by West Shore Railroad trains (which went to Buffalo) to reach Weehawken Terminal (the site is now Port Imperial), home to the HBLR's only underground station of Bergenline Ave at 160 ft below the Palisades. The 4,014 ft long tunnel was widened to create room for two tracks and made even wider for the station. The Bayonne portion of the HBLR (and the highway Route 440) was once the six-track CNJ main line, and the stations on the West Side Ave (West Side Ave portion was once the Newark and New York Railroad) and Bayonne portions were built on the sites of former CNJ stations. In the Bayonne section, not only does the HBLR not only serve drivers on Route 440 to the east but also cater to those living in the neighborhoods west of the stations. 8th Street was done in the style of the CNJ station that was there before it. It was originally a Central Railroad of NJ station between 1834 and 1978 when Conrail discontinued service. Besides 8th Street, 22nd St was once Centerville or East 22nd St, 34th St was built just north of the former East 33rd St or Bayonne station, 45th St was once Pamrapo or East 49th St station, and Danforth Ave and Richard St in Jersey City were Greenville and Van Nostrand Place respectively!
The HBLR goes where people wanna go, whether it's Hoboken Terminal, a state park, JC Medical Center, the mall, university, etc! The HBLR's most popular stop is Newport for the Newport Centre shopping mall. Newport participates in a NJ government Urban Enterprise Zone program with reduced sales tax, encouraging New Yorkers to do their shopping in NJ! The West Side Ave station is walking distance to the New Jersey City University campus and are right by the Jersey City Board of Education and Social Security offices as well. Hoboken and JC has Citi Bike infrastructure by HBLR stations. Liberty State Park station is right next door to the Liberty Science Center, home to the largest planetarium in the Western Hemisphere! When they repurposed the Conrail River Line/NJ Junction ROW in western Hoboken, they built an elevator off the cliffs so those on top can access 9th/Congress St station! The station in Hoboken has TOD and is near a Shop-Rite, so people in Jersey City can not only take the elevator down to the station but can also use the elevator as part of walking to Shop-Rite. So it acts as an accessible way for people above in Jersey City can reach things in Hoboken like Shop-Rite.
If there's something the MetroLink could learn from the HBLR, it's the connections. The HBLR is peak light-rail that feeds into heavy rail. The HBLR has connections at multiple stations. Bergenline Avenue is a busy shopping corridor and not only a bus hub for seven routes but is a jitney corridor as well. The HBLR serves Hoboken Terminal which is a hub for NJT rail, NJT buses, PATH, and ferries. Newport is a short walk from the Newport PATH station, and on the other side of the mall is a terminus for the NJ jitneys. Exchange Place is a hub for PATH, NJT buses, and ferries. Port Imperial and Lincoln Harbor both have ferry connections, with Port Imperial having different bus routes as well. In Bayonne, there's the MTA S89 bus which goes between Bayonne and Eltingville and allows Staten Islanders access to the HBLR. 34th Street station is also close to the Cape Liberty cruise port. And TOD! Port Imperial in Weehawken was designed as a big TOD with its ferry operations upgraded to a terminal when the HBLR station opened. Many luxury apartments with a supermarket have been built by the station. Outside downtown JC, developments have gone up by Liberty State Park station. And the West Side Ave portion being extended to the new Bayfront development complex revives the ROW further, with new TOD, eight thousand units, with 35 percent affordable housing! The largest mixed-income community in the NY Tri-State. Jersey City has been experiencing an Austin-level housing boom, and it's more admirable for Jersey City to do it as Jersey City is much smaller than Austin! Now to be fair, JC is next to NYC, but it's still a lesson for other cities like St Louis and Austin. In Q1 2024 for US light-rail weekday riders per mile, the HBLR had 2,964 weekday riders per mile, second place behind Seattle's Link system (Link had 3,461 weekday riders per mile in Q1 2024), while the Newark Light Rail was in third place with 2,643 weekday riders per mile. The HBLR is just 17 miles in 2024, and had FY2023 ridership of 13,400,000. Meanwhile, MetroLink had an average 490 weekday riders per mile (worse than Baltimore's 436 riders per mile, but better than Pittsburgh's 357). To be fair that number being that low for MetroLink, the farmland in Illinois definitely doesn't help, but as shown, a big key to having great LRT ridership is having TOD and a ton of connections. And that's not mentioning the pedestrianization that has taken place in downtown Jersey City.
The HBLR and NY Waterway offer a joint ticket for Port Imperial, the Hudson Go Pass. NJT bus routes 156R, 158, and 159R also participate in this. So people could take the bus or HBLR to Port Imperial, get off to take the NY Waterway to Manhattan, and when in Manhattan, there are free connecting buses at Midtown W. 39th St. Ferry Terminal!
Jersey City and Hoboken are both examples of a transit city in North America done right. And Jersey City and Hoboken are both role models for Vision Zero. Hoboken has experienced zero traffic deaths since 2017. Hoboken adopted a Vision Zero plan in 2021 after an executive order by Mayor Ravi Bhalla in 2019, and since then, they've been doing things like daylighting intersections with flexible posts or rain gardens, creating curb extensions to reduce crossing distances and improve visibility, and painting high-visibility crosswalks. In 2023 alone, Hoboken installed 78 daylighted intersections, 61 high-visibility crosswalks, 1 raised crosswalk, 9 curb extensions, and 14 multi-way stops. They also reduced the speed limit from 25 mph to 20 mph in 2022. In 2021, Hoboken had 21 pedestrian injuries, 18 cyclist injuries, and 51 motorist injuries. Compare these injuries and the zero fatalities to the Crown Heights in Brooklyn in 2021, Crown Heights had three fatalities, and over 400 injuries in total! To combat flooding, as a response to Hurricane Sandy, Hoboken turned to a Dutch firm, Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, to create a design that won a contest sponsored by then President Obama. The contest was about looking for innovative designs to reduce storm impact as a response to Sandy, and Hoboken alongside Jersey City and Weehawken won, awarded 230 million dollars total, and the state contributed an addition 100 million. They designed resiliency parks around Hoboken, inspired by Louisiana's response to Hurricane Katrina and Dutch water management systems, using a combination of above-ground green infrastructure and below-ground gray infrastructure to store stormwater. Expanding the capacity of the sewer system. A pump station allows water to be collected underground in a cistern, and then pumped out to the Hudson River. These parks include recreational space, rain gardens, porous pavers, and cisterns for rainwater harvesting.
Jersey City was the first in New Jersey to implement Vision Zero with an executive order signed by Mayor Steven Fulop in 2018, and in 2022, the city realized zero car crash-related fatalities on city-owned streets, the first city of its size in the country to accomplish this! Rather than concentrate pedestrian safety improvements in a single area downtown, Jersey City worked with Street Plans and pursued interventions across six corridors, one in each of Jersey City’s six wards. Thus, they not only built trust across different constituencies, but was able to experiment and did it fast through tactical urbanism and committed local leadership. So Jersey City has been able to make rapid, transformational improvements through daylighting intersections, narrowing lane widths to reduce speeding, converting to one-ways to remove left-turns and reduce conflicts, building a growing protected bike lane network, and adding numerous stop signs and speed humps. Under Fulop, Jersey City also became the first in NJ to have a bikeshare system when Citi Bike expanded to Jersey City in 2015, while it expanded to Hoboken in 2021. To go with this, Fulop worked with community activists to implement a comprehensive Bike Master Plan that includes a complete protected bike lane system and has implemented the steps to create a safe environment with miles of safe corridors!
Except HBLR is like every 3-5 minutes combined and 7-10 on the branches instead of every 10 at best on the combined metrolink sections and every 20 elsewhere 😭 seriously like I always see people praise metrolink (and it is a fairly cool system) but those headways are just atrocious
You might want to check those HBLR headways again...
This is one of the best videos you have ever published. It’s like you had a documentary presenter with you just giving SO much great information. Outstanding vid as always. Just even better.
And the cinematography! Chefs kiss.🤌
Thank you so much!!
This is one my favorite videos you've ever done! Royce is such a good co-host and so knowledgeable. You toured so many interesting areas too. I LOVED the old tunnels! The St. Louis tourism board should pay yall for this 😂
Thank you so much!!
2:22 Miles will win an Emmy for that shot!
wow. royce is an expert! what a great tour guide i loved this video and now im about to plan a trip to st louis lol
Royce is very informative - that was great
If you want to check out another cool water tower like at 1:22, check out the Weehawken Water Tower on Park Ave in Weehawken on the border with Union City, a short walk from the Weehawken Dueling Grounds site. It was built in 1883, designed by Frederick Clarke Withers (an architect known for his Gothic Revival designs; he also designed Chapel of the Good Shepherd on NYC's Roosevelt Island and the Victorian United States Daughters of 1812 headquarters in DC) and was modeled after Florence's Palazzo Vecchio. Water was pumped from the Hackensack River, 14 miles away. Yeah, Ted Drewes is famous! Fun fact, the reason Dairy Queen flips their Blizzards upside down is because of Ted Drewes! Samuel Temperato, the DQ franchise owner who came up with the idea for Blizzards, was inspired by the frozen treats sold by Ted Drewes, who termed them “concrete”. In 1959, Steve Gamber, then 14, would stop by Drewes’ Chippewa Street location for a sandwich and chocolate malt, asking Drewes to make it thicker and thicker each time. Drewes had enough and one day flipped the malt upside down to show its thickness, assuring Steve that if it fell out, it was free. Temperato picked this up for Dairy Queen! The Siemens SD-460s have also been used on the Valencia Metro in Venezuela. The Valencia Metro opened in 2007 under Hugo Chávez. Like MetroLink, the Valencia Metro is a light metro (with its own underground section too), the Valencia Metro is completely grade-separated (other than within its yard) and is 7.7 km long in 2025. An extension of the north-south route and an east-west route to connect mainly the Valencia Municipality with San Diego Municipality of the same city have been planned (though they haven't given new info about it since 2014).
Interesting fact about University City-Big Bend: The Francis Gymnasium and Francis Olympic Field are by University-Big Bend station, and these were venues during the 1904 Summer Olympics (which were quite the dark games because of human zoos and forcing Filipinos, Native Americans, and Africans to compete). The three-medal format of gold, silver and bronze was introduced at the 1904 Olympics. Those Olympics was the first time an African-American medalist took the podium, as hurdler George Coleman Poage won bronze. And in gymnastics, an American with a wooden leg won six medals (three gold, one silver and one bronze). The Francis Olympic Field once had a 19,000-person seating capacity, but stadium renovations in 1984 reduced the capacity to 3,300 people. Because it opened in 1904 for the Olympics, it is one of the oldest sports venues west of the Mississippi River that is still in use! Francis Olympic Field was used for athletics, cycling, archery, lacrosse, roque, tennis, tug of war, weightlifting, wrestling, gymnastics, and association football/soccer, Francis Gymnasium was used for boxing and fencing, while Forest Park was used for diving, swimming, and water polo. Chicago was supposed to host, but the organizers of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis didn't want another international event held in the same time frame, told the Chicago organizers they'd be planning their own sporting events if they weren't moved, so Pierre de Coubertin intervened and awarded St Louis the games. Due to the Russo-Japanese War and difficulties traveling, out of over 650 athletes, only up to 74 of them came from outside North America. Cuba was the only Latin American country that participated in those games, with Cuban mailman/marathon runner Andarín Carvajal having an interesting story of losing all his money to gambling in New Orleans, forced to walk the rest of the way, showed up in street clothes and had to create shorts out of his trousers quickly, stole peaches from a spectator's car, ate apples from an apple orchard that turned out to be bad, took a nap to recover, and still managed to finish fourth.
The downtown tunnel opened in 1874 (as well as the Eads Bridge, dedicated on July 4th by President Ulysses S. Grant), not 1875, but yeah, it's insanely cool that it was repurposed for MetroLink! Istanbul's Tünel, an underground funicular, opened in January 1875, making it the oldest in continental Europe, beating the Budapest Metro since Budapest's didn't open until 1896. As Royce stated in Classy Whale's MetroLink vlog, if the DC Metro is a Brutalist cathedral, Skinker is a Brutalist chapel, and yeah that adds up! When they were constructing Skinker and University City-Big Bend stations, they faced opposition because that section was gonna be street-running, so they opted to build them underground! So thanks to NIMBYs, they ironically made the Blue Line a better and quicker service through no street-running! Skinker is named after Thomas Skinker, a lawyer who moved to St. Louis in 1838. He moved to St. Louis from Fauquier County, Virginia to practice law, forming the firm of Skinker and Skinker with his brother, Peter. The Gateway Arch is quite controversial as 40 blocks and 486 buildings were demolished for it. The Arch's unique trams are operated by the Bi-State Development Agency as well. Richard Bowser developed with his father elevator equipment that could travel horizontally, diagonally, and normal vertical. He visited an elevator company in Moline, Illinois to see a friend when by chance, the company got a call from architect Eero Saarinen that they were looking for a group to take on the big project. Bowser made a return call. When Eero called back, he gave Bowser two weeks to design and present in front of the team. He knew a normal system of course wouldn't do, so for the Arch he combined elevator and Ferris wheel elements to create a unique system where a tram of eight elevator pods that by rotating, allows the visitors inside to remain leveled the entire way.
Superb video, loved all the history and information provided by Royce!
Thank you!
8:42 Pittsburgh & Steubenville Extension Railroad Tunnel: "Am I a joke to you?"
Hi Royce!!!
HI WILLOW
Illinois, home of the nation's only transit oriented swamp. I feel prouder, now.
The Main/Bergen and Pascack Valley on NJT goes through a swamp as well.
@@centralillinoisrailpix453 the Metro East side of the Metrolink line is based tbh
Miles! Come to Calgary and ride the CTrain! It’s high floor, fast, and highest LRT ridership anywhere in the U.S. or Canada :)
Great your with a greater tour guide! Definitely seems like a familiar adventure 🤔
Hmm, I wonder if you did your research on toasted raviolis during said adventure....
Very familiar, hmm... 🤔
We need more Metrolink Mondays. Make a video on another system called the Metrolink!!! :D
Edit: maybe try speedrunning Metrolink commuter rail in LA?
LA?
@@LewisYamanoteAintRealYeah, I was thinking about the other one but I couldn’t remember. This is ironic considering that I just watched a video about LA Metrolink this morning 😂
@@GobbiExists Yeah. Or Manchester.
Manchester Metrolink. Quick, before they rename it.
_speedrunning florida transit_
Fun Ted Drewes trivia, in 1986 the New York Times did a story on the Dairy Queen Blizzard and in the second to last paragraph, the company credits the franchisee in St. Louis who the paper then asks about his creation to which he basically says, “oh, yeah, that’s just a concrete from Ted Drewes.”
Shake Shack also has concretes and their founder is from St. Louis too.
The east london line of the London overground goes through the 1843 built Thames Tunnel.
0:23 Kinda looks like the type B Stadtbahn rolling stock used in North Rhine-Westphalia.
As an Indianaian who regularly flies out of STL, I was extremely vindicated in saying out loud "STL is such a chill airport, he'll totally make it" when the idea of Miles being late was introduced.
Also: Schnucks has expanded past St. Louis! There's several of them in Evansville, Indiana, though they thoroughly hold onto their STL roots by having sections of STL-produced food and ALWAYS stocking the ingredients for St. Louis style pizza in the cold cases.
Amazing video! Royce was a great guest, they have so much good knowledge about the system and city!! Wild to see a lightrail going through this kind of rural territory. Also those old subway tunnels are incredible!
Thank you!
Royce has really great hair.
2:29 to add to the compliments on screen, your camera work is great and you don't need any higher quality for your videos. Everything you film has that distinct Miles charm to it and its fantastic. That was a great shot too haha
Thank you so much!! This means a lot.
4:26 most of its underground, which is kind of insane
Wow, that is insane!
At 11:20, I’ve heard newer art deco-ish architecture being called “Echo Deco”.
Ooh, I like that!
Maybe cover to cover the best highest quality MiT video (which is saying something). Royce was a fantastic local guide, your guests are always so fun and knowledgeable and this is no exception.
Wow, thank you so much!!
1:16 2 more old water towers in North St. Louis also close to Grand. NOT a FUN fact...when the first sections of Metrolink was being planned in the early 1990's, it was intended to go into nearby St Charles County but race-baiting politicians fought against it and stopped it. As if people from the city would take the train out there, steal your t.v. and take it on the train with them. St. Charles County to this day has NO public transportation, not even buses, and some of the worst traffic in the area and with more that 400,000 people is the most populous area of the state lacking public transit.
Funny to hear about the old railway flyover next to the IKEA “just being approved” for conversion. When I went to SLU from 2016-2020 I kept hearing the same thing and was excited about potentially having a new walking route! Maybe this time it’ll finally happen!
Looks like they washed that ticket machine with a sand blaster 😬
Content has been killer lately. You’re keeping youtube alive!
Thank you so much, I really appreciate it!
Does this mean that Miles is canonically aware of furries now?
Furries and urbanism go hand in hand! I'm sure urbanist creators are well aware a lot of their fans are furries, as shown by CityNerd judging convention centers. Or secretly a furry...in May 2024, Miles did tweet that he visited Aleena the same weekend as Anthrocon the year prior ;)
@@SupremeLeaderKimJong-un Definitely would not say all Urbanist creators are furries but yes they do go hand in hand
@@realquadmoo It's almost as if most of us are massively cool nerds or something.
@@FurbleFawks yes
Man, I'm never gonna be able to live down the fact that I visited my Pittsburgh-based girlfriend for her Fourth of July party, am I? 😂
kinda reminds me of the Strausberg tram near berlin that goes through the woods like that
This video makes me miss living in St. Louis. I used to love Metrolink, though I wish it had more coverage and higher frequency.
My last visit (over the winter holidaze) made me think that they are, really, working on doing that, at least wrt coverage. (That was a lot of family stuff, so I didn't get much chance to poke around, but I'll be back for longer in March.)
8:46 I think the subtitle should say "after some of the tunnels in the London Tube"?
Damn, you've got a better ear than I do! Good catch.
You must check out the Grand Hall at St. Louis Union Station the next time you are in town. It's beautiful.
Royce's voice is smooth as butter, dishing out some Fun Facts. Hopefully we'll get more Royce in future videos.
The Metrolink was always envisioned to go to Mid America Airport since it's opening. Back in the early 2000s I took Metrolink when it used to just go to SWIC "college" station as the terminus and as the marquee scrolled back to "Lambert Airport" it scrolled past "Mid America Airport." Also college students used to get a free metro pass. Not sure if they still do, but it was included in their tuition to incentivize them to use it. The Metrolink has the second highest ridership for light rail in the Midwest after Minneapolis (which isn't hard to do considering there are only two light rail systems).
For umsl it’s 25 dollars for Saint Louis community college it’s free
My hope is you’ll “Ride The Tide” in Norfolk VA, light rail partly employing old NS right of way. The entire video could be a “short”, the route is so truncated, running (for all intents and purposes) between two hospitals. Convenient to Amtrak, though. Y’all come!
And ride the ferry.
I've written a blog post about The Tide but I should go back and do a video! I did ride it briefly in my "$19 Amtrak to Norfolk" video.
Reminds me of the Baltimore light rail
YAY ST. LOUIS YIPPEE PLACES I KNOW
"I need to ride the Delmar Stupid Thing" Truer words were never spoken.
Oh hey its this day! Rice and I talked about me tagging along that day but i was at my internship in downtown clayton too late in the afternoon to make it worth coming by. Hope to meet you next time you come into town!
I see you responded to my previous comment about Utah but now for some Utah Transit history like every other US state we had a really good streak on that way in the 1900s then it got ripped up and replaced with road on the more positive and there are some new plans that might be put into effect such as the Rio grande plan which would a re-establish the Rio grande Depot for passenger service and also run all trains underground in the City
13:47 - I hate to be the bearer of potentially bad news, but that Delmar Loop trolley service almost never runs these days. I don't think they've completely thrown in the towel, but… it's a trolley on a two-way, one-lane-each-way road, it wasn't really engineered all that well, and it was a tourism solution in search of tourists. Digging into *why* it failed may still be a valuable (to you and your audience) video in the future, but I wouldn't count on being able to ride it.
Your travel companion is so knowledgeable!! And their hair is gorgeous.
Edited: 'was' to 'is'
It has some things similar to old German trams we have in Poland, like the doors.
Yes!!! Finally a MetroLink video. Genuinely a great service to get to the airport or a Cardinals or Blues game. Come back to St. Louis and ride our travesty of a trolley, the Loop Trolley! It's technically one of the services administered by Metro Transit.
I am someone who lives car free in St Louis and wish I could have had the opportunity to see yall!!
5:07 The quickest and most impactful way to improve STL transit. The bus routes on the map aren’t terrible.
How about a Muni Metro Monday from San Francisco (especially that new section that cost a ton and only add 3 stations (reminds me of the 2nd avenue subway.)
Having driven through and visited St Louis way too many times, I’m thoroughly enjoying the St Louis history/foaming! Also, you have to visit City Museum next time you’re there!
I DO, IT LOOKS SO AMAZING
@ It’s genuinely great, they’re always adding stuff, there’s history and art all woven into a fantastic, giant playground.
I actually also love jank old highways. They can have really interesting, unique designs, and in some ways it feels like in the early days of highway building they actually cared about not completely destroying the neighborhoods they built through
Agreed!!
Please if you go back to St. Louis go to Balkan treat box (it’s technically county) but truly one of the best restaurants I have ever been to.
Point of advice from someone with experience: Always budget time to get lost in STL Lambert airport.
Love this! I really like Royce. Great personality.
very different experience watching a video with locations i actually recognize!
GREAT RACE TO NEW YORK REFERENCE
I always go for the aisle on longer flights
Tower Grove park is definitely the MVP imo. I remember back during the 2008 economic crisis, gas prices were so crazy, my dad would take a bus from STL county to the nearest Metrolink station to work downtown. Wish STL had the funds to create an overall better and more efficient public transit experience that isn't just focused on bringing folks to baseball or hockey games, but everyday stuff like commuting and grocery shopping.
Not enough people would use it for that because of crime and many people would rather not ride the bus that smells of homeless people unfortunately
I was advertised to buy full sized electric passenger buses while watching this video, TWICE
Come on, buy one, you know you want to
Man, I wish I got those ads!
I was under the impression Lafayette Park was the oldest established park. Could be wrong.
Ooh, a Google search suggests that you are right on that one!
Oh nah that's Royce that guy I see from Stormy Kara channel
Huh St. Louis uses the same seats OC Transpo does on their busses too.
What a great guest co-host! I used to go to St Louis for a work meeting annually, for about 6 years. One year I added on an extra day to ride what there was of the Metrolink back then and I took it from Clayton to downtown, mainly to see the Arch. I wish it went all the way to Cahokia Mounds. It definitely seems underused, which is a shame.
My home city! Makes me miss riding MetroLink to Blues and Cardinals games. Glad you had a great time exploring the lou!
That’s funny, on my visit last year I rode the Red Line nearly end-to-end and I do specifically remember one of the underground stations had a STANK and now I know which one!
I hope you didn't miss the chance to do some off-train infrastructure-foaming of Union Station & Eads Bridge. Structures worth appreciation side-trips
Sent from a MARC station
PIZZA HEAD FTW
The "horns" are the same as the M4s on SEPTA's MFL.
It's technically a whistle.
DUDE!! You literally walked right by my apartment when ya'll went to Pizza Head. I am glad you got to come experience the oldest subway in America though! :] You should make a Y.T. community post next time you are coming to the Lou and I would definitely like to join the adventure! Maybe you can come ride the Delmar Loop Trolley soon?! :D
WOAH SIR, Honestly I made this comment mid video because I was so blown away you walked down my street recently, but how could you call it the Delmar Stupid Thing?!?! The Loop Trolley is an amazing start to a new rail transit line for StL! It just needs to be extended and given priority.
Also, the extension the Mid-America Airport is a mostly good thing. Obviously I would rather the U.S. invest in h.s.r. but perhaps it can be turned into a station for that when that does happen. I have flown out of there before though and it is a very nice facility. I root for Lambert because it is somehow city owned so its our only exclave , and as Royce pointed out, it does run under capacity. Yet, if the state of MO refuses to invest in expanding rail transit why should we criticize IL for trying to steal some of that existing air travel from us by doing so.
The last thing I want to add, is that the secure platforms program (adding fare-gates to all stations) is a great development for Metrolink. Not only will it make trains safer, but most importantly it will allow us to more accurately measure how many people are using our amazing metro. :D I hope you enjoyed your time here in Mound City though and definitely make a Community Post on here when you are coming back, I would love to show off more of the most underrated city in the world! ⚜
Oh and I just noticed that at 1:37 you are on Arkansas and while ya'll are walking down it for awhile you can see some of my foamer ( pro-rail ) graffiti on the stop signs behind you guys. lmao
@@StLouis-yu9iz as a guy from “Skunk River City” (shikakwa) what’s up with you all calling yourselves “Mound City” when the Cahokia Mounds are on the Illinois side? 🧐 Let’s rename St. Louis “Anticahokiaville!”
OMG PIZZA HEAD! My friend works there! Also you gotta try Brasillia, Montebellos, Truc Lam, Mozay's, and Sugarwitch next time you are in town! Also go down to Cherokee Street and get some tacos from the grocery store on the corner of California ave!
Amazing as always! Loved the juxtaposition of calm railway/explanation footage vs running footage (I don't want to spoil it for anyone!)
I'm so glad the ending played out the way it did!
Also, come do Manchester metrolink in the UK... I'll happily be your guide
Maryland flag is best flag
Yooo it's the second best metro system in Illinois!
Great and interesting video! Nice of Royce to show you around on and explain various things about Metrolink and to film the last bit you weren't able to ride. Glad you made your flight. You were really pushing it there!
Please come to Europe
Where’s the fun fact chick?
What do you mean where? There's a fun fact moment in here!
3:48 oh heck yeagh i too take guilty pleasure in Protohighway Foaming
As someone who grew up near St. Louis, I loved this video and learning some history from Royce.
St. Louis is a very underrated city. Back in my Uber driving days, I was proud to show tourists around St. Louis.
Excellent video!
We need "the T" Tuesdays, WMATA Wednesdays, etc, etc now!
It's always enjoyable to watch a miles in transit video. 😎
St Louis Metrolink is definitely an underrated system, it's all on a dedicated right of way, serves major destinations and has plans to expand. I know many find it odd that there's light rail amongst the fields, but I'm a huge fan of the Illinois section. It serves the Town of Belleville, will soon serve MidAmerica Airport and gives rural and suburban St Clair county rail service, and an electrified line that runs every 20 minutes and links to work and leisure across St Louis is much better than a diesel commuter rail running old bi-level cars that only runs 3 times a day and only in rush hour directions.
BTW if you ever come back to St Louis, I recommend the Drury Inn Union station, it's an old railway hotel built in the 1900s and there's lots of model locomotives on display. It also has free breakfast and dinner and was where a young 13y/o Brit learnt to use a waffle maker and the amazing taste of biscuits and gravy. I was on a route 66 road trip from Chicago-Los Angeles.
Good American Biscuits are savory buttery scones! Soles so good you don’t need the white gravy!
9:53 “The unrolled bean” 😭
Hello everyone
Smile for Miles (in text because I couldn't attach an emoji for some unknown reason).
I love that Royce has become the unofficial metrolink tour guide.
Now we just need Metrolink in Manchester, Metrolink in California…
If interested Miles... Some old school UK transit review from the 1960s ua-cam.com/video/RJYXYkN2QZY/v-deo.html
Metrolink Monday will result in you coming to Manchester, England at some point 🗣️🗣️
7:20 Microsoft loves helping pay for transit projects if it can help them (which then has the knock-on effect of helping the community simply by improving transit availability).
In the Seattle they helped fund the Link 2-Line to get it opened to their HQ faster and get a new pedestrian bridge across the freeway there.
woah, Royce appearance!!!!! as usual, they end with a correct take, the Maryland flag is one of the best state flags. anyway, Metrolink seems pretty neat and I have to eventually make it to St. Louis to also do Metrolink Monday with the always wonderful midwestern marsupial. also, to Miles, I'm glad you made your flight, I would've had a heart attack cutting it that close
This wasn't as bad as the flight in my LA bus adventure, at least!
Bird foamer moment. At 2:57 you can hear a Northern Parula calling twice.
Oh my God, I love this comment. Thank you!!!
1 Minute Later I've Been A Mile To Miles In Transits Video
mizzurah
Oh shoot I think I haven't even gotten around to finish the trolley video, you've been putting out so much good content recently. 0:51 Grand is really Grand for foaming. 2:01 Cheap, not ugly and works. 3:40 Same way that Burger King is Hungry Jacks in Australia due to licensing issues. The cut and cover subway screams European Light Rail/Stadtbahn/pre-Métro. 9:25 are there any Marilyn Monroe-esque ventilation shafts? 15:05 Transit oriented military industrial complex. Thanks Royce and Miles in 99% of transit, fun video
YES PART TWO METROLINK MONDAY HERE I COME! (forgot it’s my birthday lol best present ever)
Monday?!? This is really throwing off my post-work weekly routine.....
I know, I just couldn't release Metrolink Monday on a Wednesday!
Huge day for rust belt enjoyers