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Perhaps even more important is education about rail-safety and common-sense precautions that everyone can take to stay safe around trains and railway property. Part of the answer is prevention – signs, gates and signals that let the public know they are about to enter railway property and to stay out. With 75 rail crossings within the City of Windsor limits, and many, many more in the County of Essex we must do everything we can to reduce the risk of avoidable tragedies. This practice of manipulating scale, area, and paths of railroads became common practice in advertising maps of the 1870s and early 1880s and in railroad timetable maps.Too often, we hear about accidents, injuries and fatalities on railroad tracks. Amerman's book entitled The Illinois Central Rail-Road Company Offers for Sale Over 2,000,000 Acres Selected Farming and Wood Land (New York, 1856) appears an "Outline map of Illinois" which emphasizes the Illinois Central Railroad by a heavy black line, with stations placed evenly along the line to give the illusion of proximity of towns along the lines. This idea, derived from the government land grant maps, may have been perpetuated by the mapping of the Illinois Central Railroad after it was granted land along its path in 1850. Consequently, the Library's collections also include some foreign-language maps aimed at both the immigration already on the East Coast and the prospective one in Europe.Ĭompetition between speculators may have led to the idea of the distortion of railroad maps to emphasize one state, area, or line to the advantage of the advertiser. As early as 1868 most western railroads established profitable land departments and bureaus of immigration, with offices in Europe, to sell land and promote foreign settlement in the western United States. Land grant maps were frequently used by land speculators to advertise railroad lands for sale to the public. Numerous maps of the United States and individual states and counties were made which clearly indicated the sections of the granted land and the railroad rights-of-way. General Land Office, now the Bureau of Land Management. Responsibility for surveying and mapping the grants fell to the U.S. Usually the companies received from the federal government, in twenty- or fifty-mile strips, alternate sections of public land for each mile of track that was built. Between 18 extensive cessions of public lands were made to states and to railroad companies to promote railroad construction. The second half of the nineteenth century was the era of railroad land grants.
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