Response

Probably the most interesting thing I found while reading this article was the quote "The fast, cheap transport of goods meant that a town could be given over to shoe-making or beer making, a whole region to cattle raising or wheat growing, and people grew used to depending upon commodities that seemed to come from nowhere."(10) It sounds an awful lot like the state we live in today, where almost everything we buy is made overseas, and it becomes increasingly difficult to find what things Americans produce. This can be seen with the recent purchase of Anheuser Busch by the massive Belgium company InBev, which already owns a large portion of the beer market, including Bass, Stella Artois, Hoegarden, and Beck's, and how British based Tesco is building Fresh and Easy markets all over California. I am curious to see how the rising cost of fuels will affect people, if maybe there will be a reversal from the "consoidation of industries and the industrialization of traditional activities."
When the author talks about how the rails undid the "local character of every place and approved of the erasure" and how "it was a leap forward of extraordinary liberation and equal alienation" I was really reminded of Santa Clarita. It seems that there are shopping centers built every couple miles with almost eveything one would need to sustain themselves, clothing, food, entertainment... except that every center is an almost exact copy of the next, and I can drive 100 miles to another town and probably find the same Target, Walmart, Vons, AMC and it will be as if I never left. It seems the personal character of the town has been killed by allowing these large corperations to take over.