香港六和开奖历史记录

these days are supposed to convey you long distances at steady speeds, without much twisting and turning, right? After all, as the author once wrote: 鈥淣o road is straight until you hit the highway.鈥�

Clearly Rim never drove through . It is there that an S-curve forces 40 mph drivers to slow down 鈥� twice in the space of 1,320 feet 鈥� if they wish to continue on the four-lane Louisiana 48.

What鈥檚 up with that, wondered Jim Copolich of Destrehan, who asked about Harahan's two 鈥渧ery sharp 90-degree turns鈥� on Jefferson Highway. 鈥淭here must have been a very good reason to have turns like this in a major thoroughfare.鈥� (There's a similar S-curve downriver in Old Jefferson, between Ochsner Medical Center and New Orleans, but that's another story for another day.)

The short (TL;DR) answer to Copolich鈥檚 question is the railroad. Two railroads, in fact.

First, however, it might be instructive to detour into the in general and Harahan in particular.

Key point: Highways as we know them in the 21st century were not planned and built end to end by the government. In most cases, they grew from 鈥� first for pedestrians, later for horses and wagons 鈥� through the woods, prairies, marshes, plains and mountains of the country.

It was only with the advent of the automobile at the turn of the 20th century that these paths came to be connected over distances and made into 鈥渞ock roads,鈥� that is, graveled.

Even then, it wasn鈥檛 the state or federal government that made it happen. Instead, it was titans of commerce and local civic boosters who saw the potential of the automobile and began clamoring to link, improve and extend the muddy tracks they had inherited. They formed highway associations, sold memberships to raise money for the work and catenated local and country roads into interstate routes.

Thus came to be 聽(New York-San Francisco), (Mackinaw City, Michigan-Miami) and (Blaine, Washington-San Diego).

And, between Winnipeg, Manitoba, and New Orleans, where its southern terminus is marked on a at the intersection of St. Charles Avenue and Common Street: the 2,373-mile . It was named for the third U.S. president and architect of the Louisiana Purchase, and known informally as the Palm to Pine Highway.

The hosted its first convention in New Orleans in November 1915, with more than 300 delegates vying to determine the route between Winnipeg and New Orleans. Over the next 11 years, members completed the fieldwork and blazed the route with signs: a vertical rectangle divided into three bars, blue at the top and bottom and the letters JH in black on a white field in the middle.

In what is now Harahan, however, it wasn鈥檛 remote dirt paths that were subsumed into Jefferson Highway. The lanes were built on either side of the privately owned , which had gone under construction March 19, 1914, and started service Feb. 25, 1915 鈥� and already had an S-curve in Harahan.

That鈥檚 because an even聽bigger railroad was in the way of the O-K.

In 1894, Illinois Central Railroad had built a large, multi-track repair yard on the former Lafreniere Plantation, between what is now Al Davis Road and Sams Avenue in Elmwood. Twenty years later, the railroad also bought the long, narrow property between its yard and the future Harahan. This was a 100-acre tract where Southern University had operated an experimental farm for its agriculture students, and the railroad made it into a town of sorts for its 1,800 local workers.

By tracing an S-curve, the O-K line avoided crossing .

It did have to get past one IC track. That one connected the yard to the Southern Pacific Railroad ferry landing, where trains arriving from the Midwest and East Coast were to Avondale, to continue their westerly route across the country. The track to the ferry was elevated 30 feet to get over the river levee, so the O-K line ran beneath it.

Much has changed since then. Southern University moved from its original location in New Orleans to 香港六和开奖历史记录 in 1913. The O-K line ceased operations in 1930, victim of the exploding popularity of automobiles. The rail ferry across the river became obsolete when the opened in 1935. The tracks of the IC repair yard were gradually abandoned and pulled up by 2012, and the Illinois Central was sold in 1998 to the Canadian National Railway.

Harahan, meanwhile, had been incorporated in 1920. It is named for James T. Harahan, president of the Illinois Central from 1906 to 1911, whose company is largely responsible for Jefferson Highway having that S-curve today.

SOURCES: Richard Skoien and Daniel Gitlin, Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development; Richard Campanella, Tulane University School of Architecture; The Times-Picayune archives; Roger Bell, Jefferson Highway Association; 鈥淟ouisiana: Its Street and Interurban Railways鈥� by Louis C. Hennick and E. Harper Charlton (Shreveport: Louis C. Hennick, 1962); U.S. Geological Survey; Archives, Manuscripts and Rare Books Department, John B. Cade Library, Southern University and A&M College; Bryan Wallace, city of Harahan; 鈥淪outhern University's Agriculture and Mechanical Departments: Descriptive Analysis of the New Orleans Years, 1880-1913" by Charles Vincent (Agriculture and Human Values, Vol. 9, 1992); 鈥淗arahan History鈥� by Ned H茅mard, (New Orleans: New Orleans Bar Association, 2009); 鈥淥-K Rail Line, Kenner to New Orleans鈥� by Jeremy Deubler, The Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies, University of New Orleans.