Cosmopolitan Railway

The Cosmopolitan Railway was a proposed global railroad network advocated by William Gilpin, formerly the first territorial governor of Colorado (1861-62), in his 1890 treatise Cosmopolitan Railway: Compacting and Fusing Together All the World's Continents. Gilpin argued that such a network could break down barriers and bring the world's civilizations into harmony.

Components

Cosmopolitan Railway was one of the earliest documents envisioning a land route to Alaska, a vision that would first be realized (though not in the form of a railroad) in 1942, with the completion of the crude original version of the Alaska Highway. The document also proposed a bridge to Asia across the Bering Strait--a concept that has been dubbed the Intercontinental Peace Bridge--which would have been, and still would be, an enormously important link between the Eurasian and African continents on the one hand and the North and South American continents on the other. However, the formidable expense and difficulty of building such a bridge, and of building thousands of miles of new railroad through remote portions of Siberia, far northern North America, Africa, and other areas, have kept the plan as nothing more than a vision.

Some aspects of Gilpin's Cosmopolitan Railway were realized half a century later when a global network of air travel routes took shape, particularly since that new network was largely unencumbered by various geographical barriers, such as the Alaskan wilderness and the Bering Strait, that even in the mid twentieth century had not yet been overcome by shipping and railroad networks, continuing to render them incomplete. (It should be noted, though, that the effect of global air service, in its eight decades of existence, on bringing the world's civilizations into harmony has been no better than partial, if it has even had any overall effect.)

See also

• Trans Global Highway

External links

• Gilpin's Proposal on Google books