The Three Amigos (Collaborative TL Between Joe Bonkers, TheMann, and isayyo2)
- Thread starter Joe Bonkers
- Start date
Damn good reading about the Beatles ITTL. But what of Mark David Chapman? Not that I actually give a crap about him, just out of curiosity.
Thank you! As for Chapman, he isn't a factor here, in part because John isn't based in New York. Mental health treatment and understanding of mental illness is stronger in TTL - partly a legacy of the cooperation of the Amigos in the world wars and postwar period - so we can assume that Chapman simply got the treatment he needed before doing something drastic.
I don’t see why not? I trust Joe and Mann to make the right cultural decisions for the Amigos.
Born From The Holy Land
By 1970, the world's geopolitical momentum had shifted dramatically from a decade before, a product of a massive nuclear energy boom, economic progress and the by-and-large halted spread of communism across the globe. The Vietnam War had only been the crowning achievement of the world's geopolitical shifting sands. Nikita Khrushchev had said in 1958 "we will bury you!" in front of the United Nations, but by 1970 the Soviet Union, now under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, was broadcasting a much more conciliatory tone, brought about by continued economic, social and technological progress in the West that was increasingly building a gap between the USSR and its allies and the nations of the West.
Oil, once a key advantage of the Soviet Bloc (and one whose huge funds in the 1960s had given the USSR and the Middle East alike a massive economic boom) was increasingly becoming less of one as new sources came online - in the 1960s, oil discoveries in the North Sea, Grand Banks, Bay of Campeche, Alaska's North Shore, Karafuto and Brazil's continental shelf had added to the still-productive fields of Venezuela, Texas, Western Canada, Mexico, Nigeria, Iran and countless others to reduce the import of oil from the Middle East to the Amigos to virtually nothing, while Europe had seen its imports from the Soviet Union and Middle East dramatically reduced. While India and China continued to buy from the Middle East, Iran had taken over as the largest supplier of oil to Europe (outside of the USSR itself), a position that was making Iran a truly enormous amount of money. Nuclear energy was now a key source of energy in the West, and new homes built in the 1960s overwhelmingly were using either natural gas-fueled or electric forced-air heating, and the latter was becoming ever more common, while transportation uses, reduced by the shift to freight on railroads (that were in many cases being electrified) and the growth of mass transit usage was having a similar effect, while the nuclear revolution had all but eliminated the burning of coal for power on the Atlantic Seaboard and was making it a dying breed on the West Coast, and the 1970s would see the shifting of the trains once used to carry coal to power plants being directed to synthetic fuel production plants. Despite the reduction in demand in the West, the economic growth of many countries (particularly in Asia, where the Asian Tigers of Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore had now been joined by Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia in the world of rapidly-growing economies, driving up their demands for energy, a situation shared with several other locales - Southern Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, Iran, India - which kept fuel prices high and kept the funds flowing in for those who had the forethought to invest the money wisely. By the 1970s, there were a lot of these nations, and the result was the steady rise in living standards and levels of investment in many nations around the world.
While the Sixties had seen much of the world's geopolitics focused on Southeast Asia, the shifting sands of the Middle East and North Africa made the headlines in the Seventies, centered primarily on what was becoming a dramatic rift in the Muslim world. While the Soviet-dominated Middle East continued to be troublesome, Iran had made it clear in no uncertain terms where their alliances laid (and were in the early 1970s in the middle of a giant military modernization that had seen them buy vast amounts of new equipment from the Amigos and Europe) and North Africa was shifting dramatically. Already much more connected to Europe, the nations to the West of Egypt of the Muslim world - Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco in particular - had by 1970 figured out who was going places and who was spinning their wheels, and while Arab solidarity meant much to these nations, it didn't mean so much that they were willing to impoverish themselves. Libya had gone the furthest here - joined at the hip with their former colonial power in Italy, Libya had begun shifting during the leadership of King Idris, but an attempt at a coup by officers of his armed forces in 1965 got the move to reform moving in earnest, and by the early 1970s Libya's oil wealth was allowing for a major expansion in social spending, even as Idris began to pass political power to others in the early 1970s. It was a similar story in Algeria, while Morocco and Tunisia, not having the benefit of oil but still taking advantage of location, worked with European powers to raise their standards of living. By the 1970s, the Europeans, well aware of the Amigos dominance of relations with Israel, had begun to make low-level efforts to try to figure out a solution between Israel and the Arabs.
The flaring in the Middle East blew up again in October 1971, as Egypt, Jordan and Syria made another attempt to attack the Israelis, the former having to push past British and French troops stationed in the Canal Zone. While the Egyptians this time sought to avoid conflicts with the Europeans - they had their hands full with the Israelis - their efforts didn't get far owing to logistical problems, but the Jordanians and Syrians did rather better at first, but after five days of bitter fighting, the Israelis once again shoved the Syrians back over their previous ceasefire line in the Golan Heights, while the Jordanians' attempt to push into the West Banki had only limited success before the enraged Israelis shoved the Jordanians back over the Jordan River. While Israel's ownership of the Sinai remained despite the Egyptian attack and the Syrians and Jordanians were pushed out of Israel, the cost to Israel had been ghastly - over 4000 dead and 10,000 wounded - and the Arabs had fared worse than that, causing a situation where both sides, finally, were prepared to begin talking peace.
For Egypt, clearly the most important player in the situation, their strategic goal was to try to get back territory for themselves first, and failing that, try to get it for Arabs in general. Syria and Jordan faced the same problems, but on July 17, 1972, Jordan was hit hard by a coup, led by royalist officers who claimed that the Communists had failed catastrophically and that King Hussein (who had been living in Europe) should come back to try to re-establish Jordan's positions as an honest broker in the Arab world. While this coup was a nasty, bloody affair that claimed over 700 lives, the Soviets, clearly seeking a detente with the West (and angered that the Arabs hadn't sought Soviet approval for their war against Israel the year before) refused to support the communist forces in Jordan, and with the majority of their armed forces still badly broken from the chaos the year before, the coup was successful, and King Hussein, after fifteen years away, returned to Amman on July 27, stating that his objective was to "Restore the glory and honor of Jordan." Initially unfazed by this, the other Arabs didn't take long to discover that Hussein during his exile had plenty of times spoken to the Israelis and they had little objection to his return provided that Jordan was willing to talk peace - which after the 1971 losses, they were. Similarly, after the embarassment in 1971, Sadat was basically facing the same needs, and with an angered-at-his-failure populace at his back, Sadat and Hussein spoke for the first time in fifteen years over the phone on August 14, both agreeing during the phone call to present a united negotiations front with Israel. That done, the Jordanians began to make it be known through third parties of their desire to negotiate over the future of the Palestinians.
Israel didn't take long to respond. The Israelis, hoping that this time the Arab negotiations would be genuine, began to send messages to the Jordanians and Egyptians in the winter of 1972. This broke in the media in January 1973, resulting in a coup attempt against Sadat on March 2, 1973, that was broken up by an enraged Sadat and many veterans of the 1971 War, who by this point were well aware of the coming negotiations and had a desire to see them at least be attempted. That failure led to the Royal Saudi Land Forces beginning to gather in northwestern Saudi Arabia - near the Jordanian border - in March, only for those forces to be bombed by the Israeli Air Force on March 22 and 23, forcing a pull back of the Saudi buildup and basically putting Jordan under the Israeli Air Force's umbrella. Realizing this, Hussein directly began negotiating with the Israelis in April 1973, and with Golda Meir's approval, he invited Sadat to a meeting between the three leaders. That news quickly made it to the West, and the Brits offered to host it at their facilities on the island of Socotra. This meeting, which happened on June 14, 1973, was the first of what would be many trilateral meetings between the three nations, and this first meeting also made clear that both the Israelis and Arabs welcomed anything the West could do to help negotiate out the differences between the two sides.
1974 would see much happen to advance these causes. With the desires for peace in the Middle East sought by pretty much everyone - though admittedly for entirely different reasons - it wasn't long before the positions began to firm up. The first outsides powers, of course, were Britain and the Commonwealth, which resulted in Canada (a key Israeli ally going back to Israel's respect for the Men of Honour) getting the Amigos involved. It wasn't hard for anybody to be convinced of the positives of negotiations, and that drew in others. Iran publicly offered to make massive contributions towards the economic rehabilitation of the Palestinians, the Commonwealth offered to station military troops in Israel to assist in its security and the United States offered to deploy Marine and Navy units to new bases in Israel or Palestine at the desire of either nation. During this came Sadat's Infitah economic policy, which allowed for much greater quantities of private sector investment in many portions of Egypt's economy, in many ways a reversal of Nasser's policies. While uptake on this from the Amigos and Commonwealth was slow - they remembered Nasser's antics all too well - the mainland Europeans were much quicker to get to this, particularly Germany, aiming to have Egypt become a foothold to the rest of the Middle Eastern markets. By the summer of 1974, a major international conference was set up for that fall to come to the beginning of a final solution to the Israel-Palestine fights.
That conference, held on September 16-19, 1974, was once again hosted by the British - this time, it was hosted by Queen Elizabeth II herself at her Windsor Castle at Berkshire in England - and went a long ways towards moving the process beyond talks. There, the Israelis, Jordanians and Egyptians all agreed that the final goals would be a "viable nation state" for the Palestinians and, with that completed, the recognition of Israel's existence as a nation and the place of Jews in the Middle East. This commitment to this end had been the primary goal of the conference, as well as the Arabs recognizing that there would surely be Western armed forces deployments to the region as part of a commitment to Israel's security. Sadat got a huge win when he accepted that in return for the Suez Canal being an international waterway, the Egyptians would have the right to enforce tolls on ships traveling through the Canal and, if the negotiations came to a successful outcome, that the UK and France would relinquish their ownership shares, effectively gaining in a negotiation what Nasser had failed to do so spectacularly eighteen years before. (This win ended and real organized objections to Egypt's peace positions - from here on out, Cairo was full steam ahead on the issue.) Jordan insisted on Jerusalem being an international city, but made it clear that international meant Jews would have every right to live there and that the Arabs would accept a need for their to be some semblance of Israeli authority in the city, though what form that was wasn't entirely agreed upon at the Conference. This was initially a big win for Jordan, but it would ultimately score big for Israel as well. After the Conference, Israel began to move people out of its settlements in the West Bank, understanding that it wouldn't be too long in the future before these places would be part of Palestine.
By the spring of 1975, the Middle East's bitter divisions were boiling. Egypt and Jordan were pushing ahead with negotiations with the Israelis, seeing that the opportunity to solve the Palestinian question was opening and wanting to take advantage of it. Lebanon had joined them at the table, as had Tunisia and Morocco, with Libya following in April 1975 and Algeria a month after that. Iran was already in on it (and were directly funding the PLO's political wing, Fatah, after the PLO declared a complete ceasefire with the Israelis in October 1974) and the entire Western World was aiming for its success. The Soviet Union, looking for all kinds of economic and technological help, were keen to not rock that boat, as by this point both China and India were also on the side of such a deal being sorted out. The Arab world and the Turks, by contrast were seething with anger, resulting in countless unfriendly air dogfights and multiple military skirmishes with the Israelis on the Golan Heights and the Jordanians in and around Aqaba. The Egyptians, fed up with the latter problem, began deploying their own air forces to Jordan to get the Saudis to back off in March 1975, while Royal Air Force (and after July 1975, USAF) units began operating from Socotra to patrol the Red Sea. By the summer of 1975 there was a clear gap between the interests and desires in the Middle East, the Saudis, Gulf Arabs, Iraqis, Sudanese and Turks loudly and angrily continuing to demand the complete destruction of Israel and the North African, Jordanian and Lebanese Arabs wanting peace to prevail. Syrian and Soviet sea deployments led to the US Navy deploying regularly to the Eastern Mediterranean in August 1975, making an already tense situation more tense still.
Despite this tension, full-blown war was averted, and on August 24, 1975, the second "Conference For The Future of the Holy Land" began, this time hosted by Indira Gandhi at the awesome Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, India, went beyond basic agreements to developing borders and conditions. To the surprise of many, Egypt agreed to the Israelis holding the east bank of the Suez Canal, while over half of the Sinai would become part of the state of Palestine, including a northern coastline up to the edge of Lake Bardawil, while Israel would absorb a smaller piece of the eastern Sinai to allow a larger port at Eliat, while the rest of the Sinai coastline down to Sharm al-Sheikh and up the Suez Gulf up to Abu Zenima, as well as a line up to Qalet el-Nakhi would become part of Palestine, as well as a wide strip of territory up to the Mediterranean Coast, in essence making it impossible for the rest of Israel proper to be reached from Egypt without going through Palestine. Israel's plans for a naval base on the Great Bitter Lake drew no objections from the Egyptians, and the plan was devised that there would be a territorial connection through the Palestinian territory through Arish and Abu al-Fita (both to become part of Palestine) and through the Israeli communities of Lahav, Lehavim, Gilat, Maslul, Yesha and Naveh, which would be free for both sides to travel through to reach the other country without restriction, but people had to follow the laws of the nation which owned the territory while doing so and nobody could be forced by either side to leave it. (Almost immediately after the agreement, Israel announced plans to a major highway through their section of the territory, with a railroad, power system connection and water pipeline later added to this corridor, improvements that the Palestinians rapidly agreed to.) This territorial agreement was more than the Palestinians had expected, and they were only too happy to support it. Jerusalem was a thorny subject that, unlike the other borders, wasn't agreed to at the New Delhi Conference. Both sides recognized that the other having complete authority over it wasn't going to be accepted, but it wasn't quite sure how a third party could run it.
But in November 1975, a solution was found, and from a place that seemed unlikely at first, but when thought about, made perfect sense - the Vatican.
Pope Paul VI had been a keen observer of the negotiations over the Holy Land - it was sacred ground to Christians, too - and when word came out about the problems Jerusalem posed, the Pontiff proposed on November 7, 1975, that Jerusalem be considered an international city under the leadership of three clerics nominated by their respective congregations - a Muslim chosen by Arabs, a Jew chosen by Israelis and a Christian chosen by Christian Arabs. These three would have governing authority over the city, which would be open for the residency of all citizens of Israel or Palestine and would allow both to claim it as their capital. The clerics would have access to a security force of a third party agreed upon by the Israelis and Arabs, while the city's civic government would be run by two mayors - one Israeli and one Palestinian - and all criminal offenses committed in Jerusalem would be tried using the law of either Israel or Palestine at the choice of the accused. All government functions aside from the armed forces or security services would be allowed to be based in Jerusalem.
It was an elegant solution, and one which while not giving either side everything they wanted was recognized as a fair compromise. The possibility of the loss of Jerusalem under Israel's sole control led to an uproar in the Israeli Knesset, but the population of Israel, altogether too aware of the brutal losses inflicted on the Jewish state during a generation of repeted wars, made it clear in elections in March 1976 where they stood as pro-treaty candidates and parties won vast shares of seats in the Knesset. The Israeli right made one more last-ditch attempt to sabotage an agreement by massively increasing the size of the city of Jerusalem to be made international, trying to get the Palestinians to balk, but PLO leader Yasser Arafat saw right through that nonsense and made it clear that such an expansion wouldn't stop their willingness to sort out an agreement. With that completed, the national leaders gathered one final time, this time in the United States, to sign the final agreement.
In keeping of the meetings at a vast, beautiful place worthy of so many great leaders, the Americans hosted the meeting at the famed Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, the immense estate being exactly the sort of environment meant to show what prosperity could do - and President John F. Kennedy, who opened the meeting on May 10, 1976, had intended just that to happen, and it did. The participants - Yitzhak Rabin representing Israel, Yasser Arafat representing the Palestinians, Anwar Sadat representing Egypt and King Hussein II representing Jordan - had asked Kennedy and others to be signatories to the agreements, out of a desire for it to be seen in the Arab World as being the world supporting their efforts. This wasn't hard to accomplish, and as such there would be signatures to the document from the United States, United Kingdom, Vatican City, Iran, the leader of the nation acting as the leader of the Commonwealth of Nations at the time (in 1976, this was Canada) and the Soviet Union, signed by the relevant leaders - President John F. Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth II, Pope Paul VI, Shah Reza Pahlavi, Prime Minister Robert Stanfield and Premier Leonid Brezhnev. With the final agreements worked out, the Treaty of Asheville was signed in a grand ceremony by the leaders involved on May 16, 1976, the signing on a Sunday Afternoon at Biltmore coming after a massive TV ceremony including speeches broadcast around the world - for many in the West, it was the first time they had ever heard Brezhnev or Pahlavi speak, and perhaps fittingly (and while this was totally unplanned), after the final signature on the paper - that of Arafat - Arafat made a point of shaking hands with Rabin, while Sadat and Hussein watched from behind Arafat and Elizabeth and Kennedy stood behind Rabin, and the image of the handshake being the front page on countless newspapers around the world the following Monday morning.
The Treaty of Asheville made it clear that the legal changes were to be sorted out by a date meant to be Day of Independence for Palestine. The two sides agreed to that date on the agreement - it would be September 1, 1977. A lot needed to be done, but no sooner had everyone returned home than plans got into motion. The Commonwealth, which now had responsibility for army locations in northern Israel, gathered a massive force - a British armored division, two infantry regiments from Canada and one apiece from Australia and India - and delivered them to Israel, them setting up Camp Lightfield (named for the famed Canadian MP and ringleader of the Men of Honour), the base activating on June 21, 1977. The Arabs and Israelis agreed on the first guardians of Jerusalem to be Canadians, who had a good rapport with both countries, and the Canadians duly dispatched their famed Royal Canadian Regiment - whose honours went back to the North American War - to Jerusalem for the duty. The Egyptians made good on their ends of the bargain, officially renouncing the ownership of the Sinai to Palestine and Israel on May 15, 1977 and officially recognizing Israel's right to exist. The three clerics were announced to the world on August 15, 1977, and on the morning of September 1, they issued their first directives to the Royal Canadian Regiment soldiers and the two civil mayors of Jerusalem, officially beginning Israel's new world. The following day, Friday, September 2, 1977, Palestine became the world's newest nation, with Arafat as its first President. Both Israel and Palestine recognized the other's existence in a high-profile ceremony in Tel Aviv on the following Monday, September 5, 1977.
The results of the Treaty and the end of the Israel-Palestine conflict ended up being profound in a way that even many of the treaty's creators and signatories couldn't have imagined. The Treaty's supporters and opponents would spend decades arguing about its worth, but what wasn't in dispute was what came after it. With a permanent peace at last achieved, Israel was able to back down much of its budget-stretching military spending, though the release of many of these people directly led to an entrepreneur-driven high-tech boom in Israel in the 1980s. Palestine's improvements were even more profound, as the millions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt were quick to make tracks to their newly-established nation and set about reversing what had been for long known as the Nakba. Helped along by tens of billions of dollars in available funds for their rehabilitation, the Palestinian refugees in particular were quick to pour into the coastal Sinai regions that were now theirs and make them into their homelands. The northern Sinai felt the effects first, as the completion of a major desalination plant East of Arish in March 1981 began the process of making the region bloom. Recognizing the possibilities in tourism and hospitality that the warm, pretty southern Sinai represented, Sharm el-Sheikh and the communities along the coastal Sinai on both the Gulf of Suez and Gulf of Aqaba side rapidly developed tourist hotels and resorts and restaurants as well as other attractions, providing jobs and income that was to rapidly snowball into much more as civil infrastructure projects boomed in the 1980s and 1990s. The Superhighway and rail lines through the travel District were completed in 1986, allowing ever-faster travel between the two nations. Jerusalem flourished under the leadership of the clerics and their third-party protectors, it's population growing by nearly 70% and its economy growing to two and a half times its original size between 1977 and 2002.
Beyond the massive economic progress, though, was an even more massive cultural shift. Having already been among the more worldly of the Arabs before the Nakba and a generation of being refugees having reinforced so many of the cultural expectations of the Palestinians, they took to the building of their nation with a powerful will and a recognition that the fates of them and the Israelis were intertwined whether they liked it or not. This recognition led to a willingness to work with each other, and with successful meetings and deals came a trust between the two sides. By the dawn of the 1990s the Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews had come to have a very deep and complex relationship, with economies, transportation systems, utility grids, water and food supplies shared between them. Israel's tech entrepreneurs built factories in Palestine and vice versa, while many of those same Israelis vacationed at the resorts of the Sinai.
Having seen the success of both the Muslim cultural shifts of the West and the success of the Palestinians, Iranians and others, the world of Islam was basically split into two by the mid-1980s, as Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco moved away from the harder line interpretations of Islam and towards more moderate and open societies. This didn't necessarily mean democracy (at least at first, though virtually every one of the above nations was moving in that direction by the mid-1990s), but did mean a massive growth in education, tolerance of religious differences (not to the degree of the West, of course, but still enormous improvements) and dramatic improvements in civil rights. With this progress came wealth, as the West, unashamedly hoping for success for these places, funded and supported their efforts with money, knowledge and supplies. Nuclear energy came to Israel and Palestine in the 1980s and to Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Lebanon in the 90s, while vast portions of the Sahara in several countries became covered in vast solar power stations. Universities and technical schools trained millions of Arabs in everything from civil engineering to nuclear science to modern agriculture, and they came up with more than a few tricks of their own in the process. As their progress grew, these places developed a brain drain from the Arabian Peninsula that came to be a real problem for Syria in particular by the 1990s. As this trend grew, with it came demands for reform in many of these nations.
By 1970, the world's geopolitical momentum had shifted dramatically from a decade before, a product of a massive nuclear energy boom, economic progress and the by-and-large halted spread of communism across the globe. The Vietnam War had only been the crowning achievement of the world's geopolitical shifting sands. Nikita Khrushchev had said in 1958 "we will bury you!" in front of the United Nations, but by 1970 the Soviet Union, now under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, was broadcasting a much more conciliatory tone, brought about by continued economic, social and technological progress in the West that was increasingly building a gap between the USSR and its allies and the nations of the West.
Oil, once a key advantage of the Soviet Bloc (and one whose huge funds in the 1960s had given the USSR and the Middle East alike a massive economic boom) was increasingly becoming less of one as new sources came online - in the 1960s, oil discoveries in the North Sea, Grand Banks, Bay of Campeche, Alaska's North Shore, Karafuto and Brazil's continental shelf had added to the still-productive fields of Venezuela, Texas, Western Canada, Mexico, Nigeria, Iran and countless others to reduce the import of oil from the Middle East to the Amigos to virtually nothing, while Europe had seen its imports from the Soviet Union and Middle East dramatically reduced. While India and China continued to buy from the Middle East, Iran had taken over as the largest supplier of oil to Europe (outside of the USSR itself), a position that was making Iran a truly enormous amount of money. Nuclear energy was now a key source of energy in the West, and new homes built in the 1960s overwhelmingly were using either natural gas-fueled or electric forced-air heating, and the latter was becoming ever more common, while transportation uses, reduced by the shift to freight on railroads (that were in many cases being electrified) and the growth of mass transit usage was having a similar effect, while the nuclear revolution had all but eliminated the burning of coal for power on the Atlantic Seaboard and was making it a dying breed on the West Coast, and the 1970s would see the shifting of the trains once used to carry coal to power plants being directed to synthetic fuel production plants. Despite the reduction in demand in the West, the economic growth of many countries (particularly in Asia, where the Asian Tigers of Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore had now been joined by Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia in the world of rapidly-growing economies, driving up their demands for energy, a situation shared with several other locales - Southern Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, Iran, India - which kept fuel prices high and kept the funds flowing in for those who had the forethought to invest the money wisely. By the 1970s, there were a lot of these nations, and the result was the steady rise in living standards and levels of investment in many nations around the world.
While the Sixties had seen much of the world's geopolitics focused on Southeast Asia, the shifting sands of the Middle East and North Africa made the headlines in the Seventies, centered primarily on what was becoming a dramatic rift in the Muslim world. While the Soviet-dominated Middle East continued to be troublesome, Iran had made it clear in no uncertain terms where their alliances laid (and were in the early 1970s in the middle of a giant military modernization that had seen them buy vast amounts of new equipment from the Amigos and Europe) and North Africa was shifting dramatically. Already much more connected to Europe, the nations to the West of Egypt of the Muslim world - Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco in particular - had by 1970 figured out who was going places and who was spinning their wheels, and while Arab solidarity meant much to these nations, it didn't mean so much that they were willing to impoverish themselves. Libya had gone the furthest here - joined at the hip with their former colonial power in Italy, Libya had begun shifting during the leadership of King Idris, but an attempt at a coup by officers of his armed forces in 1965 got the move to reform moving in earnest, and by the early 1970s Libya's oil wealth was allowing for a major expansion in social spending, even as Idris began to pass political power to others in the early 1970s. It was a similar story in Algeria, while Morocco and Tunisia, not having the benefit of oil but still taking advantage of location, worked with European powers to raise their standards of living. By the 1970s, the Europeans, well aware of the Amigos dominance of relations with Israel, had begun to make low-level efforts to try to figure out a solution between Israel and the Arabs.
The flaring in the Middle East blew up again in October 1971, as Egypt, Jordan and Syria made another attempt to attack the Israelis, the former having to push past British and French troops stationed in the Canal Zone. While the Egyptians this time sought to avoid conflicts with the Europeans - they had their hands full with the Israelis - their efforts didn't get far owing to logistical problems, but the Jordanians and Syrians did rather better at first, but after five days of bitter fighting, the Israelis once again shoved the Syrians back over their previous ceasefire line in the Golan Heights, while the Jordanians' attempt to push into the West Banki had only limited success before the enraged Israelis shoved the Jordanians back over the Jordan River. While Israel's ownership of the Sinai remained despite the Egyptian attack and the Syrians and Jordanians were pushed out of Israel, the cost to Israel had been ghastly - over 4000 dead and 10,000 wounded - and the Arabs had fared worse than that, causing a situation where both sides, finally, were prepared to begin talking peace.
For Egypt, clearly the most important player in the situation, their strategic goal was to try to get back territory for themselves first, and failing that, try to get it for Arabs in general. Syria and Jordan faced the same problems, but on July 17, 1972, Jordan was hit hard by a coup, led by royalist officers who claimed that the Communists had failed catastrophically and that King Hussein (who had been living in Europe) should come back to try to re-establish Jordan's positions as an honest broker in the Arab world. While this coup was a nasty, bloody affair that claimed over 700 lives, the Soviets, clearly seeking a detente with the West (and angered that the Arabs hadn't sought Soviet approval for their war against Israel the year before) refused to support the communist forces in Jordan, and with the majority of their armed forces still badly broken from the chaos the year before, the coup was successful, and King Hussein, after fifteen years away, returned to Amman on July 27, stating that his objective was to "Restore the glory and honor of Jordan." Initially unfazed by this, the other Arabs didn't take long to discover that Hussein during his exile had plenty of times spoken to the Israelis and they had little objection to his return provided that Jordan was willing to talk peace - which after the 1971 losses, they were. Similarly, after the embarassment in 1971, Sadat was basically facing the same needs, and with an angered-at-his-failure populace at his back, Sadat and Hussein spoke for the first time in fifteen years over the phone on August 14, both agreeing during the phone call to present a united negotiations front with Israel. That done, the Jordanians began to make it be known through third parties of their desire to negotiate over the future of the Palestinians.
Israel didn't take long to respond. The Israelis, hoping that this time the Arab negotiations would be genuine, began to send messages to the Jordanians and Egyptians in the winter of 1972. This broke in the media in January 1973, resulting in a coup attempt against Sadat on March 2, 1973, that was broken up by an enraged Sadat and many veterans of the 1971 War, who by this point were well aware of the coming negotiations and had a desire to see them at least be attempted. That failure led to the Royal Saudi Land Forces beginning to gather in northwestern Saudi Arabia - near the Jordanian border - in March, only for those forces to be bombed by the Israeli Air Force on March 22 and 23, forcing a pull back of the Saudi buildup and basically putting Jordan under the Israeli Air Force's umbrella. Realizing this, Hussein directly began negotiating with the Israelis in April 1973, and with Golda Meir's approval, he invited Sadat to a meeting between the three leaders. That news quickly made it to the West, and the Brits offered to host it at their facilities on the island of Socotra. This meeting, which happened on June 14, 1973, was the first of what would be many trilateral meetings between the three nations, and this first meeting also made clear that both the Israelis and Arabs welcomed anything the West could do to help negotiate out the differences between the two sides.
1974 would see much happen to advance these causes. With the desires for peace in the Middle East sought by pretty much everyone - though admittedly for entirely different reasons - it wasn't long before the positions began to firm up. The first outsides powers, of course, were Britain and the Commonwealth, which resulted in Canada (a key Israeli ally going back to Israel's respect for the Men of Honour) getting the Amigos involved. It wasn't hard for anybody to be convinced of the positives of negotiations, and that drew in others. Iran publicly offered to make massive contributions towards the economic rehabilitation of the Palestinians, the Commonwealth offered to station military troops in Israel to assist in its security and the United States offered to deploy Marine and Navy units to new bases in Israel or Palestine at the desire of either nation. During this came Sadat's Infitah economic policy, which allowed for much greater quantities of private sector investment in many portions of Egypt's economy, in many ways a reversal of Nasser's policies. While uptake on this from the Amigos and Commonwealth was slow - they remembered Nasser's antics all too well - the mainland Europeans were much quicker to get to this, particularly Germany, aiming to have Egypt become a foothold to the rest of the Middle Eastern markets. By the summer of 1974, a major international conference was set up for that fall to come to the beginning of a final solution to the Israel-Palestine fights.
That conference, held on September 16-19, 1974, was once again hosted by the British - this time, it was hosted by Queen Elizabeth II herself at her Windsor Castle at Berkshire in England - and went a long ways towards moving the process beyond talks. There, the Israelis, Jordanians and Egyptians all agreed that the final goals would be a "viable nation state" for the Palestinians and, with that completed, the recognition of Israel's existence as a nation and the place of Jews in the Middle East. This commitment to this end had been the primary goal of the conference, as well as the Arabs recognizing that there would surely be Western armed forces deployments to the region as part of a commitment to Israel's security. Sadat got a huge win when he accepted that in return for the Suez Canal being an international waterway, the Egyptians would have the right to enforce tolls on ships traveling through the Canal and, if the negotiations came to a successful outcome, that the UK and France would relinquish their ownership shares, effectively gaining in a negotiation what Nasser had failed to do so spectacularly eighteen years before. (This win ended and real organized objections to Egypt's peace positions - from here on out, Cairo was full steam ahead on the issue.) Jordan insisted on Jerusalem being an international city, but made it clear that international meant Jews would have every right to live there and that the Arabs would accept a need for their to be some semblance of Israeli authority in the city, though what form that was wasn't entirely agreed upon at the Conference. This was initially a big win for Jordan, but it would ultimately score big for Israel as well. After the Conference, Israel began to move people out of its settlements in the West Bank, understanding that it wouldn't be too long in the future before these places would be part of Palestine.
By the spring of 1975, the Middle East's bitter divisions were boiling. Egypt and Jordan were pushing ahead with negotiations with the Israelis, seeing that the opportunity to solve the Palestinian question was opening and wanting to take advantage of it. Lebanon had joined them at the table, as had Tunisia and Morocco, with Libya following in April 1975 and Algeria a month after that. Iran was already in on it (and were directly funding the PLO's political wing, Fatah, after the PLO declared a complete ceasefire with the Israelis in October 1974) and the entire Western World was aiming for its success. The Soviet Union, looking for all kinds of economic and technological help, were keen to not rock that boat, as by this point both China and India were also on the side of such a deal being sorted out. The Arab world and the Turks, by contrast were seething with anger, resulting in countless unfriendly air dogfights and multiple military skirmishes with the Israelis on the Golan Heights and the Jordanians in and around Aqaba. The Egyptians, fed up with the latter problem, began deploying their own air forces to Jordan to get the Saudis to back off in March 1975, while Royal Air Force (and after July 1975, USAF) units began operating from Socotra to patrol the Red Sea. By the summer of 1975 there was a clear gap between the interests and desires in the Middle East, the Saudis, Gulf Arabs, Iraqis, Sudanese and Turks loudly and angrily continuing to demand the complete destruction of Israel and the North African, Jordanian and Lebanese Arabs wanting peace to prevail. Syrian and Soviet sea deployments led to the US Navy deploying regularly to the Eastern Mediterranean in August 1975, making an already tense situation more tense still.
Despite this tension, full-blown war was averted, and on August 24, 1975, the second "Conference For The Future of the Holy Land" began, this time hosted by Indira Gandhi at the awesome Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, India, went beyond basic agreements to developing borders and conditions. To the surprise of many, Egypt agreed to the Israelis holding the east bank of the Suez Canal, while over half of the Sinai would become part of the state of Palestine, including a northern coastline up to the edge of Lake Bardawil, while Israel would absorb a smaller piece of the eastern Sinai to allow a larger port at Eliat, while the rest of the Sinai coastline down to Sharm al-Sheikh and up the Suez Gulf up to Abu Zenima, as well as a line up to Qalet el-Nakhi would become part of Palestine, as well as a wide strip of territory up to the Mediterranean Coast, in essence making it impossible for the rest of Israel proper to be reached from Egypt without going through Palestine. Israel's plans for a naval base on the Great Bitter Lake drew no objections from the Egyptians, and the plan was devised that there would be a territorial connection through the Palestinian territory through Arish and Abu al-Fita (both to become part of Palestine) and through the Israeli communities of Lahav, Lehavim, Gilat, Maslul, Yesha and Naveh, which would be free for both sides to travel through to reach the other country without restriction, but people had to follow the laws of the nation which owned the territory while doing so and nobody could be forced by either side to leave it. (Almost immediately after the agreement, Israel announced plans to a major highway through their section of the territory, with a railroad, power system connection and water pipeline later added to this corridor, improvements that the Palestinians rapidly agreed to.) This territorial agreement was more than the Palestinians had expected, and they were only too happy to support it. Jerusalem was a thorny subject that, unlike the other borders, wasn't agreed to at the New Delhi Conference. Both sides recognized that the other having complete authority over it wasn't going to be accepted, but it wasn't quite sure how a third party could run it.
But in November 1975, a solution was found, and from a place that seemed unlikely at first, but when thought about, made perfect sense - the Vatican.
Pope Paul VI had been a keen observer of the negotiations over the Holy Land - it was sacred ground to Christians, too - and when word came out about the problems Jerusalem posed, the Pontiff proposed on November 7, 1975, that Jerusalem be considered an international city under the leadership of three clerics nominated by their respective congregations - a Muslim chosen by Arabs, a Jew chosen by Israelis and a Christian chosen by Christian Arabs. These three would have governing authority over the city, which would be open for the residency of all citizens of Israel or Palestine and would allow both to claim it as their capital. The clerics would have access to a security force of a third party agreed upon by the Israelis and Arabs, while the city's civic government would be run by two mayors - one Israeli and one Palestinian - and all criminal offenses committed in Jerusalem would be tried using the law of either Israel or Palestine at the choice of the accused. All government functions aside from the armed forces or security services would be allowed to be based in Jerusalem.
It was an elegant solution, and one which while not giving either side everything they wanted was recognized as a fair compromise. The possibility of the loss of Jerusalem under Israel's sole control led to an uproar in the Israeli Knesset, but the population of Israel, altogether too aware of the brutal losses inflicted on the Jewish state during a generation of repeted wars, made it clear in elections in March 1976 where they stood as pro-treaty candidates and parties won vast shares of seats in the Knesset. The Israeli right made one more last-ditch attempt to sabotage an agreement by massively increasing the size of the city of Jerusalem to be made international, trying to get the Palestinians to balk, but PLO leader Yasser Arafat saw right through that nonsense and made it clear that such an expansion wouldn't stop their willingness to sort out an agreement. With that completed, the national leaders gathered one final time, this time in the United States, to sign the final agreement.
In keeping of the meetings at a vast, beautiful place worthy of so many great leaders, the Americans hosted the meeting at the famed Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, the immense estate being exactly the sort of environment meant to show what prosperity could do - and President John F. Kennedy, who opened the meeting on May 10, 1976, had intended just that to happen, and it did. The participants - Yitzhak Rabin representing Israel, Yasser Arafat representing the Palestinians, Anwar Sadat representing Egypt and King Hussein II representing Jordan - had asked Kennedy and others to be signatories to the agreements, out of a desire for it to be seen in the Arab World as being the world supporting their efforts. This wasn't hard to accomplish, and as such there would be signatures to the document from the United States, United Kingdom, Vatican City, Iran, the leader of the nation acting as the leader of the Commonwealth of Nations at the time (in 1976, this was Canada) and the Soviet Union, signed by the relevant leaders - President John F. Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth II, Pope Paul VI, Shah Reza Pahlavi, Prime Minister Robert Stanfield and Premier Leonid Brezhnev. With the final agreements worked out, the Treaty of Asheville was signed in a grand ceremony by the leaders involved on May 16, 1976, the signing on a Sunday Afternoon at Biltmore coming after a massive TV ceremony including speeches broadcast around the world - for many in the West, it was the first time they had ever heard Brezhnev or Pahlavi speak, and perhaps fittingly (and while this was totally unplanned), after the final signature on the paper - that of Arafat - Arafat made a point of shaking hands with Rabin, while Sadat and Hussein watched from behind Arafat and Elizabeth and Kennedy stood behind Rabin, and the image of the handshake being the front page on countless newspapers around the world the following Monday morning.
The Treaty of Asheville made it clear that the legal changes were to be sorted out by a date meant to be Day of Independence for Palestine. The two sides agreed to that date on the agreement - it would be September 1, 1977. A lot needed to be done, but no sooner had everyone returned home than plans got into motion. The Commonwealth, which now had responsibility for army locations in northern Israel, gathered a massive force - a British armored division, two infantry regiments from Canada and one apiece from Australia and India - and delivered them to Israel, them setting up Camp Lightfield (named for the famed Canadian MP and ringleader of the Men of Honour), the base activating on June 21, 1977. The Arabs and Israelis agreed on the first guardians of Jerusalem to be Canadians, who had a good rapport with both countries, and the Canadians duly dispatched their famed Royal Canadian Regiment - whose honours went back to the North American War - to Jerusalem for the duty. The Egyptians made good on their ends of the bargain, officially renouncing the ownership of the Sinai to Palestine and Israel on May 15, 1977 and officially recognizing Israel's right to exist. The three clerics were announced to the world on August 15, 1977, and on the morning of September 1, they issued their first directives to the Royal Canadian Regiment soldiers and the two civil mayors of Jerusalem, officially beginning Israel's new world. The following day, Friday, September 2, 1977, Palestine became the world's newest nation, with Arafat as its first President. Both Israel and Palestine recognized the other's existence in a high-profile ceremony in Tel Aviv on the following Monday, September 5, 1977.
The results of the Treaty and the end of the Israel-Palestine conflict ended up being profound in a way that even many of the treaty's creators and signatories couldn't have imagined. The Treaty's supporters and opponents would spend decades arguing about its worth, but what wasn't in dispute was what came after it. With a permanent peace at last achieved, Israel was able to back down much of its budget-stretching military spending, though the release of many of these people directly led to an entrepreneur-driven high-tech boom in Israel in the 1980s. Palestine's improvements were even more profound, as the millions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt were quick to make tracks to their newly-established nation and set about reversing what had been for long known as the Nakba. Helped along by tens of billions of dollars in available funds for their rehabilitation, the Palestinian refugees in particular were quick to pour into the coastal Sinai regions that were now theirs and make them into their homelands. The northern Sinai felt the effects first, as the completion of a major desalination plant East of Arish in March 1981 began the process of making the region bloom. Recognizing the possibilities in tourism and hospitality that the warm, pretty southern Sinai represented, Sharm el-Sheikh and the communities along the coastal Sinai on both the Gulf of Suez and Gulf of Aqaba side rapidly developed tourist hotels and resorts and restaurants as well as other attractions, providing jobs and income that was to rapidly snowball into much more as civil infrastructure projects boomed in the 1980s and 1990s. The Superhighway and rail lines through the travel District were completed in 1986, allowing ever-faster travel between the two nations. Jerusalem flourished under the leadership of the clerics and their third-party protectors, it's population growing by nearly 70% and its economy growing to two and a half times its original size between 1977 and 2002.
Beyond the massive economic progress, though, was an even more massive cultural shift. Having already been among the more worldly of the Arabs before the Nakba and a generation of being refugees having reinforced so many of the cultural expectations of the Palestinians, they took to the building of their nation with a powerful will and a recognition that the fates of them and the Israelis were intertwined whether they liked it or not. This recognition led to a willingness to work with each other, and with successful meetings and deals came a trust between the two sides. By the dawn of the 1990s the Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews had come to have a very deep and complex relationship, with economies, transportation systems, utility grids, water and food supplies shared between them. Israel's tech entrepreneurs built factories in Palestine and vice versa, while many of those same Israelis vacationed at the resorts of the Sinai.
Having seen the success of both the Muslim cultural shifts of the West and the success of the Palestinians, Iranians and others, the world of Islam was basically split into two by the mid-1980s, as Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco moved away from the harder line interpretations of Islam and towards more moderate and open societies. This didn't necessarily mean democracy (at least at first, though virtually every one of the above nations was moving in that direction by the mid-1990s), but did mean a massive growth in education, tolerance of religious differences (not to the degree of the West, of course, but still enormous improvements) and dramatic improvements in civil rights. With this progress came wealth, as the West, unashamedly hoping for success for these places, funded and supported their efforts with money, knowledge and supplies. Nuclear energy came to Israel and Palestine in the 1980s and to Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Lebanon in the 90s, while vast portions of the Sahara in several countries became covered in vast solar power stations. Universities and technical schools trained millions of Arabs in everything from civil engineering to nuclear science to modern agriculture, and they came up with more than a few tricks of their own in the process. As their progress grew, these places developed a brain drain from the Arabian Peninsula that came to be a real problem for Syria in particular by the 1990s. As this trend grew, with it came demands for reform in many of these nations.
OOC: To give an idea of where this world is heading, and what the times look like:
Los Angeles Union Station
Los Angeles, California
March 23, 1976
1:27 pm
It was a sight to behold to say the least, but it was a real thing, and the small army of print, TV and radio reporters from across the amigos and several other countries couldmy help but be slightly awestruck at what was gently sliding up to Platforms 1 and 2 at Los Angeles Union Station. Somehow, it looked even more impressive than it had when it had left San Francisco Union a little less than four hours earlier. It was a train, of course, but beyond the fact it carried passengers it was totally unlike anything that had run on the rails of the Amigos before.
Built with a combination of Japanese and American technology, train sets 1001 and 1002 of the California High Speed Rail System were remarkable machines. The train sets for the CAHSR system had been basically built with a power car at each end and eight passenger coaches plus a cafe car between them, though when operating as a joined pair a special twin power car setup replaced the power cars in the middle of the train, resulting in what looked like a single 22-car long passenger train. Each set was designed with a first-class coach, three business-class coaches and four standard-class ones, with the cafe car directly in the middle with the first class and business cars on one side of it and the standard class ones on the other. All of the passenger cars used a tilt system to reduce G-forces on the passengers, while the business class and first class cars had beautifully-trimmed leather seats. The interior appointments in all classes were excellent, with comfortable interiors framed by huge panoramic windows that gave riders a spectacular view of what was passing by them, with the first class and business class cars having additional glass windows up high to give a sunroof-like effect. Of course, as one moved up the food chain the quality of those and the services available improved, but this train had been designed for all who rode on it to be able to do so in comfort and in style. Decked on beautiful blue and silver, with three-foot-tall CALIFORNIA lettering and the logos of the CAHSR next to the lettering on the side of the power cars at both ends, as well as the smaller logos of the Southern Pacific and Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroads, who had helped to build the California High Speed Rail System. Unusually for the United States, the driving power cars had all been named for famous figures in California history, while the middle booster units bore the names of famous figures in California railroading - unit 1001 on the point bore the name John C. Fremont, while 1002 on the tail end was named Mariano Vallejo and booster unit 2001 in the middle had been christened Theodore Judah. It all added up to a striking look, and in the eyes of the media people it was a fitting appearance into reality for what had been an expensive and technologically-challenging project, one which had had a very surprising cheerleader for the previous eight years.
That cheerleader was the first man to step out of the train's first-class door onto Platform 1, his big smile beaming as he stepped onto the platform. Many who had first elected Ronald Reagan as the Governor of California in 1966 would not have ever expected that he would sign off on the most expensive public works project in the history of the state, but Reagan had been the sort to defy expectations. In his mind, the combination of California's extensive nuclear industry and the CAHSR gave people more options to get around the state without oil, and he vividly remembered riding the Tokaido Shinkansen in Japan when visiting for the 1964 Olympics. He'd been long convinced that a railroad like the Shinkansen would revolutionize travel in California, and he was now ready to prove it. He was only too happy to turn towards all of the TV cameras and microphones.
"Governor Reagan, are you happy with the project, Sir?"
Reagan chuckled. "I most certainly am. I don't recall the last time I got from San Francisco to Los Angeles that quickly, and the turkey club sandwich and peach cobbler were superb."
"And the train, Governor?"
A smile. "It's a masterpiece, absolutely worthy of the people of California. I hope as many people here get to ride it soon."
"And you think that it's going to make back what it cost?"
Reagan chuckled at that. Oh, I suspect ten years from now nobody will give two shits what it cost to build. "I absolutely do." He paused, then gave his mini-speech. "Today is a great day for the state of California, for after a decade of construction, the California High Speed Rail System is ready for use by the people of California and all of the visitors to it, and I can say with absolute confidence that this will be a part of the future of our state, a very clear vision of the future to come."
"We've had trains here for a century, Governor Reagan." Another journalist commented.
"But never ones like these, Colin." Reagan smiled. "With these trains, you can fly along at two hundred miles per hour while sipping wine at your seat in total comfort. This is an experience like no other in the world." Another of his movie-star grins. "And I hope they extend this thing to Orange County and Sacramento quickly, so I can go to work on this thing and not have to use the airport any time soon."
Reagan's comment drew a laugh, but a few of the more worldly members of the media were aware that Reagan knew history was on his side. France's TGV and Britain's Advanced Passenger Train were well in development and the Japanese Shinkansen had revolutionized intercity travel in Japan. Others knew of the Northeastern United States, where the Metroliner and Royal Blue Service trains were a part of the day to day life of millions of people in that part of America. Still more knew of the gas-turbine-powered trains of Central Canada, making a trip from the Canadian capital of Ottawa to either of its two largest cities in less than two and a half hours. The cost of building the line had been steep, but with that done and the only costs being the electricity and maintenance, many of the reporters were sure that Governor Reagan would be every bit as right as he knew.
Los Angeles Union Station
Los Angeles, California
March 23, 1976
1:27 pm
It was a sight to behold to say the least, but it was a real thing, and the small army of print, TV and radio reporters from across the amigos and several other countries couldmy help but be slightly awestruck at what was gently sliding up to Platforms 1 and 2 at Los Angeles Union Station. Somehow, it looked even more impressive than it had when it had left San Francisco Union a little less than four hours earlier. It was a train, of course, but beyond the fact it carried passengers it was totally unlike anything that had run on the rails of the Amigos before.
Built with a combination of Japanese and American technology, train sets 1001 and 1002 of the California High Speed Rail System were remarkable machines. The train sets for the CAHSR system had been basically built with a power car at each end and eight passenger coaches plus a cafe car between them, though when operating as a joined pair a special twin power car setup replaced the power cars in the middle of the train, resulting in what looked like a single 22-car long passenger train. Each set was designed with a first-class coach, three business-class coaches and four standard-class ones, with the cafe car directly in the middle with the first class and business cars on one side of it and the standard class ones on the other. All of the passenger cars used a tilt system to reduce G-forces on the passengers, while the business class and first class cars had beautifully-trimmed leather seats. The interior appointments in all classes were excellent, with comfortable interiors framed by huge panoramic windows that gave riders a spectacular view of what was passing by them, with the first class and business class cars having additional glass windows up high to give a sunroof-like effect. Of course, as one moved up the food chain the quality of those and the services available improved, but this train had been designed for all who rode on it to be able to do so in comfort and in style. Decked on beautiful blue and silver, with three-foot-tall CALIFORNIA lettering and the logos of the CAHSR next to the lettering on the side of the power cars at both ends, as well as the smaller logos of the Southern Pacific and Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroads, who had helped to build the California High Speed Rail System. Unusually for the United States, the driving power cars had all been named for famous figures in California history, while the middle booster units bore the names of famous figures in California railroading - unit 1001 on the point bore the name John C. Fremont, while 1002 on the tail end was named Mariano Vallejo and booster unit 2001 in the middle had been christened Theodore Judah. It all added up to a striking look, and in the eyes of the media people it was a fitting appearance into reality for what had been an expensive and technologically-challenging project, one which had had a very surprising cheerleader for the previous eight years.
That cheerleader was the first man to step out of the train's first-class door onto Platform 1, his big smile beaming as he stepped onto the platform. Many who had first elected Ronald Reagan as the Governor of California in 1966 would not have ever expected that he would sign off on the most expensive public works project in the history of the state, but Reagan had been the sort to defy expectations. In his mind, the combination of California's extensive nuclear industry and the CAHSR gave people more options to get around the state without oil, and he vividly remembered riding the Tokaido Shinkansen in Japan when visiting for the 1964 Olympics. He'd been long convinced that a railroad like the Shinkansen would revolutionize travel in California, and he was now ready to prove it. He was only too happy to turn towards all of the TV cameras and microphones.
"Governor Reagan, are you happy with the project, Sir?"
Reagan chuckled. "I most certainly am. I don't recall the last time I got from San Francisco to Los Angeles that quickly, and the turkey club sandwich and peach cobbler were superb."
"And the train, Governor?"
A smile. "It's a masterpiece, absolutely worthy of the people of California. I hope as many people here get to ride it soon."
"And you think that it's going to make back what it cost?"
Reagan chuckled at that. Oh, I suspect ten years from now nobody will give two shits what it cost to build. "I absolutely do." He paused, then gave his mini-speech. "Today is a great day for the state of California, for after a decade of construction, the California High Speed Rail System is ready for use by the people of California and all of the visitors to it, and I can say with absolute confidence that this will be a part of the future of our state, a very clear vision of the future to come."
"We've had trains here for a century, Governor Reagan." Another journalist commented.
"But never ones like these, Colin." Reagan smiled. "With these trains, you can fly along at two hundred miles per hour while sipping wine at your seat in total comfort. This is an experience like no other in the world." Another of his movie-star grins. "And I hope they extend this thing to Orange County and Sacramento quickly, so I can go to work on this thing and not have to use the airport any time soon."
Reagan's comment drew a laugh, but a few of the more worldly members of the media were aware that Reagan knew history was on his side. France's TGV and Britain's Advanced Passenger Train were well in development and the Japanese Shinkansen had revolutionized intercity travel in Japan. Others knew of the Northeastern United States, where the Metroliner and Royal Blue Service trains were a part of the day to day life of millions of people in that part of America. Still more knew of the gas-turbine-powered trains of Central Canada, making a trip from the Canadian capital of Ottawa to either of its two largest cities in less than two and a half hours. The cost of building the line had been steep, but with that done and the only costs being the electricity and maintenance, many of the reporters were sure that Governor Reagan would be every bit as right as he knew.
McElvin, Pruett and Marshall Design Studios
Peachtree Boulevard, Atlanta, Georgia
March 24, 1976
10:41 am
"Now that is a suit!" Andrea Marshall gushed over the suit as the client, a young lawyer from Huntsville, Alabama, tried on the suit, one of several he'd ordered from the fashion house known as McElvin, Pruett and Marshall - one of hundreds of such companies in Atlanta and one, like quite a few others, had been in business for multiple generations, helping to give Atlanta its well-designed reputation for design and clothing styles.
"Its much lighter than I expected." The young man smiled and shifted his shoulders, helping to get the hand-made dress shirt that was a part of the suit properly settled on his shoulders. He was happy to discover that the tailors who had done his measurements had done them perfectly, and the suit jacket was as agreeably light as it was pleasing to look at.
"This is the South, darling. We can't have you sweating in the suit, can we? That just wouldn't do." She smiled. "As requested, the fabric came from the John Richmond mill in Columbia."
The lawyer nodded his approval. "I wanted that because their fabric are superb." Andrea agreed with him.
"Indeed, they are one of the mills we buy from regularly. Them, Stewart and Kelterman, Alessandro Rimino, Chris Black, plenty of others."
"All Americans?"
"For the most part. We get customers who want Italian or British fabrics, but so much of the best comes from the South that many don't even bother with it."
"Yeah, I bought an Oxxford with Emergildo Zegna fabric. It's nice, but what you guys do is better still." He paused. "It was too heavy in the jacket, honestly."
"Probably bang on for Chicago or New York, though."
"Yeah, but when one wants clothes for warm climates, you gotta come down to Atlanta."
"I love it when a customer says that." Andrea grinned. "You mentioned you got referred here. May I ask who?"
"My uncle, Dr. Peter Evaston." Andrea knew the name.
"Oh, the surgeon in Birmingham."
"He likes the formal title, that being ophthalmologist."
"Either way, I do know of him."
"Really?"
"Yes. My niece still has her eyesight on account of him." In response to the lawyer's interested look. "She got hit by a car when she was eleven, ended up with a bunch of glass in her eyes. Doctor Evaston operated on her and got all the glass out. She needs glasses now, of course, but the other doctors were sure she'd never be able to see again."
"I know he hears words like that and takes it as a challenge." A pause. "He got an offer to move up to Baltimore recently, to Johns Hopkins, but he decided instead to stay in Birmingham, at the Roseland."
Andrea smiled. "Roseland isn't exactly a huge step down from Johns Hopkins, as I understand it."
"Yeah, but what the ophthalmalogy department there has done lately....I'm surprised at it." He paused. "Apparently they have figured out a way of doing surgery with a laser that corrects nearsightedness." That impressed Andrea.
"Wow, really?"
"Supposedly, yeah."
"That's incredible." A smile. "Maybe we'll soon be using lasers for cutting fabric." The young man laughed.
"Keep making suits like these, I don't care how you do it." The man twisted around, looking at the suit's fit in the mirror. "This is great."
"May I make a suggestion, Good Sir?"
"Of course."
"You may wish to get new shoes to match the suit. You have the standard wingtips, but I would imagine with a perfectly tailored suit you may wish to change the style up a bit."
"Any suggestions?"
"Chestnut colors would provide a good contrast with the suit pants." She smiled. "Oxfords would be my recommendation, with a little bit of subtle brouging."
"I prefer Derby types myself, but I think the color combination would work."
Andrea circled around the client. "You wear a watch?"
"Sometimes."
"We worked the corner on your cufflinks for that purpose, and while it probably doesn't mean much in a courtroom, if you have designs on other occasions with this suit, perhaps some adornment on the wrist or good cufflinks would be in order."
The lawyer smiled. He liked this studio primarily because, while like so many they wanted to sell their products, they weren't too pushy and gave good advice without expectations. "Perhaps you have something you could suggest to me?"
"Of course, Good Sir!"
Peachtree Boulevard, Atlanta, Georgia
March 24, 1976
10:41 am
"Now that is a suit!" Andrea Marshall gushed over the suit as the client, a young lawyer from Huntsville, Alabama, tried on the suit, one of several he'd ordered from the fashion house known as McElvin, Pruett and Marshall - one of hundreds of such companies in Atlanta and one, like quite a few others, had been in business for multiple generations, helping to give Atlanta its well-designed reputation for design and clothing styles.
"Its much lighter than I expected." The young man smiled and shifted his shoulders, helping to get the hand-made dress shirt that was a part of the suit properly settled on his shoulders. He was happy to discover that the tailors who had done his measurements had done them perfectly, and the suit jacket was as agreeably light as it was pleasing to look at.
"This is the South, darling. We can't have you sweating in the suit, can we? That just wouldn't do." She smiled. "As requested, the fabric came from the John Richmond mill in Columbia."
The lawyer nodded his approval. "I wanted that because their fabric are superb." Andrea agreed with him.
"Indeed, they are one of the mills we buy from regularly. Them, Stewart and Kelterman, Alessandro Rimino, Chris Black, plenty of others."
"All Americans?"
"For the most part. We get customers who want Italian or British fabrics, but so much of the best comes from the South that many don't even bother with it."
"Yeah, I bought an Oxxford with Emergildo Zegna fabric. It's nice, but what you guys do is better still." He paused. "It was too heavy in the jacket, honestly."
"Probably bang on for Chicago or New York, though."
"Yeah, but when one wants clothes for warm climates, you gotta come down to Atlanta."
"I love it when a customer says that." Andrea grinned. "You mentioned you got referred here. May I ask who?"
"My uncle, Dr. Peter Evaston." Andrea knew the name.
"Oh, the surgeon in Birmingham."
"He likes the formal title, that being ophthalmologist."
"Either way, I do know of him."
"Really?"
"Yes. My niece still has her eyesight on account of him." In response to the lawyer's interested look. "She got hit by a car when she was eleven, ended up with a bunch of glass in her eyes. Doctor Evaston operated on her and got all the glass out. She needs glasses now, of course, but the other doctors were sure she'd never be able to see again."
"I know he hears words like that and takes it as a challenge." A pause. "He got an offer to move up to Baltimore recently, to Johns Hopkins, but he decided instead to stay in Birmingham, at the Roseland."
Andrea smiled. "Roseland isn't exactly a huge step down from Johns Hopkins, as I understand it."
"Yeah, but what the ophthalmalogy department there has done lately....I'm surprised at it." He paused. "Apparently they have figured out a way of doing surgery with a laser that corrects nearsightedness." That impressed Andrea.
"Wow, really?"
"Supposedly, yeah."
"That's incredible." A smile. "Maybe we'll soon be using lasers for cutting fabric." The young man laughed.
"Keep making suits like these, I don't care how you do it." The man twisted around, looking at the suit's fit in the mirror. "This is great."
"May I make a suggestion, Good Sir?"
"Of course."
"You may wish to get new shoes to match the suit. You have the standard wingtips, but I would imagine with a perfectly tailored suit you may wish to change the style up a bit."
"Any suggestions?"
"Chestnut colors would provide a good contrast with the suit pants." She smiled. "Oxfords would be my recommendation, with a little bit of subtle brouging."
"I prefer Derby types myself, but I think the color combination would work."
Andrea circled around the client. "You wear a watch?"
"Sometimes."
"We worked the corner on your cufflinks for that purpose, and while it probably doesn't mean much in a courtroom, if you have designs on other occasions with this suit, perhaps some adornment on the wrist or good cufflinks would be in order."
The lawyer smiled. He liked this studio primarily because, while like so many they wanted to sell their products, they weren't too pushy and gave good advice without expectations. "Perhaps you have something you could suggest to me?"
"Of course, Good Sir!"
Would I be correct to assume that the trainsets here were carbon copies of the JR Shinkansen 0 series?
Nope. The closest thing to it in many ways is the British APT-P. To General Motors and Pullman-Standard (who built them), it's known as the GM25HST, to the California HSR it's the Series 1. The power cars and booster units are powered, with the CAHSR system here using 25 kV power and thus the power cars and booster cars each make 6,135 hp, with a total power output of 24,540 hp, a considerable boost on any Shinkansen (which were generally 16,000 to 18,000 hp) though the Shinkansen having all wheels driven (which the Series 3 trains for the California HSR will have) helps with acceleration, but the additional needed with the heavier weight of the longer trains used by the CAHSR. The design is clearly influenced by the Shinkansen though, as it uses very similar cab signalling systems and wheels to the Shinkansen, though it uses power cars to allow for a gyroscopic tilt mechanism (similar to the Italian Pendolino) without the extra complication.
In 1976, the system runs at a top speed of 160 mph on the very-straight section from Modesto to Bakersfield (via Merced, Madera, Fresno and Delano), with speeds south of Newhall Pass and north of Modesto (over Altamont Pass) limited to 125 mph because of population density. It shares tracks with commuter operations from San Francisco to San Jose and from Santa Clarita to Los Angeles.
USS Long Beach, docked at HMNB Socotra
Di Selmeho, Socotra
March 25, 1976
6:26 AM
"Finished with engines." Captain Andrew Miller, USN, said with a smile, knowing his crew would be happy with the order, knowing what it meant. "Gentlemen, we have arrived at the final redoubt of the British in the Indian Ocean." That earned a chuckle from Captain Miller's XO.
"If this is a fuckin' redoubt, I can only guess what the rest of their bases are like."
"Yeah, probably got more good food and fine pussy than anywhere else on Earth." One of the younger of the deck crew commented.
"Aren't you a little bit young to be chasing tail in another country?" The cruiser's navigator commented.
"Nate, boss, this is what I joined the Navy for! See the world, live the adventure, bang the beauties!"
The Captain chucked aloud. Oh, to be young, dumb and full of cum again. But as the season USN Captain thought about it more, he did realize that there was more to the comment that he had once realized.
Her Majesty's Naval Base Socotra was one of the newer bases of the Royal Navy and was used extensively by the USN and navies of the Commonwealth as well as the Royal Navy - and it showed today, as the one British missile cruiser and one anti-submarine frigate in the base were outnumbered massively by the USN fast carrier group that had just arrived. Enterprise-class aircraft carrier Saratoga led its group, which included multi-role cruiser Long Beach, older air defense cruiser Columbus, newly-commissioned missile destroyer Spruance, older destroyers Sampson and Dahlgren, frigates McInerney, Pharris and Ramsey, nuclear submarine Archerfish, nuclear-powered submarine tender Yellowstone and it's diesel-electric submarine charges Tiburon, Shark and Unicorn, Nuclear-powered fast supply ship Seattle, fleet oiler Truckee and dry cargo ship Sylvania rounded out the fleet, with Mexican missile cruiser Sonora and Canadian helicopter destroyer Huron also ja part of the arriving fleet. The fleet would have crowded many naval bases, but such was the size of the one the Royal Navy had built on the island of Socotra that space simply wasn't a big issue. The carrier and cruisers got one dock that had been designed for large, deep draught vessels, while its fleet was located at other piers near it on the base. The huge dry-dock at the base was empty for now for repair reasons, the giant hammerhead cranes built for it visible over the dry dock. The buildings that made up the base's facilities were built around the piers, with the main docks all having an overhead supply system to allow ships on a dock to be serviced by two crews at once. The port's employees in more menial positions were mostly Arabs or Africans, but these well-paid individuals still did their jobs well. As befitting a RN base there was a massive base exchange store that stocked goods that weren't usually seen by the Americans, and knowing that British ships had limited quantities of alcohol aboard and the exchanges did sell alcohol, many of the Americans visiting the base could and did stock up, even though many vessel COs and fleet admirals would never tolerate booze on a ship. The RN and USN both used similar quality of fuels so resupply of fuel and food was easy, and both shore-side trucks and both USN and RN helicopters would be involved in this as well.
The city that lay to the east of the base, the construction cranes of which were easily visible from the base, was perhaps a bigger sign than the naval base and two air bases as to what Socotra's future was. After the loss of Aden in 1957 the British had joined those that had been evacuated from Aden in endeavoring to make sure this second chance at a place in the Indian Ocean never suffered the same fate, and that it became the sort of place people wanted to live. The bases and defenses of the island made the first part a reality, and in the nearly twenty years since the evacuation of Aden the Commonwealth's money and the residents' hard work had gone a long, long way towards making the second point true.
What had been an island in the ocean with a population of maybe thirty thousand was now a major city with ten times that many people, and more arriving all the time, a steady flow of refugees from the oppressive communities of the Arabian Peninsula who in many cases had paid smugglers and other shady people a vast sum to get them to Socotra. The Royal Navy's patrol vessels in the area regularly came across refugee vessels and the island did have camps for such people, with the Brits sorting out who was a viable refugee - they had a wide net, though, particularly as despite the presence of the refugees from the Arabian Peninsula and Africa, the island was immensely prosperous, helped along by the massive British Petroleum refinery west of the naval base and its adjacent power station and desalination plant. The oil jetties built with the refinery allowed tankers to dock well offshore and away from the naval base, and the refinery and servicing the many ships that stopped there had become a lucrative business for both people from the Commonwealth and the Arab residents of Socotra alike. The island was only growing in both its population and prosperity, and the towering construction cranes of Hadiboh, Hulaf and Hadramaut to the west of the base attested to this, the building of 20th Century towers that aped the spread of civilization in the most modern of senses across the island.
Perhaps because of its history and the refugees, Socotra was probably significantly more liberal and a greater believer in Modern Islam than anywhere else in the world. Fundamentalists had long learned to steer clear of the island, And while Arabs made up the majority of the population, with the vast majority of these having been forced out of the other nations of the Middle East, their difficulties with British ownership of the island were non-existent, and the island was also home to huge Commonwealth populations - Canadians, Australians, Indians, Irish and New Zealanders were commonplace, many of these being people who had come to Socotra to take advantage of the island's remarkable beauty and spectacular weather. These people had already created over two dozen hotels and resort communities, and the Socotra Airport, which already had runways big enough to land Boeing 747s on, had expanded its terminals and operations for the ever-greater arrivals. With the island being a regular stopping point for aircraft headed from Europe to Australia and the Far East, travel through the island was a big business, and the beautiful beaches of the island - and there are a lot of them - were a clear and obvious tourist draw. It all added up to a bright future for the island and its people, something they and the far-off power that had jurisdiction over the island very much appreciated.
The gangplanks had barely been rigged up to the pier and its upper bridges before there was a loud hoot on the deck, as a late-model Jaguar XJ6 luxury sedan rolled up to the dock's edge, stopping right at the end of the gangplank. The base personnel quickly snapped to attention as a middle-aged man clad in a very good Royal Navy working uniform stepped out of the backseat of the Jaguar, the man's uniform bearing the crown, crossed baton and sword and one star of a Commodore. The base personnel all were quick to salute the officer, and the Americans were quick to follow the British and Arabs' examples. Even the dumbest or most ignorant of Sailors knew better than to ignore a flag officer. The man strode confidently onto the deck as Captain Miller arrived down to greet him.
"Base Commander Socotra, arriving." The man on the deck signalled, and Captain Miller and the man were quick to exchange salutes.
"Welcome to Socotra, Captain." The man extended his hand, which the American captain took. "Commodore Nicholas Hereford, Royal Navy, Base Commander Socotra."
"Captain Andrew Miller, United States Navy, commanding officer USS Long Beach." Miller responded. "Thank you for receiving us. My crew have been looking forward to arriving here."
"A long trip, Captain?"
"Our last port was Norfolk, aside from a brief stop at Port Said."
"Indeed, that is a long trip." The Commodore commented. "That would be why your whole fleet has docked, then?"
"Yes, Commodore." A pause. "I understand we have supplies here waiting for us?"
"You do indeed, Captain." The Commodore smiled. "Your ships should be refueled by the day after tomorrow, and we have lots of aviation fuel for the carrier and your helicopters."
"That's good, I understand the tankers had to refuel the destroyers and frigates in the eastern Mediterranean."
"But not your cruiser, Captain." The Commodore commented with a knowing smile. He got a smile in return for that.
"Nuclear reactors don't need refueling too frequently, thankfully."
"Indeed." The Commodore smiled. "I've never been aboard a Long Beach class vessel before."
"Really?" Captain Miller was surprised by that. "I know there have been a bunch of exchange officers on these ships."
"I did do a tour some years ago on your cruiser Chicago, but that's not a nuclear vessel." A smile. "Still a very impressive vessel, mind you."
"Old dogs, though."
"Anything with Standard and Talos missiles with a full air defense suite is worth paying attention to." The British officer commented. "But I would love to see what this cruiser looks like from such a high bridge."
"Only one way to find that out for yourself." Captain Miller commented with a smile. "Shall we?"
Di Selmeho, Socotra
March 25, 1976
6:26 AM
"Finished with engines." Captain Andrew Miller, USN, said with a smile, knowing his crew would be happy with the order, knowing what it meant. "Gentlemen, we have arrived at the final redoubt of the British in the Indian Ocean." That earned a chuckle from Captain Miller's XO.
"If this is a fuckin' redoubt, I can only guess what the rest of their bases are like."
"Yeah, probably got more good food and fine pussy than anywhere else on Earth." One of the younger of the deck crew commented.
"Aren't you a little bit young to be chasing tail in another country?" The cruiser's navigator commented.
"Nate, boss, this is what I joined the Navy for! See the world, live the adventure, bang the beauties!"
The Captain chucked aloud. Oh, to be young, dumb and full of cum again. But as the season USN Captain thought about it more, he did realize that there was more to the comment that he had once realized.
Her Majesty's Naval Base Socotra was one of the newer bases of the Royal Navy and was used extensively by the USN and navies of the Commonwealth as well as the Royal Navy - and it showed today, as the one British missile cruiser and one anti-submarine frigate in the base were outnumbered massively by the USN fast carrier group that had just arrived. Enterprise-class aircraft carrier Saratoga led its group, which included multi-role cruiser Long Beach, older air defense cruiser Columbus, newly-commissioned missile destroyer Spruance, older destroyers Sampson and Dahlgren, frigates McInerney, Pharris and Ramsey, nuclear submarine Archerfish, nuclear-powered submarine tender Yellowstone and it's diesel-electric submarine charges Tiburon, Shark and Unicorn, Nuclear-powered fast supply ship Seattle, fleet oiler Truckee and dry cargo ship Sylvania rounded out the fleet, with Mexican missile cruiser Sonora and Canadian helicopter destroyer Huron also ja part of the arriving fleet. The fleet would have crowded many naval bases, but such was the size of the one the Royal Navy had built on the island of Socotra that space simply wasn't a big issue. The carrier and cruisers got one dock that had been designed for large, deep draught vessels, while its fleet was located at other piers near it on the base. The huge dry-dock at the base was empty for now for repair reasons, the giant hammerhead cranes built for it visible over the dry dock. The buildings that made up the base's facilities were built around the piers, with the main docks all having an overhead supply system to allow ships on a dock to be serviced by two crews at once. The port's employees in more menial positions were mostly Arabs or Africans, but these well-paid individuals still did their jobs well. As befitting a RN base there was a massive base exchange store that stocked goods that weren't usually seen by the Americans, and knowing that British ships had limited quantities of alcohol aboard and the exchanges did sell alcohol, many of the Americans visiting the base could and did stock up, even though many vessel COs and fleet admirals would never tolerate booze on a ship. The RN and USN both used similar quality of fuels so resupply of fuel and food was easy, and both shore-side trucks and both USN and RN helicopters would be involved in this as well.
The city that lay to the east of the base, the construction cranes of which were easily visible from the base, was perhaps a bigger sign than the naval base and two air bases as to what Socotra's future was. After the loss of Aden in 1957 the British had joined those that had been evacuated from Aden in endeavoring to make sure this second chance at a place in the Indian Ocean never suffered the same fate, and that it became the sort of place people wanted to live. The bases and defenses of the island made the first part a reality, and in the nearly twenty years since the evacuation of Aden the Commonwealth's money and the residents' hard work had gone a long, long way towards making the second point true.
What had been an island in the ocean with a population of maybe thirty thousand was now a major city with ten times that many people, and more arriving all the time, a steady flow of refugees from the oppressive communities of the Arabian Peninsula who in many cases had paid smugglers and other shady people a vast sum to get them to Socotra. The Royal Navy's patrol vessels in the area regularly came across refugee vessels and the island did have camps for such people, with the Brits sorting out who was a viable refugee - they had a wide net, though, particularly as despite the presence of the refugees from the Arabian Peninsula and Africa, the island was immensely prosperous, helped along by the massive British Petroleum refinery west of the naval base and its adjacent power station and desalination plant. The oil jetties built with the refinery allowed tankers to dock well offshore and away from the naval base, and the refinery and servicing the many ships that stopped there had become a lucrative business for both people from the Commonwealth and the Arab residents of Socotra alike. The island was only growing in both its population and prosperity, and the towering construction cranes of Hadiboh, Hulaf and Hadramaut to the west of the base attested to this, the building of 20th Century towers that aped the spread of civilization in the most modern of senses across the island.
Perhaps because of its history and the refugees, Socotra was probably significantly more liberal and a greater believer in Modern Islam than anywhere else in the world. Fundamentalists had long learned to steer clear of the island, And while Arabs made up the majority of the population, with the vast majority of these having been forced out of the other nations of the Middle East, their difficulties with British ownership of the island were non-existent, and the island was also home to huge Commonwealth populations - Canadians, Australians, Indians, Irish and New Zealanders were commonplace, many of these being people who had come to Socotra to take advantage of the island's remarkable beauty and spectacular weather. These people had already created over two dozen hotels and resort communities, and the Socotra Airport, which already had runways big enough to land Boeing 747s on, had expanded its terminals and operations for the ever-greater arrivals. With the island being a regular stopping point for aircraft headed from Europe to Australia and the Far East, travel through the island was a big business, and the beautiful beaches of the island - and there are a lot of them - were a clear and obvious tourist draw. It all added up to a bright future for the island and its people, something they and the far-off power that had jurisdiction over the island very much appreciated.
The gangplanks had barely been rigged up to the pier and its upper bridges before there was a loud hoot on the deck, as a late-model Jaguar XJ6 luxury sedan rolled up to the dock's edge, stopping right at the end of the gangplank. The base personnel quickly snapped to attention as a middle-aged man clad in a very good Royal Navy working uniform stepped out of the backseat of the Jaguar, the man's uniform bearing the crown, crossed baton and sword and one star of a Commodore. The base personnel all were quick to salute the officer, and the Americans were quick to follow the British and Arabs' examples. Even the dumbest or most ignorant of Sailors knew better than to ignore a flag officer. The man strode confidently onto the deck as Captain Miller arrived down to greet him.
"Base Commander Socotra, arriving." The man on the deck signalled, and Captain Miller and the man were quick to exchange salutes.
"Welcome to Socotra, Captain." The man extended his hand, which the American captain took. "Commodore Nicholas Hereford, Royal Navy, Base Commander Socotra."
"Captain Andrew Miller, United States Navy, commanding officer USS Long Beach." Miller responded. "Thank you for receiving us. My crew have been looking forward to arriving here."
"A long trip, Captain?"
"Our last port was Norfolk, aside from a brief stop at Port Said."
"Indeed, that is a long trip." The Commodore commented. "That would be why your whole fleet has docked, then?"
"Yes, Commodore." A pause. "I understand we have supplies here waiting for us?"
"You do indeed, Captain." The Commodore smiled. "Your ships should be refueled by the day after tomorrow, and we have lots of aviation fuel for the carrier and your helicopters."
"That's good, I understand the tankers had to refuel the destroyers and frigates in the eastern Mediterranean."
"But not your cruiser, Captain." The Commodore commented with a knowing smile. He got a smile in return for that.
"Nuclear reactors don't need refueling too frequently, thankfully."
"Indeed." The Commodore smiled. "I've never been aboard a Long Beach class vessel before."
"Really?" Captain Miller was surprised by that. "I know there have been a bunch of exchange officers on these ships."
"I did do a tour some years ago on your cruiser Chicago, but that's not a nuclear vessel." A smile. "Still a very impressive vessel, mind you."
"Old dogs, though."
"Anything with Standard and Talos missiles with a full air defense suite is worth paying attention to." The British officer commented. "But I would love to see what this cruiser looks like from such a high bridge."
"Only one way to find that out for yourself." Captain Miller commented with a smile. "Shall we?"
Another pop culture interlude:
The Kinks, The Who, and The Yardbirds
The Kinks were one of the most successful groups to come out of the British Invasion that landed in North America in 1964 in the wake of the Beatles. One advantage they had going for them was their manager, Ian Lawson [OOC: the grandson of an Englishman who didn't get killed in the shorter and less bloody World War I]. Lawson, a young hustler in the mold of Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager, or Kit Lambert, the Who's manager, easily pushed aside the ineffectual Robert Wace, a rich kid who was basically "slumming" by managing the group, in early 1964 and took over management of the Kinks. His hustling got their debut single, "You Really Got Me," to have sufficient radio airplay in the States to take it to Number One on the Billboard charts in December 1964.
When the group arrived for their debut American tour that following summer, Lawson was right at their side; he chuckled to himself at a recent conversation he'd had with Wace, who told Lawson he'd have stayed in London and let the road manager handle accompanying the group on tour. "What a bloody idiot," Lawson thought; "what if something happens to the group? Epstein would NEVER do that to the Beatles, and I bloody well won't do that to the Kinks." And a good thing it was that he was there, too, for on the Fourth of July weekend, when the Kinks were in Hollywood to tape an appearance on a Dick Clark TV special for the holiday, an official of the union that covered the backstage crews, lighting technicians and so forth, chose to pick an argument with the Kinks' Ray Davies when the group showed up late for rehearsal, berating him for how "you Limeys" were supposedly taking work away from American bands (utter nonsense). Before things could get out of hand, Lawson grabbed Clark and got him to pull the union official aside, while Lawson took Davies to his dressing room and calmed him down. It's entirely possible that if they hadn't been separated, a fistfight might have broken out, one that would have led the union to refusing to work with the Kinks, effectively banning them from live appearances in the States - and thus devastating their record sales there. Lawson found the union official and stuffed $20 bills into his hand until he shut up and went away. The show proceeded without incident.
The Kinks' popularity continued to grow through 1965 and 1966, until in the fall of '66 they topped the US charts again with "Sunny Afternoon," proving that the success of their debut single hadn't been a fluke. Their quirkiness and their celebration of the joys ordinary people found in their lives brought a dimension to the music of the Sixties it might have lacked otherwise, and they ended up scoring a total of six additional Number Ones in the US: "Waterloo Sunset" (1967), "Days" (1968), "Lola" (1970), "Celluloid Heroes" (1972), "Jukebox Music" (1977), and "Come Dancing" (1983).
Their success also brought about increased exposure for opening acts on two of their tours: one which had already had hits in the United States, and one which was virtually unknown: respectively, the Yardbirds and the Who.
When, just before the Kinks' fall 1966 North American tour, Ray Davies learned that Kit Lambert, the manager of the Who, had finagled his group into opening for the Kinks, Ray refused to speak to Ian Lawson for two weeks. No wonder; hardly anyone familiar with them wanted to be in the position of following the Who onstage.
Their frenetic stage act - Pete Townshend madly windmilling his right arm as he slashed out chords, Roger Daltrey twirling the microphone cord like a lasso, Keith Moon's hell-for-leather attack on his drum set, even John Entwistle's standing stock still as he played, as if he'd seen it all done better; enhanced throughout with smoke bombs, filmstrips, and the loudest amplifiers any rock band had yet seen fit to use; and capped off with Townshend smashing his guitar to pieces and Moon kicking over and trashing his drums - had already made them major stars in Europe, though they'd had yet to break in North America. Townshend didn't always smash his guitar these days - it had gotten to be way too expensive - but Ray Davies knew he would surely do so on the Who's American debut, opening for the Kinks.
Lawson managed to get Lambert to agree to withdraw all but nine of the bookings, but Lambert insisted on keeping those nine, threatening a lawsuit if the Who were dropped. In the end, Lawson relented.
The nine dates on the tour where the Who opened for the Kinks turned out to be one of those "you should have been" there moments in popular music history. The Who poured it on, turning their act (not to mention their sound) to the highest volume they could, determined to make the most of this chance. The Kinks were equally determined not to be upstaged, and likewise they pulled out all the stops, with Ray Davies' mincing and teasing of the girls in the audience and his brother Dave's guitar-hero moves keyed up as if on steroids.
In the end, of course, both groups benefited: the Kinks got to Number One again with "Sunny Afternoon"; the Who, unknown at the beginning of the tour, were by the time they departed for England greeted at the airport by the mid-Sixties' most prominent sign of popular approval: a phalanx of screaming girls.
Decca Records, somewhat belatedly, realized the opportunity on their hands, and re-released as a single "Substitute," which had flopped earlier in the year, in the States. It climbed to Number 9 on the charts in January 1967, giving the Who their first big hit in the US. That fall, the Who, having toured incessantly during the past year, finally scored their first US Number One with "I Can See for Miles."
The Who were ever-inventive, too, and the following year they started work on the first "rock opera," as they called it, the story of a deaf, dumb, and blind boy named Tommy and his search for spiritual Truth. Tommy would launch the Who into the stratosphere, and they would record two more rock operas, Lifehouse in 1971 and Quadrophenia in 1973. Ray Davies having reconciled with Townshend, he drew inspiration from the Who, and the Kinks entered the rock opera sweepstakes too, with Arthur (1969), Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround (1970), Preservation Acts 1 and 2 (1973-74), the aptly-named Soap Opera (1975), and Schoolboys in Disgrace (1975).
The Kinks, however, were careful never to book the Who as an opening act again. In 1967, though, their opening slot would be occupied by a band in need of a shot in the arm: the Yardbirds.
The 60s version of the Yardbirds was in so many ways a band before their time. They played long blues jams before anyone else; they featured the lead guitar in a way few had thought of doing; they mixed psychedelic, heavy, bluesy chord progressions with oddball ideas, including everything from a Gregorian-chant-like melody ("Still I'm Sad") to an acid-rock lead-guitar freak-out with lead singer Keith Relf muttering and cackling deep in the mix ("Happenings Ten Years Time Ago"). In the States, they'd had two Top Ten hits in 1965, "For Your Love" and "Heart Full of Soul."
But their biggest problem all the way up to 1968 was the instability of their lineup; they kept losing and replacing key members, and with every change the band's basic sound would alter, so their musical vision tended to get muddied. The first big change was in 1965, when Eric Clapton, then a blues purist, objected to the commercialism of "For Your Love" and its attempt at a hit single, and quit the band. (Another year of "purism" convinced Clapton that being a rock star wasn't such a bad idea after all.) Jeff Beck replaced Clapton as lead guitarist.
Then, in late 1966, Paul Samwell-Smith, the bass player, decided to quit. Guitarist Chris Dreja moved to bass, and renowned session guitarist Jimmy Page came in as his replacement. This should have led to a big ego fight between Beck and Page, given how highly each thought of his own talents, but instead, the intervention of, among others, Andrew Oldham - the man who had passed on the Rolling Stones - talked the two of them into not throwing away a good thing. They instead worked out, over the rest of 1966 and into 1967, a dual-guitar attack that made the Yardbirds' sound truly unique. This was first reflected in their next album, Little Games, which came out in July 1967.
The membership flux had hurt their career, though, and they might well have faded into the sunset, had not Ian Lawson agreed with their manager, Graham Gouldman, to book the Yardbirds as the opening act for the Kinks' summer 1967 tour. The Yardbirds' sets, with Beck and Page trading guitar solos and smoothly augmenting one another rather than trying to walk all over each other, drew renewed attention to the band, enough to get the title track of their new album, "Little Games," into the American Top Ten.
They recorded another album, Truth, with this lineup, but then one more change came along: the singer, Keith Relf, had been growing more interested in folk and classical sounds as opposed to the heavy rock the Yardbirds were playing, and ultimately decided to leave the band to form another outfit, Renaissance. Page, Beck, Dreja and drummer Jim McCarty were nonplussed - just when they were beginning to have a consistent sound, they would now lose their lead singer? - but they at least managed to convince Relf to stick around long enough to finish the band's 1968 tour. In the meantime, they began shopping for a new lead singer - preferably an unknown, who would fit the Yardbirds' style.
Page still continued to take the occasional session gig, less now for the money than for fun and to hone his skills. He played on sessions for Donovan's 1968 album Hurdy Gurdy Man, wherein the Scottish flower-power folk singer was attempting to make his sound rock a bit harder. On the session with him were two up-and-comers, bass guitarist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham.
Page didn't have a job to offer either of them, as Dreja and McCarty were happy in the Yardbirds. But Bonham did have a lead for Page: a singer he had worked with a band called Earth, named Robert Plant. Page went to hear him, was knocked out, and promptly hired him on as the new lead vocalist.
And thus the Yardbirds' lineup was finally settled, into the band that would go on to become one of the biggest acts in rock and produce a long string of classic albums: Dazed and Confused (1968), Lead Zeppelin (1969; named after a joke from Keith Moon that the new Yardbirds lineup would go over like the biggest lead balloon ever, "a right lead Zeppelin"); Rough and Ready (1970); The Runes Album (1971); Houses of the Holy (1973); Physical Graffiti (1975); Presence (1976); In Through the Out Door (1979); Wired (1981); Coda (1983); and Blow by Blow (1985).
The Kinks, The Who, and The Yardbirds
The Kinks were one of the most successful groups to come out of the British Invasion that landed in North America in 1964 in the wake of the Beatles. One advantage they had going for them was their manager, Ian Lawson [OOC: the grandson of an Englishman who didn't get killed in the shorter and less bloody World War I]. Lawson, a young hustler in the mold of Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager, or Kit Lambert, the Who's manager, easily pushed aside the ineffectual Robert Wace, a rich kid who was basically "slumming" by managing the group, in early 1964 and took over management of the Kinks. His hustling got their debut single, "You Really Got Me," to have sufficient radio airplay in the States to take it to Number One on the Billboard charts in December 1964.
When the group arrived for their debut American tour that following summer, Lawson was right at their side; he chuckled to himself at a recent conversation he'd had with Wace, who told Lawson he'd have stayed in London and let the road manager handle accompanying the group on tour. "What a bloody idiot," Lawson thought; "what if something happens to the group? Epstein would NEVER do that to the Beatles, and I bloody well won't do that to the Kinks." And a good thing it was that he was there, too, for on the Fourth of July weekend, when the Kinks were in Hollywood to tape an appearance on a Dick Clark TV special for the holiday, an official of the union that covered the backstage crews, lighting technicians and so forth, chose to pick an argument with the Kinks' Ray Davies when the group showed up late for rehearsal, berating him for how "you Limeys" were supposedly taking work away from American bands (utter nonsense). Before things could get out of hand, Lawson grabbed Clark and got him to pull the union official aside, while Lawson took Davies to his dressing room and calmed him down. It's entirely possible that if they hadn't been separated, a fistfight might have broken out, one that would have led the union to refusing to work with the Kinks, effectively banning them from live appearances in the States - and thus devastating their record sales there. Lawson found the union official and stuffed $20 bills into his hand until he shut up and went away. The show proceeded without incident.
The Kinks' popularity continued to grow through 1965 and 1966, until in the fall of '66 they topped the US charts again with "Sunny Afternoon," proving that the success of their debut single hadn't been a fluke. Their quirkiness and their celebration of the joys ordinary people found in their lives brought a dimension to the music of the Sixties it might have lacked otherwise, and they ended up scoring a total of six additional Number Ones in the US: "Waterloo Sunset" (1967), "Days" (1968), "Lola" (1970), "Celluloid Heroes" (1972), "Jukebox Music" (1977), and "Come Dancing" (1983).
Their success also brought about increased exposure for opening acts on two of their tours: one which had already had hits in the United States, and one which was virtually unknown: respectively, the Yardbirds and the Who.
When, just before the Kinks' fall 1966 North American tour, Ray Davies learned that Kit Lambert, the manager of the Who, had finagled his group into opening for the Kinks, Ray refused to speak to Ian Lawson for two weeks. No wonder; hardly anyone familiar with them wanted to be in the position of following the Who onstage.
Their frenetic stage act - Pete Townshend madly windmilling his right arm as he slashed out chords, Roger Daltrey twirling the microphone cord like a lasso, Keith Moon's hell-for-leather attack on his drum set, even John Entwistle's standing stock still as he played, as if he'd seen it all done better; enhanced throughout with smoke bombs, filmstrips, and the loudest amplifiers any rock band had yet seen fit to use; and capped off with Townshend smashing his guitar to pieces and Moon kicking over and trashing his drums - had already made them major stars in Europe, though they'd had yet to break in North America. Townshend didn't always smash his guitar these days - it had gotten to be way too expensive - but Ray Davies knew he would surely do so on the Who's American debut, opening for the Kinks.
Lawson managed to get Lambert to agree to withdraw all but nine of the bookings, but Lambert insisted on keeping those nine, threatening a lawsuit if the Who were dropped. In the end, Lawson relented.
The nine dates on the tour where the Who opened for the Kinks turned out to be one of those "you should have been" there moments in popular music history. The Who poured it on, turning their act (not to mention their sound) to the highest volume they could, determined to make the most of this chance. The Kinks were equally determined not to be upstaged, and likewise they pulled out all the stops, with Ray Davies' mincing and teasing of the girls in the audience and his brother Dave's guitar-hero moves keyed up as if on steroids.
In the end, of course, both groups benefited: the Kinks got to Number One again with "Sunny Afternoon"; the Who, unknown at the beginning of the tour, were by the time they departed for England greeted at the airport by the mid-Sixties' most prominent sign of popular approval: a phalanx of screaming girls.
Decca Records, somewhat belatedly, realized the opportunity on their hands, and re-released as a single "Substitute," which had flopped earlier in the year, in the States. It climbed to Number 9 on the charts in January 1967, giving the Who their first big hit in the US. That fall, the Who, having toured incessantly during the past year, finally scored their first US Number One with "I Can See for Miles."
The Who were ever-inventive, too, and the following year they started work on the first "rock opera," as they called it, the story of a deaf, dumb, and blind boy named Tommy and his search for spiritual Truth. Tommy would launch the Who into the stratosphere, and they would record two more rock operas, Lifehouse in 1971 and Quadrophenia in 1973. Ray Davies having reconciled with Townshend, he drew inspiration from the Who, and the Kinks entered the rock opera sweepstakes too, with Arthur (1969), Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround (1970), Preservation Acts 1 and 2 (1973-74), the aptly-named Soap Opera (1975), and Schoolboys in Disgrace (1975).
The Kinks, however, were careful never to book the Who as an opening act again. In 1967, though, their opening slot would be occupied by a band in need of a shot in the arm: the Yardbirds.
The 60s version of the Yardbirds was in so many ways a band before their time. They played long blues jams before anyone else; they featured the lead guitar in a way few had thought of doing; they mixed psychedelic, heavy, bluesy chord progressions with oddball ideas, including everything from a Gregorian-chant-like melody ("Still I'm Sad") to an acid-rock lead-guitar freak-out with lead singer Keith Relf muttering and cackling deep in the mix ("Happenings Ten Years Time Ago"). In the States, they'd had two Top Ten hits in 1965, "For Your Love" and "Heart Full of Soul."
But their biggest problem all the way up to 1968 was the instability of their lineup; they kept losing and replacing key members, and with every change the band's basic sound would alter, so their musical vision tended to get muddied. The first big change was in 1965, when Eric Clapton, then a blues purist, objected to the commercialism of "For Your Love" and its attempt at a hit single, and quit the band. (Another year of "purism" convinced Clapton that being a rock star wasn't such a bad idea after all.) Jeff Beck replaced Clapton as lead guitarist.
Then, in late 1966, Paul Samwell-Smith, the bass player, decided to quit. Guitarist Chris Dreja moved to bass, and renowned session guitarist Jimmy Page came in as his replacement. This should have led to a big ego fight between Beck and Page, given how highly each thought of his own talents, but instead, the intervention of, among others, Andrew Oldham - the man who had passed on the Rolling Stones - talked the two of them into not throwing away a good thing. They instead worked out, over the rest of 1966 and into 1967, a dual-guitar attack that made the Yardbirds' sound truly unique. This was first reflected in their next album, Little Games, which came out in July 1967.
The membership flux had hurt their career, though, and they might well have faded into the sunset, had not Ian Lawson agreed with their manager, Graham Gouldman, to book the Yardbirds as the opening act for the Kinks' summer 1967 tour. The Yardbirds' sets, with Beck and Page trading guitar solos and smoothly augmenting one another rather than trying to walk all over each other, drew renewed attention to the band, enough to get the title track of their new album, "Little Games," into the American Top Ten.
They recorded another album, Truth, with this lineup, but then one more change came along: the singer, Keith Relf, had been growing more interested in folk and classical sounds as opposed to the heavy rock the Yardbirds were playing, and ultimately decided to leave the band to form another outfit, Renaissance. Page, Beck, Dreja and drummer Jim McCarty were nonplussed - just when they were beginning to have a consistent sound, they would now lose their lead singer? - but they at least managed to convince Relf to stick around long enough to finish the band's 1968 tour. In the meantime, they began shopping for a new lead singer - preferably an unknown, who would fit the Yardbirds' style.
Page still continued to take the occasional session gig, less now for the money than for fun and to hone his skills. He played on sessions for Donovan's 1968 album Hurdy Gurdy Man, wherein the Scottish flower-power folk singer was attempting to make his sound rock a bit harder. On the session with him were two up-and-comers, bass guitarist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham.
Page didn't have a job to offer either of them, as Dreja and McCarty were happy in the Yardbirds. But Bonham did have a lead for Page: a singer he had worked with a band called Earth, named Robert Plant. Page went to hear him, was knocked out, and promptly hired him on as the new lead vocalist.
And thus the Yardbirds' lineup was finally settled, into the band that would go on to become one of the biggest acts in rock and produce a long string of classic albums: Dazed and Confused (1968), Lead Zeppelin (1969; named after a joke from Keith Moon that the new Yardbirds lineup would go over like the biggest lead balloon ever, "a right lead Zeppelin"); Rough and Ready (1970); The Runes Album (1971); Houses of the Holy (1973); Physical Graffiti (1975); Presence (1976); In Through the Out Door (1979); Wired (1981); Coda (1983); and Blow by Blow (1985).
And one more:
The Beach Boys
In September 1965, in response to Capitol Records' request for a holiday release and to buy time for the elaborate new album he had been dreaming up (which ultimately became Pet Sounds), Brian Wilson recorded a group of tracks that basically involved the group fooling around in the studio, to be released as The Beach Boys' Party. However, Derek Taylor, who had been doing dual work for the Beatles and the Beach Boys as press officer, slipped Brian an early demo in October of "Norwegian Wood," a song John Lennon had written and the Beatles were working on for their next album. Brian was deeply entranced by the hypnotic, surreal folk-rock music, which - ever conscious of his own constant ambition to match the Beatles at every turn - he compared to the Party album tapes, the latter coming out unfavorably. "Here's the Beatles doing real music," he later told a interviewer, "and here's us screwing around. It didn't sound like we were a serious act. It would have been a step backward." Brian decided to chuck the Party album.
When he got the expected annoyed phone calls from Capitol, Brian suggested that Capitol release one of the tracks, "Barbara Ann," that Brian considered salvageable, as a single, with a new song, "The Little Girl I Once Knew," on the B-side. The latter track had moments where the music came to a dead stop, which would have irritated radio programmers, who don't like dead air; but as a B-side, that was less of an issue. Brian further suggested that Capitol make both songs the highlight of a Best of the Beach Boys set, which could be the holiday release. Capitol, grudgingly, agreed. What Brian didn't tell Capitol was that a greatest hits collection also nicely drew a line under the group's surfing-and-cars era, allowing Brian to work on the more ambitious music of Pet Sounds, and without a greatest hits collection competing with it on the charts.
Pet Sounds was released in May 1966, and - as the Beach Boys' first all-new album since Summer Days (And Summer Nights) the previous July - went gold, reaching #3 on the album charts. It produced three hit singles: "Sloop John B," "Wouldn't It Be Nice," and "God Only Knows," all of which made the Top Ten on the Billboard singles chart. Capitol, though nervous about Brian's new direction, seemed satisfied - after all, the fans appeared to be buying the new music - and Brian's reputation was greatly enhanced by the critical appraisal of his new music. It leaked out that Paul McCartney's reaction was, "This is the greatest album of all time. What the hell are we [Beatles] going to do [to match it]?"
The success of the album also bought time for Brian to go for some medical treatment - the Beach Boys' press office covered it up, but it was mental treatment. Brian was concerned about his deepening paranoia and disconnection from reality, plus his increasing fear and sense of a lack of confidence, and more than anything else he wanted an end to the voices he was hearing in his head, with increasing frequency, saying they were going to "get" him.
Fortunately, Brian had the good fortune of living in Los Angeles, in North America, and once again the Amigos' world leadership - this time in the area of treatment of mental illness, a product of psychological damage suffered by soldiers in World War II - proved its value. Brian, after a brief few days of being checked inside the hospital and about two months of outpatient care - to be supplemented by ongoing treatment - wasn't completely rid of the voices, but now he was clear that they were coming from his own brain and should be ignored. Hallucinogenic drugs, he was told, would only intensify the voices and his other problems as well, so he abandoned the use of LSD and marijuana. As his confidence returned, so did his conviction that he could be creative without relying on drugs.
The single "Good Vibrations," perhaps his most elaborate piece yet, was completed in the fall and rose to the top position on the Billboard chart, vindicating for Brian that his new experimental music was just as popular as the old surfing sounds. Capitol, though, was still ambivalent, and pressed Brian for a new album, but Brian now had the confidence to dig in his heels and do the next album the way he wanted it to sound. He was also confident enough now to overcome the objections within his own band, in particular from Mike Love, who objected to "fucking with the formula." When Love confronted lyricist Van Dyke Parks over the meaning of the lyrics to one of the new songs, "Cabinessence," Brian convinced Parks to stand up for his work, and Love gave in.
Smile, the Beach Boys' masterpiece, was finally released in April 1967, two months before the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper, and it quickly gained the sort of cachet as a true work of art that would also attach itself to the Beatles' upcoming album. Brian Wilson was once and for all vindicated as a true artist, which pleased him immensely and helped him remain confident. He was in fact confident enough now to finally rejoin the group on stage, at least for a special occasion - like the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. Brian's stunning performance with the group of "Surf's Up," the climactic closer of Smile, was impressive enough to make it into D.A. Pennebaker's Monterey Pop film.
The Beach Boys, like everyone else, drew back their ambitions a bit after completing Smile, but their hip status was never in doubt, and the quality of their records continued unabated. Best of all, a calmer, more peaceful, happier Brian Wilson, free of drugs, found his life much more enjoyable in the years to come.
The Beach Boys
In September 1965, in response to Capitol Records' request for a holiday release and to buy time for the elaborate new album he had been dreaming up (which ultimately became Pet Sounds), Brian Wilson recorded a group of tracks that basically involved the group fooling around in the studio, to be released as The Beach Boys' Party. However, Derek Taylor, who had been doing dual work for the Beatles and the Beach Boys as press officer, slipped Brian an early demo in October of "Norwegian Wood," a song John Lennon had written and the Beatles were working on for their next album. Brian was deeply entranced by the hypnotic, surreal folk-rock music, which - ever conscious of his own constant ambition to match the Beatles at every turn - he compared to the Party album tapes, the latter coming out unfavorably. "Here's the Beatles doing real music," he later told a interviewer, "and here's us screwing around. It didn't sound like we were a serious act. It would have been a step backward." Brian decided to chuck the Party album.
When he got the expected annoyed phone calls from Capitol, Brian suggested that Capitol release one of the tracks, "Barbara Ann," that Brian considered salvageable, as a single, with a new song, "The Little Girl I Once Knew," on the B-side. The latter track had moments where the music came to a dead stop, which would have irritated radio programmers, who don't like dead air; but as a B-side, that was less of an issue. Brian further suggested that Capitol make both songs the highlight of a Best of the Beach Boys set, which could be the holiday release. Capitol, grudgingly, agreed. What Brian didn't tell Capitol was that a greatest hits collection also nicely drew a line under the group's surfing-and-cars era, allowing Brian to work on the more ambitious music of Pet Sounds, and without a greatest hits collection competing with it on the charts.
Pet Sounds was released in May 1966, and - as the Beach Boys' first all-new album since Summer Days (And Summer Nights) the previous July - went gold, reaching #3 on the album charts. It produced three hit singles: "Sloop John B," "Wouldn't It Be Nice," and "God Only Knows," all of which made the Top Ten on the Billboard singles chart. Capitol, though nervous about Brian's new direction, seemed satisfied - after all, the fans appeared to be buying the new music - and Brian's reputation was greatly enhanced by the critical appraisal of his new music. It leaked out that Paul McCartney's reaction was, "This is the greatest album of all time. What the hell are we [Beatles] going to do [to match it]?"
The success of the album also bought time for Brian to go for some medical treatment - the Beach Boys' press office covered it up, but it was mental treatment. Brian was concerned about his deepening paranoia and disconnection from reality, plus his increasing fear and sense of a lack of confidence, and more than anything else he wanted an end to the voices he was hearing in his head, with increasing frequency, saying they were going to "get" him.
Fortunately, Brian had the good fortune of living in Los Angeles, in North America, and once again the Amigos' world leadership - this time in the area of treatment of mental illness, a product of psychological damage suffered by soldiers in World War II - proved its value. Brian, after a brief few days of being checked inside the hospital and about two months of outpatient care - to be supplemented by ongoing treatment - wasn't completely rid of the voices, but now he was clear that they were coming from his own brain and should be ignored. Hallucinogenic drugs, he was told, would only intensify the voices and his other problems as well, so he abandoned the use of LSD and marijuana. As his confidence returned, so did his conviction that he could be creative without relying on drugs.
The single "Good Vibrations," perhaps his most elaborate piece yet, was completed in the fall and rose to the top position on the Billboard chart, vindicating for Brian that his new experimental music was just as popular as the old surfing sounds. Capitol, though, was still ambivalent, and pressed Brian for a new album, but Brian now had the confidence to dig in his heels and do the next album the way he wanted it to sound. He was also confident enough now to overcome the objections within his own band, in particular from Mike Love, who objected to "fucking with the formula." When Love confronted lyricist Van Dyke Parks over the meaning of the lyrics to one of the new songs, "Cabinessence," Brian convinced Parks to stand up for his work, and Love gave in.
Smile, the Beach Boys' masterpiece, was finally released in April 1967, two months before the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper, and it quickly gained the sort of cachet as a true work of art that would also attach itself to the Beatles' upcoming album. Brian Wilson was once and for all vindicated as a true artist, which pleased him immensely and helped him remain confident. He was in fact confident enough now to finally rejoin the group on stage, at least for a special occasion - like the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. Brian's stunning performance with the group of "Surf's Up," the climactic closer of Smile, was impressive enough to make it into D.A. Pennebaker's Monterey Pop film.
The Beach Boys, like everyone else, drew back their ambitions a bit after completing Smile, but their hip status was never in doubt, and the quality of their records continued unabated. Best of all, a calmer, more peaceful, happier Brian Wilson, free of drugs, found his life much more enjoyable in the years to come.
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Not a whole lot, but see the earlier posts on the Beatles and Rolling Stones for details.
State of the Amigos
By 1975, the world of the Amigos had shifted dramatically from its late-1950s nadir amidst the energy crisis and the massive pitfalls of the Cold War era. And while things hadn't always gone entirely to the benefit of the Amigos, and economically they were now facing an increasing onslaught of competition from multiple sources (primarily Asia and Western Europe, both of which had seen dramatic rebuilding in the previous thirty years), it wasn't by any means bad or troubled, and the growth of the nuclear and transportation industries that had defined the 1960s was giving way to the fruits of that labor in the 70s, with several industries that had been hit hard by the crisis and growing competition - electronics, steel and aluminum production, shipbuilding, food processing, tourism - seeing a dramatic rebirth in North America as the number of travelers grew, trade agreements resulted in greater trade between the Amigos themselves and the world and the advancement of air travel made tourism and travel a much greater industry than before. In addition to that, the Baby Boomer generation, having cut their teeth in making the world a better place through smaller efforts in the 1960s, would in the 1970s and 1980s dramatically up the ante as their desire to improve the world remained, but the resources they could call on to seek the changes to the world grew dramatically.
In America, institutional racism died its last breaths in the 1950s as hundreds of thousands of black GIs went into the workforce alongside whites and proved their worth, in the process helping to forge the Baby Boomers' immense disdain for racial bigotry in general. This disdain had by then ended the racism directed at Latino Americans and Native Americans (who would through the 1950s and 1960s increasingly adopt the "First Nations" moniker than had been a part of Canada's conversation with Native Canadians since the early 1900s) and Asian Americans had by and large already carved out their own places in American society. The end of the institutional racism fights merely shifted the goalposts to the women's rights movements and those towards LGBT rights, both of which saw dramatic improvements in the 1960s and 1970s. As these rights grew, the sense that bigotry was nearly a death sentence to one's position in society only grew, and as the Baby Boomers began to become parents them in large numbers in the late 1960s and 1970s, they instilled many of the same values of being loudly against racism into their children, basically dooming the idea of social bigotry being acceptable and making its virtual destruction a matter of time.
Among the Three Amigos, for the most part Canada was the vanguard of new ideas that would rapidly move south to the United States of America and Mexico. One of these that had had the most dramatic effect was Canada's recognition of its "Two Foundational Languages", which had been passed to considerable fanfare by the government of Louis St. Laurent in 1956, which saw the Spanish language get a considerable official recognition in many parts of the United States in the 1960s, starting with the states of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, California, Arizona and Florida, which all began granting the Spanish language official status and began making its government communications in both languages in 1964 and 1965. Mexico returned the favor with English in 1968 ahead of the Mexico City Olympics, aiming to give Mexico a new status among the nations of the English-speaking world. Indeed, the three lingua francas of the Amigos - English, Spanish and French - all saw increasing use across all three Amigos in the 1960s, and in the 1970s most universities and schools of higher learning would make learning one of the other languages a part of the curriculum, particularly in fields involving international travel and relations because of the advantages that such knowledge offered. As more states home to large number of Latino Americans followed their fellow states in the use of Spanish - Texas, Nevada, Georgia, New Mexico, Louisiana and Colorado would follow the other states in the 1960s and 1970s - it also began to be used at the federal level, to the point of America having its first bilingual president in Robert Kennedy, who was inaugurated in January 1985.
The 1970s would on the social front be defined both by the growth of languages, but if one thing defined the decade, it was the "Born For This" generation, named after a famous rock song by Michigan-based rock band Black Rock, which spent over seven months on top of the Billboard charts in the spring, summer and fall of 1971. The "Born For This" generation only pushed forward with what had been developed during the 1960s with the Third Great Awakening, taking the desire to better the world to another level, this movement engendering a sense of individual and collective self-improvement that became one of the hallmarks of the decade. With money being in wide supply, the new nuclear power plants, hydroelectric dams and power infrastructure making energy supplies easy to get and the ever-improving education in both the arts, business and STEM fields making it possible to do things with industry once thought impossible. For the Amigos, this was seen in many dramatic fashions, with the Apollo Project of the 1960s leading to the development of permanent space laboratories and the growth of satellite communication in the 1970s, while the dramatic growth in the recycling of aluminum red mud in Canada and the West Coast of the United States and Mexico in the late 1960s led to a vast supply of high-quality silica glass, which led to the development of fiber optics by General Electric, Western Materials Science, Bell Labs Mexico and Nortel Networks in the 1970s led to the massive growth in the use of fiber-optics-based communications networks in the late 1970s onwards. The building of electrified railroads in the years after the Energy Crisis had seen the extension of the Boston-to-Washington Northeast Corridor system, which had been electrified in its entirety in 1962, extended first to Richmond and Norfolk in 1967, then to Charlotte in 1970 and eventually to Atlanta via Columbia and Augusta in 1974, while the fast-train lines from Chicago to Montreal via Detroit, Kitchener, Toronto and Kingston were, along with the line from Albany to Montreal and Ottawa, completed in time for the 1976 Summer Olympics, which were hosted in Montreal. At the same time as this, Japan's opening of the Tokaido Shinkansen in 1964 had led to a similar system plan being developed in many parts of the Amigos, with the first section of the "American Shinkansen" opened between Miami and Atlanta in 1972, with the San Francisco-Los Angeles section of the California High-Speed Rail System opening in 1976.
What followed the transportation networks and the mass transit developments of the 1960s was countless major urban renewal projects in major cities. Toronto's famed Harbour City, completed in 1965, became the template on how to turn once-neglected portions of major cities into new communities, and with it many cities began vast projects to improve portions of cities once left behind. older industrial plants moved to newer (and in most cases better) locations outside of major cities (but still on transportation networks), leading to major urban renewal efforts. Buffalo, New York's Niagara Park, dedicated in 1964, was another sign of what was to come, and many other developments of similar parks and recreation facilities were part of these renewals, whether it was renewing existing parks like Central Park in New York, Grant Park in Chicago, Stanley Park in Vancouver or Griffith Park in Los Angeles or creating new ones - The Presidio in San Francisco, Sam Houston Park in Houston, Virginia Key in Miami, River Island in Savannah. Major renewal projects tended to take into account existing neighborhoods, resulting in many cases of large new buildings being built in existing poorer neighborhoods and resulting in many cities enacting restrictions meant to preserve many historical places while allowing for the improvement of the local environment. Respecting the fact that the building of such systems gave a sense of both permanence and investment into a place, many of these rebuilt neighborhoods were built with streetcar and light rail systems, and for many cities such vehicles became a part of the urban environment in the 1960s and 1970s. Co-op developments made it possible for those of lesser means to remain in the cities and indeed many of the redeveloped neighborhoods, helping to remove the stigma towards poorer people that had once upon a time been a real problems in the cities of all three Amigos - a stereotype that the Campaign For The Less Fortunate had already reduced that was all but eradicated with the advancement of better social and government support programs in the 1970s and 1980s.
As things improved at home, the reputations of the Amigos improved worldwide as well. The Asia Pacific Treaty Alliance, founded in 1971, included all three Amigos (as well as Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom) and helped develop a rapport among the Pacific Rim nations in a similar way that NATO had done in Europe, and the United States' return of Okinawa to Japan in 1972 helped make a noticable difference in the Japanese views of America. All of Asia saw its economy growth faster than anywhere else in the world in the 1960s and 1970s, helped along by huge exports to North America which, by the 1970s, was seeing more than a few items go back the other way, as the Asians came to rely on Canadian wheat and minerals and Mexican petroleum and fruit, while buying airliners from Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, cars and trucks from the North American automakers (especially in the higher-end fields - by the mid-1970s, if one wanted to show they'd made it in much of Asia, they bought a Cadillac or a Lincoln), farm equipment from Case, Robinson, Allis-Chalmers and Massey-Ferguson and electrical components from General Electric, Westinghouse and Western Electric, even as many of the brands of Asia - Panasonic, Lucky-Goldstar, Evergreen, Pioneer, Sony, Toyota, Samsung, Hyundai - became household names in North America in the 1970s.
As the 1970s went on, the growth of Asia against Europe, the Americas and Australia had created a whole new set of resource challenges, particularly when it came to minerals used in many industries, resulting in a dramatic growth of the development of recycling in the 1970s and 1980s. Initially meant just for the most easily recovered of materials, by the 21st Century that had changed a lot, with virtually all metals being recyclable, though how much varied by location and the metals in question. Environmental concerns led to the development by Alcoa, Alcan, Empresa de Aluminio de México and Kaiser Materials of the Evans Process for the refining of red mud waste from aluminum refining into useful materials, recovering iron, silicon, titanium dioxide, kaolinite and tricalcium aluminate (the latter being a key component of Portland Cement) as well as massively reducing the waste products left over from aluminum production. By the late 1980s, the Evans Process was de rigueur for aluminum production in the West and in many parts of Asia, and the idea of recycling was creating some massive companies out of it. It was just one way there was major developments going on in the world of materials science - and by the late 1970s, carbon fiber was one of the materials of the future, and it was another where the Amigos led the way, with many industries specializing in carbon fiber locating near the best sources of it, with the Front Range of Colorado, northern Alberta and eastern Pennsylvania (the former two for access to carbon from refined petroleum from oil shale and oil sands and the latter from Pennsylvania's high-quality anthracite) being the largest centers of the industry. Going with the recycling industries came the massive growth of environmental mediation as an industry, which began in California and northern Mexico as well as the Northeastern United States and saw major nexuses of the industry located in places that needed the help the most, particularly in the long-industrialized American Northeast and eastern Canada.
Ultimately by the late 1970s the concerns about pollution had resulted in many major industrial industries and power plants recovering materials from their exhaust, the cost of emissions reduction equipment required by laws in the Amigos and the desires of many of its incoming managers counteracting the costs of doing so, but as demand for many of the recovered products grew (particularly sulfuric acid and bulk carbon dioxide) it became ever more cost effective to do this, and by the 1980s as said regulations got ever-more-strict and energy efficiency made it easier to recover what otherwise would have been waste, even major facilities like chemical plants and oil refineries began to be built inside of enclosed structures. to reduce emissions. In addition to this, as the second generation of nuclear reactors began entering service in the 1960s and the development of fast breeder and molten-salt reactors meant usable reactors began to enter service in the 1970s, the economics of nuclear power stations (even when accounting for higher uranium prices) began to eclipse many coal and gas-fueled power stations, so much so that many coal-fired power stations began to be shut down as uneconomic in the mid to late 1970s, as the rising demand for coal for synthetic fuel drove demand to those places rather than burning it for power. As this happened, many of these facilities found new lives as everything from incinerators and industrial facilities to convention centers and movie studios.
The auto industry, changed forever by the energy crisis and then with those changes driven home by the technological advancements of the 1960s, helped with this dramatically. Cars from the North American makers got lighter and gained countless driving improvements - rack and pinion steering, disc brakes, double-wishbone and multilink suspension, radial tires - and the development of better engines and drivetrains in the 1960s made cars both faster and more efficient, and after countless failed attempt, the success of the "Pony cars" of the 1960s - the AMC Javelin, Ford Mustang, Westland Kalahari and the Plymouth Barracuda and Dodge Challenger and Chevrolet Camaro and Pontiac Firebird pairs - led to a general shrinking of cars made in Detroit in the 1960s, even up to including Cadillac, Lincoln, Packard and Pierce-Arrow luxury cars. The Chevrolet Corvair sports coupe became a hit in Europe after it began being sold there in 1966 - many European writers compared it favorably with the Porsche 911, which shared some aspects of its design, though the Corvair cost half as much even in Europe - and the car industry of the 1960s made a point of providing many new designs for every conceivable need or want from a customer, with the pony cars and the bigger "muscle cars" of the era being joined by the "sport sedans" that in many cases came from Europe (the BMW 2002, Triumph 2000 and Dolomite and Alfa Romeo Giulia being notable examples of these, though it wouldn't be long before others emulated this) and ever-improving variants of fun cars in other categories, such as the car-based pickups in the Chevrolet El Camino and Ford Ranchero (which would be copied both at home and abroad) and the first off-roaders meant for fun in the forms of the Jeep CJ Renegade, Ford Bronco, Chevrolet Blazer and International Scout 800. Even as the Detroit small cars got better, the Japanese automakers were able to get a foothold in North America in the 1970s, and they rapidly showed off what they could do in terms of enthusiast cars, with the Datsun 240Z becoming one of the best-known sports cars of the 1970s and cars like the Datsun 510 and Toyota Celica becoming status symbols in their own right. By the early 1970s, the technological advancement was being directed into all-aluminum engines (which Chrysler had been technically doing since 1960, but others hadn't quite caught on yet), turbodiesel engines, bodywork made from fiberglass and aluminum, improved gas engine efficiency, better aerodynamics and anti-lock brakes, the latter of which was first seen on the new-for-1968 Chevrolet Corvette and Camaro Z/28 and which rapidly spread across the GM world, soon to be followed by the rest of the industry. Even as the Boomers became parents, this desire for cars they could enjoy never went away, it just changed form into cars that could be used for other purposes.
The first commercial microprocessor, the famous Intel 4004, was introduced in 1969 to considerable fanfare, and over the 1970s the world of electronics rapidly evolved, with the first personal computers to land on the market, in the form of the "Trio of '76" computers in the Apple II, Commodore PET and Tandy TRS-80, which all launched in 1976 and became huge sellers in the market, even as the three companies went in dramatically different directions in the 1980s. The growth of computers also was joined by the first commercially-available video cassette players in both VHS and Betamax form, dramatic improvements in home audio systems, a massive swell in the use of cable and the first commercial satellite television systems, the development of the first cellular phones and the first video game consoles in the likes of the Atari 2600. One particularly oh-so-70s trend in electronics was the explosion in the use of citizens' band (CB) two-way radios in the second half of the 1970s, to the fact that both American and Japanese makers began offering such radios installed from the factory. While much of the CB boom would die off by the early 1980s, it became the precursor to the Family Radio Service, which was legalized through joint agreement in the Amigos in 1988, and the desire to have better mobile communications led to the growth in the use of mobile telephones in the 1980s.
With the growth in the electronics industry came a dramatic new industry in North America that soon came to have vast numbers of jobs. Major universities with highly-active computer science departments - Stanford, UC San Francisco, MIT, Penn State, Cornell, UT Austin, Waterloo, Queens, ITESM, Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara - usually became the genesis of many of these industries, and by the late 1970s the San Francisco Bay Area of California had gained the nickname "Silicon Valley", which led to countless other "Silicon" locations in many parts of the Amigos and the world. Enticed by a major investment from the Province of Ontario's Trillium Natural Resources Fund, Commodore relocated from the Bay Area to Waterloo, Ontario, in 1984, while IBM funded the development of a major center for computer science at Georgia Tech in its hometown of Atlanta, Georgia (which became the genesis of another such hub of electronics industries) and Mexico's General Computer Corporation, Kaleidah Labs and Grupo Electrónica Ricardo became players in the industry in their own right. While the Amigos were quick off the mark in the electronics industries, the Japanese in particular were quick to catch up, and by the 1990s the battles for the world's supremacy in the field of electronics was one fought between great corporations of the Amigos and those of Japan and Korea, with both sides winning some and losing some.
By 1975, the world of the Amigos had shifted dramatically from its late-1950s nadir amidst the energy crisis and the massive pitfalls of the Cold War era. And while things hadn't always gone entirely to the benefit of the Amigos, and economically they were now facing an increasing onslaught of competition from multiple sources (primarily Asia and Western Europe, both of which had seen dramatic rebuilding in the previous thirty years), it wasn't by any means bad or troubled, and the growth of the nuclear and transportation industries that had defined the 1960s was giving way to the fruits of that labor in the 70s, with several industries that had been hit hard by the crisis and growing competition - electronics, steel and aluminum production, shipbuilding, food processing, tourism - seeing a dramatic rebirth in North America as the number of travelers grew, trade agreements resulted in greater trade between the Amigos themselves and the world and the advancement of air travel made tourism and travel a much greater industry than before. In addition to that, the Baby Boomer generation, having cut their teeth in making the world a better place through smaller efforts in the 1960s, would in the 1970s and 1980s dramatically up the ante as their desire to improve the world remained, but the resources they could call on to seek the changes to the world grew dramatically.
In America, institutional racism died its last breaths in the 1950s as hundreds of thousands of black GIs went into the workforce alongside whites and proved their worth, in the process helping to forge the Baby Boomers' immense disdain for racial bigotry in general. This disdain had by then ended the racism directed at Latino Americans and Native Americans (who would through the 1950s and 1960s increasingly adopt the "First Nations" moniker than had been a part of Canada's conversation with Native Canadians since the early 1900s) and Asian Americans had by and large already carved out their own places in American society. The end of the institutional racism fights merely shifted the goalposts to the women's rights movements and those towards LGBT rights, both of which saw dramatic improvements in the 1960s and 1970s. As these rights grew, the sense that bigotry was nearly a death sentence to one's position in society only grew, and as the Baby Boomers began to become parents them in large numbers in the late 1960s and 1970s, they instilled many of the same values of being loudly against racism into their children, basically dooming the idea of social bigotry being acceptable and making its virtual destruction a matter of time.
Among the Three Amigos, for the most part Canada was the vanguard of new ideas that would rapidly move south to the United States of America and Mexico. One of these that had had the most dramatic effect was Canada's recognition of its "Two Foundational Languages", which had been passed to considerable fanfare by the government of Louis St. Laurent in 1956, which saw the Spanish language get a considerable official recognition in many parts of the United States in the 1960s, starting with the states of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, California, Arizona and Florida, which all began granting the Spanish language official status and began making its government communications in both languages in 1964 and 1965. Mexico returned the favor with English in 1968 ahead of the Mexico City Olympics, aiming to give Mexico a new status among the nations of the English-speaking world. Indeed, the three lingua francas of the Amigos - English, Spanish and French - all saw increasing use across all three Amigos in the 1960s, and in the 1970s most universities and schools of higher learning would make learning one of the other languages a part of the curriculum, particularly in fields involving international travel and relations because of the advantages that such knowledge offered. As more states home to large number of Latino Americans followed their fellow states in the use of Spanish - Texas, Nevada, Georgia, New Mexico, Louisiana and Colorado would follow the other states in the 1960s and 1970s - it also began to be used at the federal level, to the point of America having its first bilingual president in Robert Kennedy, who was inaugurated in January 1985.
The 1970s would on the social front be defined both by the growth of languages, but if one thing defined the decade, it was the "Born For This" generation, named after a famous rock song by Michigan-based rock band Black Rock, which spent over seven months on top of the Billboard charts in the spring, summer and fall of 1971. The "Born For This" generation only pushed forward with what had been developed during the 1960s with the Third Great Awakening, taking the desire to better the world to another level, this movement engendering a sense of individual and collective self-improvement that became one of the hallmarks of the decade. With money being in wide supply, the new nuclear power plants, hydroelectric dams and power infrastructure making energy supplies easy to get and the ever-improving education in both the arts, business and STEM fields making it possible to do things with industry once thought impossible. For the Amigos, this was seen in many dramatic fashions, with the Apollo Project of the 1960s leading to the development of permanent space laboratories and the growth of satellite communication in the 1970s, while the dramatic growth in the recycling of aluminum red mud in Canada and the West Coast of the United States and Mexico in the late 1960s led to a vast supply of high-quality silica glass, which led to the development of fiber optics by General Electric, Western Materials Science, Bell Labs Mexico and Nortel Networks in the 1970s led to the massive growth in the use of fiber-optics-based communications networks in the late 1970s onwards. The building of electrified railroads in the years after the Energy Crisis had seen the extension of the Boston-to-Washington Northeast Corridor system, which had been electrified in its entirety in 1962, extended first to Richmond and Norfolk in 1967, then to Charlotte in 1970 and eventually to Atlanta via Columbia and Augusta in 1974, while the fast-train lines from Chicago to Montreal via Detroit, Kitchener, Toronto and Kingston were, along with the line from Albany to Montreal and Ottawa, completed in time for the 1976 Summer Olympics, which were hosted in Montreal. At the same time as this, Japan's opening of the Tokaido Shinkansen in 1964 had led to a similar system plan being developed in many parts of the Amigos, with the first section of the "American Shinkansen" opened between Miami and Atlanta in 1972, with the San Francisco-Los Angeles section of the California High-Speed Rail System opening in 1976.
What followed the transportation networks and the mass transit developments of the 1960s was countless major urban renewal projects in major cities. Toronto's famed Harbour City, completed in 1965, became the template on how to turn once-neglected portions of major cities into new communities, and with it many cities began vast projects to improve portions of cities once left behind. older industrial plants moved to newer (and in most cases better) locations outside of major cities (but still on transportation networks), leading to major urban renewal efforts. Buffalo, New York's Niagara Park, dedicated in 1964, was another sign of what was to come, and many other developments of similar parks and recreation facilities were part of these renewals, whether it was renewing existing parks like Central Park in New York, Grant Park in Chicago, Stanley Park in Vancouver or Griffith Park in Los Angeles or creating new ones - The Presidio in San Francisco, Sam Houston Park in Houston, Virginia Key in Miami, River Island in Savannah. Major renewal projects tended to take into account existing neighborhoods, resulting in many cases of large new buildings being built in existing poorer neighborhoods and resulting in many cities enacting restrictions meant to preserve many historical places while allowing for the improvement of the local environment. Respecting the fact that the building of such systems gave a sense of both permanence and investment into a place, many of these rebuilt neighborhoods were built with streetcar and light rail systems, and for many cities such vehicles became a part of the urban environment in the 1960s and 1970s. Co-op developments made it possible for those of lesser means to remain in the cities and indeed many of the redeveloped neighborhoods, helping to remove the stigma towards poorer people that had once upon a time been a real problems in the cities of all three Amigos - a stereotype that the Campaign For The Less Fortunate had already reduced that was all but eradicated with the advancement of better social and government support programs in the 1970s and 1980s.
As things improved at home, the reputations of the Amigos improved worldwide as well. The Asia Pacific Treaty Alliance, founded in 1971, included all three Amigos (as well as Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom) and helped develop a rapport among the Pacific Rim nations in a similar way that NATO had done in Europe, and the United States' return of Okinawa to Japan in 1972 helped make a noticable difference in the Japanese views of America. All of Asia saw its economy growth faster than anywhere else in the world in the 1960s and 1970s, helped along by huge exports to North America which, by the 1970s, was seeing more than a few items go back the other way, as the Asians came to rely on Canadian wheat and minerals and Mexican petroleum and fruit, while buying airliners from Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, cars and trucks from the North American automakers (especially in the higher-end fields - by the mid-1970s, if one wanted to show they'd made it in much of Asia, they bought a Cadillac or a Lincoln), farm equipment from Case, Robinson, Allis-Chalmers and Massey-Ferguson and electrical components from General Electric, Westinghouse and Western Electric, even as many of the brands of Asia - Panasonic, Lucky-Goldstar, Evergreen, Pioneer, Sony, Toyota, Samsung, Hyundai - became household names in North America in the 1970s.
As the 1970s went on, the growth of Asia against Europe, the Americas and Australia had created a whole new set of resource challenges, particularly when it came to minerals used in many industries, resulting in a dramatic growth of the development of recycling in the 1970s and 1980s. Initially meant just for the most easily recovered of materials, by the 21st Century that had changed a lot, with virtually all metals being recyclable, though how much varied by location and the metals in question. Environmental concerns led to the development by Alcoa, Alcan, Empresa de Aluminio de México and Kaiser Materials of the Evans Process for the refining of red mud waste from aluminum refining into useful materials, recovering iron, silicon, titanium dioxide, kaolinite and tricalcium aluminate (the latter being a key component of Portland Cement) as well as massively reducing the waste products left over from aluminum production. By the late 1980s, the Evans Process was de rigueur for aluminum production in the West and in many parts of Asia, and the idea of recycling was creating some massive companies out of it. It was just one way there was major developments going on in the world of materials science - and by the late 1970s, carbon fiber was one of the materials of the future, and it was another where the Amigos led the way, with many industries specializing in carbon fiber locating near the best sources of it, with the Front Range of Colorado, northern Alberta and eastern Pennsylvania (the former two for access to carbon from refined petroleum from oil shale and oil sands and the latter from Pennsylvania's high-quality anthracite) being the largest centers of the industry. Going with the recycling industries came the massive growth of environmental mediation as an industry, which began in California and northern Mexico as well as the Northeastern United States and saw major nexuses of the industry located in places that needed the help the most, particularly in the long-industrialized American Northeast and eastern Canada.
Ultimately by the late 1970s the concerns about pollution had resulted in many major industrial industries and power plants recovering materials from their exhaust, the cost of emissions reduction equipment required by laws in the Amigos and the desires of many of its incoming managers counteracting the costs of doing so, but as demand for many of the recovered products grew (particularly sulfuric acid and bulk carbon dioxide) it became ever more cost effective to do this, and by the 1980s as said regulations got ever-more-strict and energy efficiency made it easier to recover what otherwise would have been waste, even major facilities like chemical plants and oil refineries began to be built inside of enclosed structures. to reduce emissions. In addition to this, as the second generation of nuclear reactors began entering service in the 1960s and the development of fast breeder and molten-salt reactors meant usable reactors began to enter service in the 1970s, the economics of nuclear power stations (even when accounting for higher uranium prices) began to eclipse many coal and gas-fueled power stations, so much so that many coal-fired power stations began to be shut down as uneconomic in the mid to late 1970s, as the rising demand for coal for synthetic fuel drove demand to those places rather than burning it for power. As this happened, many of these facilities found new lives as everything from incinerators and industrial facilities to convention centers and movie studios.
The auto industry, changed forever by the energy crisis and then with those changes driven home by the technological advancements of the 1960s, helped with this dramatically. Cars from the North American makers got lighter and gained countless driving improvements - rack and pinion steering, disc brakes, double-wishbone and multilink suspension, radial tires - and the development of better engines and drivetrains in the 1960s made cars both faster and more efficient, and after countless failed attempt, the success of the "Pony cars" of the 1960s - the AMC Javelin, Ford Mustang, Westland Kalahari and the Plymouth Barracuda and Dodge Challenger and Chevrolet Camaro and Pontiac Firebird pairs - led to a general shrinking of cars made in Detroit in the 1960s, even up to including Cadillac, Lincoln, Packard and Pierce-Arrow luxury cars. The Chevrolet Corvair sports coupe became a hit in Europe after it began being sold there in 1966 - many European writers compared it favorably with the Porsche 911, which shared some aspects of its design, though the Corvair cost half as much even in Europe - and the car industry of the 1960s made a point of providing many new designs for every conceivable need or want from a customer, with the pony cars and the bigger "muscle cars" of the era being joined by the "sport sedans" that in many cases came from Europe (the BMW 2002, Triumph 2000 and Dolomite and Alfa Romeo Giulia being notable examples of these, though it wouldn't be long before others emulated this) and ever-improving variants of fun cars in other categories, such as the car-based pickups in the Chevrolet El Camino and Ford Ranchero (which would be copied both at home and abroad) and the first off-roaders meant for fun in the forms of the Jeep CJ Renegade, Ford Bronco, Chevrolet Blazer and International Scout 800. Even as the Detroit small cars got better, the Japanese automakers were able to get a foothold in North America in the 1970s, and they rapidly showed off what they could do in terms of enthusiast cars, with the Datsun 240Z becoming one of the best-known sports cars of the 1970s and cars like the Datsun 510 and Toyota Celica becoming status symbols in their own right. By the early 1970s, the technological advancement was being directed into all-aluminum engines (which Chrysler had been technically doing since 1960, but others hadn't quite caught on yet), turbodiesel engines, bodywork made from fiberglass and aluminum, improved gas engine efficiency, better aerodynamics and anti-lock brakes, the latter of which was first seen on the new-for-1968 Chevrolet Corvette and Camaro Z/28 and which rapidly spread across the GM world, soon to be followed by the rest of the industry. Even as the Boomers became parents, this desire for cars they could enjoy never went away, it just changed form into cars that could be used for other purposes.
The first commercial microprocessor, the famous Intel 4004, was introduced in 1969 to considerable fanfare, and over the 1970s the world of electronics rapidly evolved, with the first personal computers to land on the market, in the form of the "Trio of '76" computers in the Apple II, Commodore PET and Tandy TRS-80, which all launched in 1976 and became huge sellers in the market, even as the three companies went in dramatically different directions in the 1980s. The growth of computers also was joined by the first commercially-available video cassette players in both VHS and Betamax form, dramatic improvements in home audio systems, a massive swell in the use of cable and the first commercial satellite television systems, the development of the first cellular phones and the first video game consoles in the likes of the Atari 2600. One particularly oh-so-70s trend in electronics was the explosion in the use of citizens' band (CB) two-way radios in the second half of the 1970s, to the fact that both American and Japanese makers began offering such radios installed from the factory. While much of the CB boom would die off by the early 1980s, it became the precursor to the Family Radio Service, which was legalized through joint agreement in the Amigos in 1988, and the desire to have better mobile communications led to the growth in the use of mobile telephones in the 1980s.
With the growth in the electronics industry came a dramatic new industry in North America that soon came to have vast numbers of jobs. Major universities with highly-active computer science departments - Stanford, UC San Francisco, MIT, Penn State, Cornell, UT Austin, Waterloo, Queens, ITESM, Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara - usually became the genesis of many of these industries, and by the late 1970s the San Francisco Bay Area of California had gained the nickname "Silicon Valley", which led to countless other "Silicon" locations in many parts of the Amigos and the world. Enticed by a major investment from the Province of Ontario's Trillium Natural Resources Fund, Commodore relocated from the Bay Area to Waterloo, Ontario, in 1984, while IBM funded the development of a major center for computer science at Georgia Tech in its hometown of Atlanta, Georgia (which became the genesis of another such hub of electronics industries) and Mexico's General Computer Corporation, Kaleidah Labs and Grupo Electrónica Ricardo became players in the industry in their own right. While the Amigos were quick off the mark in the electronics industries, the Japanese in particular were quick to catch up, and by the 1990s the battles for the world's supremacy in the field of electronics was one fought between great corporations of the Amigos and those of Japan and Korea, with both sides winning some and losing some.
Presidential Succession, 1960-1992
A crowded field of Democratic contenders hoped to succeed Marshall Kirk as president in 1960. A rather bruising battle in the primaries that year led to no obvious front runners, as various Democrats jockeyed for position. This ultimately led to a divided Democratic party going into the convention - which was exactly what one of the leading Democratic candidates, Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas, had hoped for. Johnson, who had served as the Democratic leader in the Senate, called in virtually a lifetime's worth of favors to cajole, persuade, entice - and sometimes bully - delegates to his banner. He ended up being nominated on the third ballot.
The obvious Republican choice was Kirk's vice president, Richard Nixon, who had been a relative political novice when he had first been elected as second on the ticket in 1952, but who had already gained a reputation as one of the Senate's staunchest anti-Communists as well as a budding expert on foreign affairs and foreign policy. Nixon had enjoyed a good relationship with President Kirk over the past eight years, and often spoke subsequently of Kirk's leadership qualities and how his mentorship helped Nixon grow in both his political and personal sophistication. Nixon had something of a chip on his shoulder when he first arrived in the Congress, the result of his and his family's struggles in poverty in California early in his lifetime. Kirk, who even in his youth had faced still-prominent racial prejudice from certain people, understood perhaps better than anyone else could have, and helped Nixon see past his issues and put away his bitterness in favor of a growing commitment to helping people throughout the world get ahead.
Still, Nixon was somewhat stiff and awkward in public, although a reasonably good speaker, and the Democrats hoped this would work against him, as a contrast against the sophisticated, commanding presence of Marshall Kirk. But their own candidate, Lyndon Johnson, though fairly good at portraying himself in a "just-folks" manner, had a tendency toward coarseness that came out often enough to be off-putting to a large bloc of voters. He was strong in the South and in some regions of the Midwest, but not really anywhere else, and his support in much of the North was paper-thin, especially in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. Furthermore, he made a severe tactical error by not selecting Hubert Humphrey as his running mate, which cost him vital support in the Midwest - while Nixon made the wiser choice of Senator Everett Dirksen, the popular Illinois senator, which boosted Nixon not only in that state but in neighboring Missouri as well. In New Jersey, the failure of Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts to appear on the national ticket likewise hurt Johnson with Catholic voters, enough so that he trailed Nixon in that vital state.
The results on election night were not quite a landslide, but nonetheless a solid win for Nixon.
The Nixon Administration, even before its ultimate foreign policy triumph in Vietnam, remained popular throughout his first term, as Nixon for the most part carried over the most popular of Kirk's policies, including the efforts toward oil conservation that had begun in the wake of the energy crisis. Kennedy had originally been seen as the front runner for the 1964 nomination, but early that year he went in for experimental surgery on his back problems - a surgery that would finally, at long last, offer him, if not a total cure, then at least a fair amount of relief from his persistent back issues. Unfortunately, though, the lengthy surgery meant he was unavailable for the 1964 Democratic race, so it fell to Humphrey to attempt to unseat Nixon, an effort that was probably doomed to failure from the start, as Nixon cruised to reelection.
By 1968, though, voter fatigue after sixteen years of Republicans in the White House had begun to take the bloom off the rose. Furthermore, a growing sense on the part of conservative Republican voters that the party had drifted too far from its roots had begun to take hold. The result was a tough fight in the primaries, with the standard-bearer of the Republican liberals, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, facing off against Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the leading conservative in the party at the time. Goldwater ultimately won the nomination, but found himself in a tough general election battle against Senator Kennedy, who had finally won the Democratic nomination. Goldwater and Kennedy respected each other, and Goldwater had hoped for a series of nationwide debates with Kennedy, touching on such areas as Kennedy's support of government funding toward rail passenger service and toward the further development of nuclear power, both areas which the Massachusetts Senator had come to embrace during his eight years awaiting the chance to seek the White House. In the event, though, only one televised debate was held, and it backfired on Goldwater - Kennedy came across as calm and collected, explaining his positions well, whereas Goldwater committed a major gaffe by saying that the victory in Vietnam "didn't go far enough." What, exactly, did that mean, voters wondered - that the United States should have moved against China? The Middle East? Russia? Goldwater tried unsuccessfully to walk back the comment, but that in turn simply meant that he spent the rest of the campaign trying to explain it, while the incident enhanced his perhaps undeserved reputation as a hothead. His chances were worsened when his running mate - the governor of Maryland, Spiro Agnew, a liberal and former supporter of Rockefeller chosen to balance the ticket - faced accusations of corruption. The election was Kennedy's to lose at that point - and he did nothing of the sort.
The centrist policies and results of Kennedy's first term made him immensely popular, and most major Republicans found reasons not to try a run against him in 1972, with the Republicans ultimately having to settle for the Ohio Governor James Rhodes. The governor was a colorless character compared to the charismatic Kennedy, and was never able to excite the public with any sense of ideas or vision. The result was an easy win for Kennedy.
The Republicans had a better opportunity in 1976, as concerns over government intervention in the economy, and the regulation and bureaucracy that came with it, being a drag on the economy had begun to grow. This was fertile ground for a conservative, even one who had over the years moved far enough to the center to become a major supporter of California's newly-minted high-speed rail initiative - namely, Governor Ronald Reagan. There were some on the Democratic side who had hoped to keep the Kennedy magic alive by nominating his younger brother, Robert, who had served as Secretary of State and virtually as co-president during his brother's term of office; but RFK demurred, believing he should gain experience of public office in order to be credible in his own right to the American people, who might otherwise see him as simply a would-be dynastic successor. Toward that end, RFK would be elected to the Senate from New York in 1978. The Democrats hoped to retain some of the Kennedy magic by selecting Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine as their candidate. But Muskie had a short temper and an angry mien that contrasted badly with ex-actor Reagan's ability to project himself as a friendly, folksy type, and in November the voters went with Reagan.
Reagan had once been a liberal and then became a staunch conservative, but had since moved back toward the political center during his two terms as California's governor. Nonetheless, though, he adopted firm positions on foreign affairs, including an emphasis on defense and on putting increased pressure on the Soviet Union, which though still a formidable adversary had begun to show the first evidence of the cracks that would eventually lead to its downfall. Reagan also benefited from the reputation the Republicans had gained, through the presidencies of Marshall Kirk and Richard Nixon, for skilled management of projects, culminating most recently in the establishment of the California high-speed rail project. Although somewhat controversial, Reagan still had the confidence of enough Americans to lead to his reelection in 1980 against a challenger, former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, who seemed amiable enough but thin on substantial ideas or positions.
By 1984, it was Robert Kennedy's year, and he cruised easily to the Democratic nomination, winning just as easily against a personality who seemed colorless by comparison, Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee (even President Reagan at certain points hinted that he might prefer RFK as a successor). And so it was that on January 20, 1985, Robert Francis Kennedy would be sworn in as president of the United States, in a world that was rapidly changing.
A crowded field of Democratic contenders hoped to succeed Marshall Kirk as president in 1960. A rather bruising battle in the primaries that year led to no obvious front runners, as various Democrats jockeyed for position. This ultimately led to a divided Democratic party going into the convention - which was exactly what one of the leading Democratic candidates, Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas, had hoped for. Johnson, who had served as the Democratic leader in the Senate, called in virtually a lifetime's worth of favors to cajole, persuade, entice - and sometimes bully - delegates to his banner. He ended up being nominated on the third ballot.
The obvious Republican choice was Kirk's vice president, Richard Nixon, who had been a relative political novice when he had first been elected as second on the ticket in 1952, but who had already gained a reputation as one of the Senate's staunchest anti-Communists as well as a budding expert on foreign affairs and foreign policy. Nixon had enjoyed a good relationship with President Kirk over the past eight years, and often spoke subsequently of Kirk's leadership qualities and how his mentorship helped Nixon grow in both his political and personal sophistication. Nixon had something of a chip on his shoulder when he first arrived in the Congress, the result of his and his family's struggles in poverty in California early in his lifetime. Kirk, who even in his youth had faced still-prominent racial prejudice from certain people, understood perhaps better than anyone else could have, and helped Nixon see past his issues and put away his bitterness in favor of a growing commitment to helping people throughout the world get ahead.
Still, Nixon was somewhat stiff and awkward in public, although a reasonably good speaker, and the Democrats hoped this would work against him, as a contrast against the sophisticated, commanding presence of Marshall Kirk. But their own candidate, Lyndon Johnson, though fairly good at portraying himself in a "just-folks" manner, had a tendency toward coarseness that came out often enough to be off-putting to a large bloc of voters. He was strong in the South and in some regions of the Midwest, but not really anywhere else, and his support in much of the North was paper-thin, especially in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. Furthermore, he made a severe tactical error by not selecting Hubert Humphrey as his running mate, which cost him vital support in the Midwest - while Nixon made the wiser choice of Senator Everett Dirksen, the popular Illinois senator, which boosted Nixon not only in that state but in neighboring Missouri as well. In New Jersey, the failure of Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts to appear on the national ticket likewise hurt Johnson with Catholic voters, enough so that he trailed Nixon in that vital state.
The results on election night were not quite a landslide, but nonetheless a solid win for Nixon.
The Nixon Administration, even before its ultimate foreign policy triumph in Vietnam, remained popular throughout his first term, as Nixon for the most part carried over the most popular of Kirk's policies, including the efforts toward oil conservation that had begun in the wake of the energy crisis. Kennedy had originally been seen as the front runner for the 1964 nomination, but early that year he went in for experimental surgery on his back problems - a surgery that would finally, at long last, offer him, if not a total cure, then at least a fair amount of relief from his persistent back issues. Unfortunately, though, the lengthy surgery meant he was unavailable for the 1964 Democratic race, so it fell to Humphrey to attempt to unseat Nixon, an effort that was probably doomed to failure from the start, as Nixon cruised to reelection.
By 1968, though, voter fatigue after sixteen years of Republicans in the White House had begun to take the bloom off the rose. Furthermore, a growing sense on the part of conservative Republican voters that the party had drifted too far from its roots had begun to take hold. The result was a tough fight in the primaries, with the standard-bearer of the Republican liberals, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, facing off against Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the leading conservative in the party at the time. Goldwater ultimately won the nomination, but found himself in a tough general election battle against Senator Kennedy, who had finally won the Democratic nomination. Goldwater and Kennedy respected each other, and Goldwater had hoped for a series of nationwide debates with Kennedy, touching on such areas as Kennedy's support of government funding toward rail passenger service and toward the further development of nuclear power, both areas which the Massachusetts Senator had come to embrace during his eight years awaiting the chance to seek the White House. In the event, though, only one televised debate was held, and it backfired on Goldwater - Kennedy came across as calm and collected, explaining his positions well, whereas Goldwater committed a major gaffe by saying that the victory in Vietnam "didn't go far enough." What, exactly, did that mean, voters wondered - that the United States should have moved against China? The Middle East? Russia? Goldwater tried unsuccessfully to walk back the comment, but that in turn simply meant that he spent the rest of the campaign trying to explain it, while the incident enhanced his perhaps undeserved reputation as a hothead. His chances were worsened when his running mate - the governor of Maryland, Spiro Agnew, a liberal and former supporter of Rockefeller chosen to balance the ticket - faced accusations of corruption. The election was Kennedy's to lose at that point - and he did nothing of the sort.
The centrist policies and results of Kennedy's first term made him immensely popular, and most major Republicans found reasons not to try a run against him in 1972, with the Republicans ultimately having to settle for the Ohio Governor James Rhodes. The governor was a colorless character compared to the charismatic Kennedy, and was never able to excite the public with any sense of ideas or vision. The result was an easy win for Kennedy.
The Republicans had a better opportunity in 1976, as concerns over government intervention in the economy, and the regulation and bureaucracy that came with it, being a drag on the economy had begun to grow. This was fertile ground for a conservative, even one who had over the years moved far enough to the center to become a major supporter of California's newly-minted high-speed rail initiative - namely, Governor Ronald Reagan. There were some on the Democratic side who had hoped to keep the Kennedy magic alive by nominating his younger brother, Robert, who had served as Secretary of State and virtually as co-president during his brother's term of office; but RFK demurred, believing he should gain experience of public office in order to be credible in his own right to the American people, who might otherwise see him as simply a would-be dynastic successor. Toward that end, RFK would be elected to the Senate from New York in 1978. The Democrats hoped to retain some of the Kennedy magic by selecting Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine as their candidate. But Muskie had a short temper and an angry mien that contrasted badly with ex-actor Reagan's ability to project himself as a friendly, folksy type, and in November the voters went with Reagan.
Reagan had once been a liberal and then became a staunch conservative, but had since moved back toward the political center during his two terms as California's governor. Nonetheless, though, he adopted firm positions on foreign affairs, including an emphasis on defense and on putting increased pressure on the Soviet Union, which though still a formidable adversary had begun to show the first evidence of the cracks that would eventually lead to its downfall. Reagan also benefited from the reputation the Republicans had gained, through the presidencies of Marshall Kirk and Richard Nixon, for skilled management of projects, culminating most recently in the establishment of the California high-speed rail project. Although somewhat controversial, Reagan still had the confidence of enough Americans to lead to his reelection in 1980 against a challenger, former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, who seemed amiable enough but thin on substantial ideas or positions.
By 1984, it was Robert Kennedy's year, and he cruised easily to the Democratic nomination, winning just as easily against a personality who seemed colorless by comparison, Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee (even President Reagan at certain points hinted that he might prefer RFK as a successor). And so it was that on January 20, 1985, Robert Francis Kennedy would be sworn in as president of the United States, in a world that was rapidly changing.
Ming777
Monthly Donor
A few thoughts:
-I presume President Kirk was able to moderate Nixon's paranoia and some of his more dubious behavior.
-It appears that ATL Ronald Reagan was more of a Social Moderate (Centre Right), but maintained a hardline stance towards the USSR. Curious if this did change some of his social and economic policies.
-Presumably the Space Race was occurring during this time. Were there any ATL Presidents that advocates for the Apollo Program?
-So both Kennedys were able to retire from Politics alive. Curious how this affects the subsequent generation.
-I presume President Kirk was able to moderate Nixon's paranoia and some of his more dubious behavior.
-It appears that ATL Ronald Reagan was more of a Social Moderate (Centre Right), but maintained a hardline stance towards the USSR. Curious if this did change some of his social and economic policies.
-Presumably the Space Race was occurring during this time. Were there any ATL Presidents that advocates for the Apollo Program?
-So both Kennedys were able to retire from Politics alive. Curious how this affects the subsequent generation.
Correct. Marshall Kirk was regarded by Nixon as a mentor. In fact, Kirk's example of strong, efficient, professional leadership colors the GOP in TTL, as many Republicans view him as one of the party's heroes.
Reagan is another example. Taking his cues from the Kirk and Nixon presidencies, he is more willing in this timeline to develop public-private partnerships, as exemplified by his support for the California high-speed rail project, and to take the tack of efficient, professional leadership (even though personality-wise he is more akin to the charismatic Kennedys than to Nixon). While, as you said, maintaining a tough stance against the Soviets.
I confess that we haven't really discussed the Space Race in great detail, but once again, this is exactly the sort of technological endeavor that would be right up President Kirk's alley, and he surely would pass the baton to Nixon in that regard, so I would imagine the Apollo moon landings happen on schedule - maybe even a little earlier.
The Kennedys and their charisma will loom large over the Democrats for many years to come.
OOC: Waiting the inevitable barrage of questions from Andrew....but here is a key chapter on trains. Andrew, please don't clog up the thread with questions, use PMs if you need to.
Riding the Rails in the Amigos
Ever since the first rails of the Baltimore and Ohio and the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company ran their first trains in 1830, the railroad has been a key part of transportation networks in all three Amigos nations. Rail transportation allowed for a trip across the continent to be reduced from a months-long ordeal into a pleasure trip that took barely a week (and that was before later speed improvements) and allowed the movement of people and goods on a scale never before seen, ultimately first unifying the continent under the flags and banners of the three Amigos and then turning the nations into mighty industrial powers. By the time of the network's zenith in the early 1920s some 350,000 miles of track had been laid across the three Amigos, with trains able to go all the way from Newfoundland or Alaska to Trinidad or Panama on the rails (with a handful of car ferries). The corporations that built these rails became some of the richest and most powerful corporations on Earth and many of their builders became among the richest men of their time, while at same time many of the men who best took advantage of the capabilities the railroads offered often ended up as rich as their rail baron counterparts. Railroads offered services to even the most desolate parts of the North and West of North America, while also hauling tens of millions of intercity passengers every year and making commuting possible from much greater distances than before.
After World War II steam locomotives gave way to diesel ones (a process delayed by the energy crisis) and the growth of electrified railroads, first seen on highly-patronized intercity routes and on the nastiest of mountain railroads, swelled far and wide. Passenger trains had, as a result of cost increases and declining ridership in the 1940s and 1950s (though this too was shifted by the energy crisis) led to the beginnings of Amtrak as America's major passenger railroad operator after its formation under the Nixon Administration in 1962, which led to Via Rail Canada and Nacional de Mexico's formations in 1965 for the same purpose.
The growth of trucking (and the Interstate Highway System, the building of which began in 1955) had had dramatic effects on the railroads' freight business, and the rising costs in their business combined with a tough regulatory environment led to wave after wave of railroad consolidations in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, narrowing much of the field of competitors but, as a result of the same 1955 Transport America Act that had authorized the Interstate Highway System, led to the government openly bringing conditions onto mergers with the aim of improving competition. With this, the 1960 American Railroad Network Act also nationalized the dispatchers and signal staff of train railroads, basically resulting in Washington being able to dictate traffic priority on the railroads. A federal lawsuit by the Pennsylvania and Southern railroads was decided in favor of the government in 1965, but by then the railroads and Washington had come to a long list of agreements with the goal of keeping railroads moving and their finances up, as well as establishing a new regulatory framework that massively sped up the process of the railroads disposing of lines made superfluous or uneconomic as result of changing times - after the Energy Crisis, a vast number of these soon-to-be-abandoned lines were purchased by the communities they served and/or the industries on the lines that used them, fearful of more issues with trucking and wanting these links to continue to exist. The government's involvement with the Act, coming so closely after the Energy Crisis and a sudden (and huge) increase in freight on rails, also gave out a vast number of low-interest loans and more than a few outright grants for service improvements, and the railroads hell bent on this - and there were many - were quick to jump on the opportunities, and so the improvements to freight service came fast and furious through the 1960s.
The advent of containerization of shipping and the use of unit load devices on aircraft led to the development of "Multi Box" containers of a number of sizes that allowed much faster and easier less-than-carload loads, which when combined with newer and different freight car types, 'piggyback' services for carrying truck trailers, unit trains for bulk cargo and other improvements caused a dramatic swelling of freight traffic on the rails starting in the 1960s. As higher diesel prices pinched a lot of intercity truck traffic, much of which ended up instead of heading for the highway instead headed straight to a railroad depot to load the truck onto a train, sometimes including the tractor as well as its trailer. (Many railroads also designed equipment to allow the carrying of aircraft containers, and many variants of the Multi Box system were developed for shipping refrigerated or frozen items, bulk liquids and even highly-specialized uses such as the transport of explosives or shipping of live fish or lobsters.) Over time, railroads invested in rapid-load systems for intermodal traffic such as the Modalohr and Cargobeamer systems and raised their overhead clearance to allow double-stack trains as well as developing remote-control systems for their locomotives. Owing to this traffic surge, electrification projects grew, the last steam locomotives were finally retired in 1964-65, diesel locomotives grew more powerful on a regular basis (as did the gas turbines used by the Union Pacific, Santa Fe, Southern Pacific and Burlington Route on the Great Plains and into the Rockies), extra track was built, grade crossings were eliminated, new yards built with computerized car handling systems, centralized traffic control spread in its use and ultimately the railroads began experimenting with remote-control cars for distributed power and cabooses began to be equipped with air compressors to allow quicker brake applications and releases.
The post-war world also resulted in dramatic drops in commuter traffic (this would reverse over time, mind you) as people moved out to the suburbs, resulting in many commuter operations being loss-makers by the mid-1950s. The energy crisis, though, made it clear that these operations were essential for the cities themselves, and one by one on the 1960s the cities, states or provinces took them over from the freight railroads and Amtrak, often resulting in simply different managers for the same operating personnel at first but almost always seeing that state of affairs dramatically change. Old locomotive-hauled trains were often replaced by multiple units and old-school machines like the famous Budd RDC (Rail Diesel Car) were replaced by newer machinery, with the Budd SPV-2000 (once it's bugs were worked out), Hawker Siddeley RTS-85SPD and the Chrysler-Alco MU150D being common choices for these services. It wasn't long before even these began to have issues with capacity though, and most city commuter agencies had gone with double-deck equipment for its busy runs by the 1980s. Newly-created systems in areas that didn't have them before such as GO Transit in Toronto, Exo in Montreal, GoDetroit in Detroit, Metra in Chicago and Metrolink in Los Angeles often had the edge in not needing as much to work around the freight lines and being able to immediately purchase new equipment. EMD developed the GP40TC (a GP40-2 with a HEP unit and bigger fuel tank on a 69' SD40 frame) for GO Transit which ended up being a big hit with commuter operators (despite the HEP engine proving challenging to work on at times), while New Jersey Transit did a similar deal with General Electric for the U34CH, a U36C modified for passenger service using a HEP motor driven off of the locomotive's crankshaft. Dozens of old EMD F-units ended up being rebuilt for service as cab cars and HEP power providers on push-pull trains where demand was heaviest, and more than a few older freight locomotives were paired with these for power purposes.
Amtrak began somewhat inauscpisiously, co-coordinating the trains of railroads that wanted out of the passenger business with those who still served passengers and operating trains considered important to the people along its routes, using hand-me-down equipment for the freight lines. As time went on, though, more railroads faced with the costs of replacing passenger equipment chose to exit the business rather than pay the costs of operating such services, growing Amtrak's service network and business. The hauling of mail on Amtrak trains from Day One helped with costs, and in 1963 Amtrak acquired the Railway Express Agency shares of several railroads who were reducing their exposure to less-than-carload business, helping with its parcel business. Despite this and Amtrak's massive investments in new equipment in the 1960s, it wasn't until the first Kennedy Administration began in 1969 that Amtrak really got going in terms of expanding services beyond what it had inheirited from the other railroads.
The departure of the Pennsylvania and Baltimore and Ohio railroads from the passenger business in 1970 led to the agency taking over the Northeast Corridor in its entirety, along with its nearly-complete extension to Richmond, Norfolk and Portsmouth. The following year the New York Central followed the B&O and PRR out of the business and Amtrak got the use of Northeast Corridor, while the Erie Lackawanna also gave Amtrak the ability to build adjacent to their famed Lackawanna Cut-Off in February 1972, months before Hurricane Agnes caused extensive damage along the route and gave Amtrak the ability to get better terms for its rebuilt line. Amtrak, with the explicit support of the Kennedy Administration (and knowing of the Tokaido Shinkansen, which had opened in 1964) and the funds to match, began high-speed operations on the NEC in October 1970, but true HSR didn't come until the completion of the California High Speed Rail System and the Texas Express in 1976.
These routes, however, revolutionized the passenger transport business in their territories, and as Amtrak's own tracks expanded so did its high-speed operations. By 1980 the fast trains ran from Maine, Buffalo and Montreal all the way to Atlanta, and routes from Pittsburgh to Atlantic City, Roanoke to Norfolk and Columbia to Charleston and Myrtle Beach added to the territory available. The following year the Brightline Service expanded from Jacksonville to Atlanta via Savannah, giving an unbroken fast-train route from the Northeast all the way to Miami. Amtrak was quick to take advantage of that, and by the 1980s so popular were its trains to the sunny South (namely the Silver Service trains in the Silver Star, Silver Meteor and Silver Palm) that at many times they ran twice or even three times daily and still had full loads of both coach passengers and sleeper car users, and dedicated sleeper car trains began to be a regular occurrence, with Amtrak's Silver Night night train beginning operations to the South in 1984, allowing passengers to board a train in New York in the evening and wake up in Atlanta the next morning and be in Miami before noon.
Amtrak's long-distance services also improved dramatically in the 1960s as new equipment arrived, older cars cycled through shops for rebuilds and new locomotives came in to replace worn-out units. EMD's SDP45s, delivered in 1967, began the process, which led through the cowl-bodywork FP45s and then to the four-axle F40PH, while Alco made railfans' (and Amtrak's) jaws drop when they brought out the PA-5/PB-5 pairs on 1970, which were PA-1 bodies on top of C636 frames and using the Emerson Electric components of the in-development Millennium Series of engines. While GE missed out on the diesel orders from Amtrak, they didn't miss out on the early electrics, and while the GE E60 wasn't the rocket Amtrak had hoped for, it proved instead to be a bombproof workhorse that would spend decades hauling the heaviest trains on the electrified lines. In the end, EMD's AEM-7 (a derivative of the Swedish SJ Rc4) and Morrison-Knudsen's AEM-8 (which was derived from the Swiss Re 6/6) were bought for faster operations on the NEC and other corridors before bumped down to long-distance train service with the arrival of ever-more EMUs in the 2000s. The last EMD E8s were retired in the late 1970s as the FP45s and SDP45s used on most western long-distance trains were joined by the EMD SDP40F in 1972 (OOC: these are all built with HEP rather than heavy steam boilers and thus don't have the derailment issues of OTL), the EMD F40PH in 1975 (here built on an SD40-2 frame but otherwise very similar to OTL) and the Alco Millennium 175DPA in 1977.
As Amtrak's equipment was steadily replaced in the 1960s, the new firm was quick to develop standards for Bi-Level passenger cars, which would they recognized would be the future of the company on routes with sufficient clearance. Their standards would include a 85' length, 17'6" height and 10'6" width, to which Amtrak organized a plan to replace its entire fleet. Trains that served the Northeast Corridor would be required to be single level for clearance reasons, resulting in the Budd-built Amfleet high-speed coaches (which were derived from the Metroliner electric multiple unit and the SPV-2000 diesel multiple unit) and the Viewliners, which would be mostly built by American Car and Foundry to replace older cars on East Coast trains. Many rebuilt Heritage Fleet coaches would be mixed with the Viewliners for many years, though toilet-equipped Heritage Fleet cars would be rapidly replaced owing to non-retention toilets and the mess they created. Budd's Hi-Levels, built for the Santa Fe, Burlington Route and Union Pacific, would be joined by the Pullman-built Superliners, much of the early ones being sleeping cars and coaches, while the three-unit "Restauranteur" dining car-kitchen car sets would be built by St. Louis Car Company and all-glass-roof lounge and "sightseer" cars would also be built for Amtrak by Pacific Car and Foundry. The Superliners would be joined starting in 1967 by the Hawker Siddeley "Challenger" cars, which were intended to supplement the Superliner and Hi-Level sleeping cars, coaches and lounges. This complex arrangement, however, satisfied many parties and allowed Amtrak to acquire better than four thousand passenger cars between 1962 and 1971. Amtrak's move into express freight services and mail traffic resulted in the purchase of a large number of eight-door express boxcars, and long-distance trains by the late 1960s gaining dedicated refrigerator cars for both cold shipments and food for the trains' dining cars.
While the equipment may have had different builders, the standards set were high. All new cars were equipped with outboard disc brakes, head-end power systems, effective air conditioning and were from the start made accessible for those in wheelchairs, with retractable ramps and specialized compartments for such users. Early Superliner sleeping cars had toilets in all comparments (this feature was removed from roomettes later as it was felt by riders that this was unsanitary) and all rooms had comfortable convertible beds with mattress pads and excellent bedding. Coach seats were made from leather on all cars, with 2x2 in standard cars and 2x1 arrangement in first class ones, with all seats having sturdy tray tables and later on being equipped first with headphone jacks and later on with power ports for mobile devices. All lounges were equipped with telephones in soundproofed rooms (later on, private work and conference rooms were offered on trains frequented by business travelers) and Amtrak's meal service was of a good quality to start that only got better with time. The Restauranteur sets allowed for a complete kitchen and a separate bar as well as two private dining rooms (which proved to be a hit on many routes) and as the Viewliner dining cars arrived in the late 1960s the facilities available improved markedly, with actual silverware, china plates and proper glassware being used. Coach passengers could get complimentary pillows and blankets if they desired (and all new coaches got seats with leg rests) while sleeping car passengers arrived on the train to find amenity kits waiting for them in their rooms. Amtrak from 1972 offered the first "American Rail Pass" offers in 14-day and 28-day intervals, meant specifically for tourists who wanted to explore America far and wide, and Amtrak trains in 1966 began the practice of picking up a number of newspapers as part of morning stops for long-distance trains, and radios at individual seats and compartments began to be used in 1969.
The results were obvious. While Amtrak initially began to allow freight railroads to not have to operate passenger trains, even those that did continue to do so by the late 1960s were allied with Amtrak and basically let them take the lead on much of the scheduling of the services. The Santa Fe, Burlington Northern, New York Central, Rock Island and Rio Grande, Seaboard Coast Line and Southern held out the longest before they turned over passenger operations to Amtrak in 1972, but by then Amtrak were very much choosing to recognize the freight railroads' involvement in the maintenance of tracks and facilities, and so not only did Amtrak's names appear on the trains but so did the freight railroads, and train announcements began regularly with the likes of "On behalf of Amtrak and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, the train crew welcomes you on board the Super Chief, bound for Los Angeles." Locomotives assigned to the territory of one of these railroads frequently got smaller logos of the freight railroads in question, and the Empire Builder, Super Chief, 20th Century Limited, Southern Crescent and California Zephyr trains began carrying stylized logos of the train itself in 1974. Amtrak, wisely, advertised its trains by the late 1960s as being the civilized way to travel, and as the services got more frequent, faster and more comfortable, the idea that passenger trains were the civilized way to travel stuck.
Via Rail Canada and National of Mexico also took many of these same ideas to heart, but added some ones of their own. Via Rail Canada moved to make a number of its "Great Canadian Fleet" trains (including the Canadian, Rocky Mountaineer and Confederation) as room-only trains with no coaches (Amtrak would one day do this as well) and Via Rail Canada wholeheartedly embraced many of the old-school style elements, with their flagship trains being fleets of gleaming stainless-steel cars behind rebuilt streamlined locomotives (Via would rely on its rebuilt Alco PA-4, EMD E8 and CLC Type 4 locomotives until the 1980s for these jobs) while other routes got double-deckers similar to their American counterparts. National of Mexico went with brightly-colored interiors for their cars for their long-distance efforts, and they in the early 1970s developed the idea of the "local cuisine" on the trains that both Amtrak and Via Rail would copy extensively in the 1970s and 1980s. The Auto Train Corporation's development of trains where passengers and their automobiles rode on the same train was copied extensively by all of the major rail passenger carriers in the 1970s and 1980s (though Auto Train's trains would be astoundingly successful in the 1980s and 1990s) and the mail trains of all of the carriers got sufficiently well patronized that they began running on their own by the 1990s. By 1980, A long-distance train for Amtrak, Via Rail or National of Mexico could be over 25 cars in length, with electrified zones having three electric locomotives on the point, while in territories operated by diesels as many as four big diesels led the train, often with a helper unit or two on the nastiest of sections.
By the 1970s, the dozens of freight railroads of the past had been narrowed down to just over fifteen through the consolidations. Burlington Northern and Milwaukee Road competed for the Pacific Northwest, while the Union Pacific, Chicago, Rock Island, Rio Grande and Pacific (usually referred to as just "The Rock"), Santa Fe and Southern Pacific fought for the rest of the American West, running from Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans to Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The Northeastern quarter of America (roughly east of Chicago and north of the Ohio River, as well as from Kentucky and Virginia northwards), the most densely-populated part of it, saw four railroads - New York Central, Pennsylvania, Erie Lackawanna and Chessie System - competing for all of the market, as well as the lines of Canadian National and Canadian Pacific that stretched into the United States, while the South was a battle between two immense systems in the Seaboard System and Southern Railway, with the Illinois Central also operating in the market.
This arrangement was further bolstered by the many agreements between railroads over trackage and operating rights that existed by the 1970s, which when combined with the dispatching system orchestrated by Washington allowed for fairly level playing fields that benefitted those who thought on their feet. Not every railroad wanted to compete in every market, of course, but there were few cases by then where a company that didn't want to compete couldn't, and such was the growth in freight traffic that railroads had by the late 1970s become highly-profitable enterprises. While the ever-more-efficient automobiles of the 1980s and steady growth in both conventional and non-conventional sources of oil saw the prices for oil sink steadily in the 1970s and early 1980s, the standards of living of the Amigos had grown to the point that while the life of a long-haul truck driver was more lucrative than ever before, the vast majority of truckers still wanted to sleep in their own beds at night and it was just easier to keep the cargo boxes, containers, truck trailers and larger loads rolling onto the train cars and then the trains off to their destinations. By the 1980s, some of the goods shipped by rail had gotten huge - Boeing and Canadair, for example, were shipping complete aircraft fuselages - the ever-better systems of cargo tracking made it easier for virtually anyone to ship by rail, and the vast majority did. Interstate trucking still existed, of course, but the efficiency of rail cargo was such that most customers went in that direction.
Canada was unique in the presence of the government-owned Canadian National Railways - formed in 1918 from the bankrupt bones of several other firms, CNR had been one of Canada's true 20th Century success stories, building a rail network of over 40,000 miles serving all of Canada and using its finances to dramatically expand into all kinds of other forms of transportation, and by the 1950s they had extended into the United States, with CN buying lines to connect to the Southern Pacific at Portland, Oregon, across the Midwest to the Twin Cities, Milwaukee and Chicago and purchasing the right of way of the bankrupt New York, Ontario and Western in 1957, which was integrated into CN after the Oswego Subdivision was completed in 1960, allowing CN to run through freight trains to New York. Despite being owned by the Canadian government, the company's reputation among Canadians was exemplary, and the company began its over half-century of unbroken years of profit in 1963, helped by the diesel locomotive, growing electrification (and the cheaper energy prices that resulted), swelling intermodal traffic and the completion of the rebuilding of the Newfoundland Railway into standard gauge, which was completed in 1965. The Canadian railroads had long made their profits in Western Canada, but such was the growth in freight traffic and the use of intermodal traffic that by 1970 both Canadian National and Canadian Pacific were making money everywhere. While Canadian Pacific's airline would be sold off in the mid-1970s (forming half of what would become Canadian Airlines) and CN's ocean shipping division was separated from it by Ottawa in 1986, the two lines, competitors across all of Canada, made Canada's transportation network just as efficient as America's. The giant hydroelectric projects of Ontario and Quebec (which also provided tens of thousands of megawatts of electricity to New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois) meant the cost of hydropower was cheap, which both companies took extensive advantage of. It was similar with the British Columbia Railway, the provincially-owned firm making its first profits in 1961 and maintaining them to this day, while the BCR eventually made its way to Whitehorse in the Yukon (and the Canadian National Northern Main Line, which ran to a connection with the Alaska Railroad in Fairbanks) and became a partner in the vast Roberts Bank Superport, opened in 1969.
Mexican railroading was in many ways similar to the United States, though Mexico's geography meant that the country's primary division for rail lines was the Mexican Altiplano, with the line from Guadalajara to Veracruz via Mexico City being basically a line where Mexico's rail systems (which went through multiple rounds of consolidations just as the American ones did) divided their operations - the Kansas City, Sonora and Pacific and Sistema Azteca railroads operated from the United States to the Mexican Altiplano, while Ferrosur and Ferrocarriles del Pacifico operated south of there as far as Panama and up the Yucatan. Of course, this line was by no means a hard and fast one, as Ferrosur operated well up the Gulf Coast all the way to Brownsville and FCP operated as far as Hermosillo, and the northern systems ran well into the United States, with the KCSP operating out to Omaha, St. Louis and Kansas City and the Sistema Azteca lines reaching Tulsa, Oklahoma City and Little Rock, as well as all of the major border cities, including New Orleans, Houston, San Antonio, Albuquerque, Phoenix and Los Angeles. The competing lines were joined by the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe lines that stretched all the way to Guadalajara, while Union Pacific served far as Monterrey, Chihuahua, Ciudad Victoria and Saltillo. Mexican demand resulted in Chrysler-Alco acquiring the Obras Ferroviarias de México in Aguascalientes in 1949, with it (and Canadian subsidiary Montreal Locomotive Works) both being part of Alco's takeover by Chrysler and Emerson Electric in 1967, while EMD also established a locomotive plant in Mexico (Electro-Motive de México) in San Luis Potosi in 1954, which remains in operation to this day.
Mexico's immense population density and economic growth in the central regions mean the lines across the Altiplano and its major cities - Mexico City, Guadalajara, Aguascalientes, Leon, Queretaro, Morelia, Toluca, Tlaxcala, Puebla, Jalapa, Veracruz - are affairs reminiscent of the Northeast Corridor of America. Three-track and four-track mainlines are common, and the Guadalajara area has multiple railyards with interchange points specifically meant for traffic off of the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific to be rapidly forwarded across the rest of the region. Electrification is almost universal in this area, main lines are almost entirely separated from road crossings, high-density passenger lines are separated from the freight ones (the Guadalajara-Mexico City-Veracruz Corredor Centro is just as busy as the Northeast Corridor is, sometimes even more so) and, like so much of the United States, the competition is fierce and the systems themselves more than a little impressive. The Ferrosur and FCP lines south from the Valley of Mexico are almost entirely electrified, owing to hydroelectric power in the area and the presence of multiple nuclear power plants in coastal regions, and these main routes function even more as a corridor of commerce owing to the population densities of much of Central America.
In modern times, one unique set of agreements not often seen elsewhere in the world involves trains making their way between all three countries - in modern times, its quite common to see trains with goods from the southern reaches of Mexico (particularly the coffee, bananas, sugar, melons, citrus fruits, hardwoods and cotton for which this part of the world is famous) heading straight through Mexico and the United States to Canada, and the same being true in reverse - most railroad cars in all three countries have their reporting marks and information markings in both English and Spanish for this very reason, and as the three countries standardized virtually all aspects of railroad operation in the 1920s and 1930s, seeing rolling stock from anywhere on the continent anywhere else is a common occurrence. Beyond that, starting in the 1960s many railroads began encouraging their customers to commission their own rolling stock, this encouragement done as a way of helping to share the cost of fleet refurbishment in the era. Many leasing companies had existed for decades - General American, Armour, Pacific Fruit Express, Union Tank Car, Merchants Dispatch, Procor, Trailer Train, Pacific Railroad Car, Servicio de Vagones Varracerdo, Sea-Land, Maritime Ontario - many of the largest rail shippers took this request, including major oil and chemical companies, mining firms and agricultural giants, taking advantage in many cases to plaster company logos all over the freight cars. Truck trailers of major intermodal shippers also began doing this (in come cases they even bought their own rail cars as well) and many customers, aware of trains going by being a cheap mode of advertising, made a point of using their cars as rolling billboards for them and their products.
Riding the Rails in the Amigos
Ever since the first rails of the Baltimore and Ohio and the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company ran their first trains in 1830, the railroad has been a key part of transportation networks in all three Amigos nations. Rail transportation allowed for a trip across the continent to be reduced from a months-long ordeal into a pleasure trip that took barely a week (and that was before later speed improvements) and allowed the movement of people and goods on a scale never before seen, ultimately first unifying the continent under the flags and banners of the three Amigos and then turning the nations into mighty industrial powers. By the time of the network's zenith in the early 1920s some 350,000 miles of track had been laid across the three Amigos, with trains able to go all the way from Newfoundland or Alaska to Trinidad or Panama on the rails (with a handful of car ferries). The corporations that built these rails became some of the richest and most powerful corporations on Earth and many of their builders became among the richest men of their time, while at same time many of the men who best took advantage of the capabilities the railroads offered often ended up as rich as their rail baron counterparts. Railroads offered services to even the most desolate parts of the North and West of North America, while also hauling tens of millions of intercity passengers every year and making commuting possible from much greater distances than before.
After World War II steam locomotives gave way to diesel ones (a process delayed by the energy crisis) and the growth of electrified railroads, first seen on highly-patronized intercity routes and on the nastiest of mountain railroads, swelled far and wide. Passenger trains had, as a result of cost increases and declining ridership in the 1940s and 1950s (though this too was shifted by the energy crisis) led to the beginnings of Amtrak as America's major passenger railroad operator after its formation under the Nixon Administration in 1962, which led to Via Rail Canada and Nacional de Mexico's formations in 1965 for the same purpose.
The growth of trucking (and the Interstate Highway System, the building of which began in 1955) had had dramatic effects on the railroads' freight business, and the rising costs in their business combined with a tough regulatory environment led to wave after wave of railroad consolidations in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, narrowing much of the field of competitors but, as a result of the same 1955 Transport America Act that had authorized the Interstate Highway System, led to the government openly bringing conditions onto mergers with the aim of improving competition. With this, the 1960 American Railroad Network Act also nationalized the dispatchers and signal staff of train railroads, basically resulting in Washington being able to dictate traffic priority on the railroads. A federal lawsuit by the Pennsylvania and Southern railroads was decided in favor of the government in 1965, but by then the railroads and Washington had come to a long list of agreements with the goal of keeping railroads moving and their finances up, as well as establishing a new regulatory framework that massively sped up the process of the railroads disposing of lines made superfluous or uneconomic as result of changing times - after the Energy Crisis, a vast number of these soon-to-be-abandoned lines were purchased by the communities they served and/or the industries on the lines that used them, fearful of more issues with trucking and wanting these links to continue to exist. The government's involvement with the Act, coming so closely after the Energy Crisis and a sudden (and huge) increase in freight on rails, also gave out a vast number of low-interest loans and more than a few outright grants for service improvements, and the railroads hell bent on this - and there were many - were quick to jump on the opportunities, and so the improvements to freight service came fast and furious through the 1960s.
The advent of containerization of shipping and the use of unit load devices on aircraft led to the development of "Multi Box" containers of a number of sizes that allowed much faster and easier less-than-carload loads, which when combined with newer and different freight car types, 'piggyback' services for carrying truck trailers, unit trains for bulk cargo and other improvements caused a dramatic swelling of freight traffic on the rails starting in the 1960s. As higher diesel prices pinched a lot of intercity truck traffic, much of which ended up instead of heading for the highway instead headed straight to a railroad depot to load the truck onto a train, sometimes including the tractor as well as its trailer. (Many railroads also designed equipment to allow the carrying of aircraft containers, and many variants of the Multi Box system were developed for shipping refrigerated or frozen items, bulk liquids and even highly-specialized uses such as the transport of explosives or shipping of live fish or lobsters.) Over time, railroads invested in rapid-load systems for intermodal traffic such as the Modalohr and Cargobeamer systems and raised their overhead clearance to allow double-stack trains as well as developing remote-control systems for their locomotives. Owing to this traffic surge, electrification projects grew, the last steam locomotives were finally retired in 1964-65, diesel locomotives grew more powerful on a regular basis (as did the gas turbines used by the Union Pacific, Santa Fe, Southern Pacific and Burlington Route on the Great Plains and into the Rockies), extra track was built, grade crossings were eliminated, new yards built with computerized car handling systems, centralized traffic control spread in its use and ultimately the railroads began experimenting with remote-control cars for distributed power and cabooses began to be equipped with air compressors to allow quicker brake applications and releases.
The post-war world also resulted in dramatic drops in commuter traffic (this would reverse over time, mind you) as people moved out to the suburbs, resulting in many commuter operations being loss-makers by the mid-1950s. The energy crisis, though, made it clear that these operations were essential for the cities themselves, and one by one on the 1960s the cities, states or provinces took them over from the freight railroads and Amtrak, often resulting in simply different managers for the same operating personnel at first but almost always seeing that state of affairs dramatically change. Old locomotive-hauled trains were often replaced by multiple units and old-school machines like the famous Budd RDC (Rail Diesel Car) were replaced by newer machinery, with the Budd SPV-2000 (once it's bugs were worked out), Hawker Siddeley RTS-85SPD and the Chrysler-Alco MU150D being common choices for these services. It wasn't long before even these began to have issues with capacity though, and most city commuter agencies had gone with double-deck equipment for its busy runs by the 1980s. Newly-created systems in areas that didn't have them before such as GO Transit in Toronto, Exo in Montreal, GoDetroit in Detroit, Metra in Chicago and Metrolink in Los Angeles often had the edge in not needing as much to work around the freight lines and being able to immediately purchase new equipment. EMD developed the GP40TC (a GP40-2 with a HEP unit and bigger fuel tank on a 69' SD40 frame) for GO Transit which ended up being a big hit with commuter operators (despite the HEP engine proving challenging to work on at times), while New Jersey Transit did a similar deal with General Electric for the U34CH, a U36C modified for passenger service using a HEP motor driven off of the locomotive's crankshaft. Dozens of old EMD F-units ended up being rebuilt for service as cab cars and HEP power providers on push-pull trains where demand was heaviest, and more than a few older freight locomotives were paired with these for power purposes.
Amtrak began somewhat inauscpisiously, co-coordinating the trains of railroads that wanted out of the passenger business with those who still served passengers and operating trains considered important to the people along its routes, using hand-me-down equipment for the freight lines. As time went on, though, more railroads faced with the costs of replacing passenger equipment chose to exit the business rather than pay the costs of operating such services, growing Amtrak's service network and business. The hauling of mail on Amtrak trains from Day One helped with costs, and in 1963 Amtrak acquired the Railway Express Agency shares of several railroads who were reducing their exposure to less-than-carload business, helping with its parcel business. Despite this and Amtrak's massive investments in new equipment in the 1960s, it wasn't until the first Kennedy Administration began in 1969 that Amtrak really got going in terms of expanding services beyond what it had inheirited from the other railroads.
The departure of the Pennsylvania and Baltimore and Ohio railroads from the passenger business in 1970 led to the agency taking over the Northeast Corridor in its entirety, along with its nearly-complete extension to Richmond, Norfolk and Portsmouth. The following year the New York Central followed the B&O and PRR out of the business and Amtrak got the use of Northeast Corridor, while the Erie Lackawanna also gave Amtrak the ability to build adjacent to their famed Lackawanna Cut-Off in February 1972, months before Hurricane Agnes caused extensive damage along the route and gave Amtrak the ability to get better terms for its rebuilt line. Amtrak, with the explicit support of the Kennedy Administration (and knowing of the Tokaido Shinkansen, which had opened in 1964) and the funds to match, began high-speed operations on the NEC in October 1970, but true HSR didn't come until the completion of the California High Speed Rail System and the Texas Express in 1976.
These routes, however, revolutionized the passenger transport business in their territories, and as Amtrak's own tracks expanded so did its high-speed operations. By 1980 the fast trains ran from Maine, Buffalo and Montreal all the way to Atlanta, and routes from Pittsburgh to Atlantic City, Roanoke to Norfolk and Columbia to Charleston and Myrtle Beach added to the territory available. The following year the Brightline Service expanded from Jacksonville to Atlanta via Savannah, giving an unbroken fast-train route from the Northeast all the way to Miami. Amtrak was quick to take advantage of that, and by the 1980s so popular were its trains to the sunny South (namely the Silver Service trains in the Silver Star, Silver Meteor and Silver Palm) that at many times they ran twice or even three times daily and still had full loads of both coach passengers and sleeper car users, and dedicated sleeper car trains began to be a regular occurrence, with Amtrak's Silver Night night train beginning operations to the South in 1984, allowing passengers to board a train in New York in the evening and wake up in Atlanta the next morning and be in Miami before noon.
Amtrak's long-distance services also improved dramatically in the 1960s as new equipment arrived, older cars cycled through shops for rebuilds and new locomotives came in to replace worn-out units. EMD's SDP45s, delivered in 1967, began the process, which led through the cowl-bodywork FP45s and then to the four-axle F40PH, while Alco made railfans' (and Amtrak's) jaws drop when they brought out the PA-5/PB-5 pairs on 1970, which were PA-1 bodies on top of C636 frames and using the Emerson Electric components of the in-development Millennium Series of engines. While GE missed out on the diesel orders from Amtrak, they didn't miss out on the early electrics, and while the GE E60 wasn't the rocket Amtrak had hoped for, it proved instead to be a bombproof workhorse that would spend decades hauling the heaviest trains on the electrified lines. In the end, EMD's AEM-7 (a derivative of the Swedish SJ Rc4) and Morrison-Knudsen's AEM-8 (which was derived from the Swiss Re 6/6) were bought for faster operations on the NEC and other corridors before bumped down to long-distance train service with the arrival of ever-more EMUs in the 2000s. The last EMD E8s were retired in the late 1970s as the FP45s and SDP45s used on most western long-distance trains were joined by the EMD SDP40F in 1972 (OOC: these are all built with HEP rather than heavy steam boilers and thus don't have the derailment issues of OTL), the EMD F40PH in 1975 (here built on an SD40-2 frame but otherwise very similar to OTL) and the Alco Millennium 175DPA in 1977.
As Amtrak's equipment was steadily replaced in the 1960s, the new firm was quick to develop standards for Bi-Level passenger cars, which would they recognized would be the future of the company on routes with sufficient clearance. Their standards would include a 85' length, 17'6" height and 10'6" width, to which Amtrak organized a plan to replace its entire fleet. Trains that served the Northeast Corridor would be required to be single level for clearance reasons, resulting in the Budd-built Amfleet high-speed coaches (which were derived from the Metroliner electric multiple unit and the SPV-2000 diesel multiple unit) and the Viewliners, which would be mostly built by American Car and Foundry to replace older cars on East Coast trains. Many rebuilt Heritage Fleet coaches would be mixed with the Viewliners for many years, though toilet-equipped Heritage Fleet cars would be rapidly replaced owing to non-retention toilets and the mess they created. Budd's Hi-Levels, built for the Santa Fe, Burlington Route and Union Pacific, would be joined by the Pullman-built Superliners, much of the early ones being sleeping cars and coaches, while the three-unit "Restauranteur" dining car-kitchen car sets would be built by St. Louis Car Company and all-glass-roof lounge and "sightseer" cars would also be built for Amtrak by Pacific Car and Foundry. The Superliners would be joined starting in 1967 by the Hawker Siddeley "Challenger" cars, which were intended to supplement the Superliner and Hi-Level sleeping cars, coaches and lounges. This complex arrangement, however, satisfied many parties and allowed Amtrak to acquire better than four thousand passenger cars between 1962 and 1971. Amtrak's move into express freight services and mail traffic resulted in the purchase of a large number of eight-door express boxcars, and long-distance trains by the late 1960s gaining dedicated refrigerator cars for both cold shipments and food for the trains' dining cars.
While the equipment may have had different builders, the standards set were high. All new cars were equipped with outboard disc brakes, head-end power systems, effective air conditioning and were from the start made accessible for those in wheelchairs, with retractable ramps and specialized compartments for such users. Early Superliner sleeping cars had toilets in all comparments (this feature was removed from roomettes later as it was felt by riders that this was unsanitary) and all rooms had comfortable convertible beds with mattress pads and excellent bedding. Coach seats were made from leather on all cars, with 2x2 in standard cars and 2x1 arrangement in first class ones, with all seats having sturdy tray tables and later on being equipped first with headphone jacks and later on with power ports for mobile devices. All lounges were equipped with telephones in soundproofed rooms (later on, private work and conference rooms were offered on trains frequented by business travelers) and Amtrak's meal service was of a good quality to start that only got better with time. The Restauranteur sets allowed for a complete kitchen and a separate bar as well as two private dining rooms (which proved to be a hit on many routes) and as the Viewliner dining cars arrived in the late 1960s the facilities available improved markedly, with actual silverware, china plates and proper glassware being used. Coach passengers could get complimentary pillows and blankets if they desired (and all new coaches got seats with leg rests) while sleeping car passengers arrived on the train to find amenity kits waiting for them in their rooms. Amtrak from 1972 offered the first "American Rail Pass" offers in 14-day and 28-day intervals, meant specifically for tourists who wanted to explore America far and wide, and Amtrak trains in 1966 began the practice of picking up a number of newspapers as part of morning stops for long-distance trains, and radios at individual seats and compartments began to be used in 1969.
The results were obvious. While Amtrak initially began to allow freight railroads to not have to operate passenger trains, even those that did continue to do so by the late 1960s were allied with Amtrak and basically let them take the lead on much of the scheduling of the services. The Santa Fe, Burlington Northern, New York Central, Rock Island and Rio Grande, Seaboard Coast Line and Southern held out the longest before they turned over passenger operations to Amtrak in 1972, but by then Amtrak were very much choosing to recognize the freight railroads' involvement in the maintenance of tracks and facilities, and so not only did Amtrak's names appear on the trains but so did the freight railroads, and train announcements began regularly with the likes of "On behalf of Amtrak and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, the train crew welcomes you on board the Super Chief, bound for Los Angeles." Locomotives assigned to the territory of one of these railroads frequently got smaller logos of the freight railroads in question, and the Empire Builder, Super Chief, 20th Century Limited, Southern Crescent and California Zephyr trains began carrying stylized logos of the train itself in 1974. Amtrak, wisely, advertised its trains by the late 1960s as being the civilized way to travel, and as the services got more frequent, faster and more comfortable, the idea that passenger trains were the civilized way to travel stuck.
Via Rail Canada and National of Mexico also took many of these same ideas to heart, but added some ones of their own. Via Rail Canada moved to make a number of its "Great Canadian Fleet" trains (including the Canadian, Rocky Mountaineer and Confederation) as room-only trains with no coaches (Amtrak would one day do this as well) and Via Rail Canada wholeheartedly embraced many of the old-school style elements, with their flagship trains being fleets of gleaming stainless-steel cars behind rebuilt streamlined locomotives (Via would rely on its rebuilt Alco PA-4, EMD E8 and CLC Type 4 locomotives until the 1980s for these jobs) while other routes got double-deckers similar to their American counterparts. National of Mexico went with brightly-colored interiors for their cars for their long-distance efforts, and they in the early 1970s developed the idea of the "local cuisine" on the trains that both Amtrak and Via Rail would copy extensively in the 1970s and 1980s. The Auto Train Corporation's development of trains where passengers and their automobiles rode on the same train was copied extensively by all of the major rail passenger carriers in the 1970s and 1980s (though Auto Train's trains would be astoundingly successful in the 1980s and 1990s) and the mail trains of all of the carriers got sufficiently well patronized that they began running on their own by the 1990s. By 1980, A long-distance train for Amtrak, Via Rail or National of Mexico could be over 25 cars in length, with electrified zones having three electric locomotives on the point, while in territories operated by diesels as many as four big diesels led the train, often with a helper unit or two on the nastiest of sections.
By the 1970s, the dozens of freight railroads of the past had been narrowed down to just over fifteen through the consolidations. Burlington Northern and Milwaukee Road competed for the Pacific Northwest, while the Union Pacific, Chicago, Rock Island, Rio Grande and Pacific (usually referred to as just "The Rock"), Santa Fe and Southern Pacific fought for the rest of the American West, running from Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans to Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The Northeastern quarter of America (roughly east of Chicago and north of the Ohio River, as well as from Kentucky and Virginia northwards), the most densely-populated part of it, saw four railroads - New York Central, Pennsylvania, Erie Lackawanna and Chessie System - competing for all of the market, as well as the lines of Canadian National and Canadian Pacific that stretched into the United States, while the South was a battle between two immense systems in the Seaboard System and Southern Railway, with the Illinois Central also operating in the market.
This arrangement was further bolstered by the many agreements between railroads over trackage and operating rights that existed by the 1970s, which when combined with the dispatching system orchestrated by Washington allowed for fairly level playing fields that benefitted those who thought on their feet. Not every railroad wanted to compete in every market, of course, but there were few cases by then where a company that didn't want to compete couldn't, and such was the growth in freight traffic that railroads had by the late 1970s become highly-profitable enterprises. While the ever-more-efficient automobiles of the 1980s and steady growth in both conventional and non-conventional sources of oil saw the prices for oil sink steadily in the 1970s and early 1980s, the standards of living of the Amigos had grown to the point that while the life of a long-haul truck driver was more lucrative than ever before, the vast majority of truckers still wanted to sleep in their own beds at night and it was just easier to keep the cargo boxes, containers, truck trailers and larger loads rolling onto the train cars and then the trains off to their destinations. By the 1980s, some of the goods shipped by rail had gotten huge - Boeing and Canadair, for example, were shipping complete aircraft fuselages - the ever-better systems of cargo tracking made it easier for virtually anyone to ship by rail, and the vast majority did. Interstate trucking still existed, of course, but the efficiency of rail cargo was such that most customers went in that direction.
Canada was unique in the presence of the government-owned Canadian National Railways - formed in 1918 from the bankrupt bones of several other firms, CNR had been one of Canada's true 20th Century success stories, building a rail network of over 40,000 miles serving all of Canada and using its finances to dramatically expand into all kinds of other forms of transportation, and by the 1950s they had extended into the United States, with CN buying lines to connect to the Southern Pacific at Portland, Oregon, across the Midwest to the Twin Cities, Milwaukee and Chicago and purchasing the right of way of the bankrupt New York, Ontario and Western in 1957, which was integrated into CN after the Oswego Subdivision was completed in 1960, allowing CN to run through freight trains to New York. Despite being owned by the Canadian government, the company's reputation among Canadians was exemplary, and the company began its over half-century of unbroken years of profit in 1963, helped by the diesel locomotive, growing electrification (and the cheaper energy prices that resulted), swelling intermodal traffic and the completion of the rebuilding of the Newfoundland Railway into standard gauge, which was completed in 1965. The Canadian railroads had long made their profits in Western Canada, but such was the growth in freight traffic and the use of intermodal traffic that by 1970 both Canadian National and Canadian Pacific were making money everywhere. While Canadian Pacific's airline would be sold off in the mid-1970s (forming half of what would become Canadian Airlines) and CN's ocean shipping division was separated from it by Ottawa in 1986, the two lines, competitors across all of Canada, made Canada's transportation network just as efficient as America's. The giant hydroelectric projects of Ontario and Quebec (which also provided tens of thousands of megawatts of electricity to New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois) meant the cost of hydropower was cheap, which both companies took extensive advantage of. It was similar with the British Columbia Railway, the provincially-owned firm making its first profits in 1961 and maintaining them to this day, while the BCR eventually made its way to Whitehorse in the Yukon (and the Canadian National Northern Main Line, which ran to a connection with the Alaska Railroad in Fairbanks) and became a partner in the vast Roberts Bank Superport, opened in 1969.
Mexican railroading was in many ways similar to the United States, though Mexico's geography meant that the country's primary division for rail lines was the Mexican Altiplano, with the line from Guadalajara to Veracruz via Mexico City being basically a line where Mexico's rail systems (which went through multiple rounds of consolidations just as the American ones did) divided their operations - the Kansas City, Sonora and Pacific and Sistema Azteca railroads operated from the United States to the Mexican Altiplano, while Ferrosur and Ferrocarriles del Pacifico operated south of there as far as Panama and up the Yucatan. Of course, this line was by no means a hard and fast one, as Ferrosur operated well up the Gulf Coast all the way to Brownsville and FCP operated as far as Hermosillo, and the northern systems ran well into the United States, with the KCSP operating out to Omaha, St. Louis and Kansas City and the Sistema Azteca lines reaching Tulsa, Oklahoma City and Little Rock, as well as all of the major border cities, including New Orleans, Houston, San Antonio, Albuquerque, Phoenix and Los Angeles. The competing lines were joined by the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe lines that stretched all the way to Guadalajara, while Union Pacific served far as Monterrey, Chihuahua, Ciudad Victoria and Saltillo. Mexican demand resulted in Chrysler-Alco acquiring the Obras Ferroviarias de México in Aguascalientes in 1949, with it (and Canadian subsidiary Montreal Locomotive Works) both being part of Alco's takeover by Chrysler and Emerson Electric in 1967, while EMD also established a locomotive plant in Mexico (Electro-Motive de México) in San Luis Potosi in 1954, which remains in operation to this day.
Mexico's immense population density and economic growth in the central regions mean the lines across the Altiplano and its major cities - Mexico City, Guadalajara, Aguascalientes, Leon, Queretaro, Morelia, Toluca, Tlaxcala, Puebla, Jalapa, Veracruz - are affairs reminiscent of the Northeast Corridor of America. Three-track and four-track mainlines are common, and the Guadalajara area has multiple railyards with interchange points specifically meant for traffic off of the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific to be rapidly forwarded across the rest of the region. Electrification is almost universal in this area, main lines are almost entirely separated from road crossings, high-density passenger lines are separated from the freight ones (the Guadalajara-Mexico City-Veracruz Corredor Centro is just as busy as the Northeast Corridor is, sometimes even more so) and, like so much of the United States, the competition is fierce and the systems themselves more than a little impressive. The Ferrosur and FCP lines south from the Valley of Mexico are almost entirely electrified, owing to hydroelectric power in the area and the presence of multiple nuclear power plants in coastal regions, and these main routes function even more as a corridor of commerce owing to the population densities of much of Central America.
In modern times, one unique set of agreements not often seen elsewhere in the world involves trains making their way between all three countries - in modern times, its quite common to see trains with goods from the southern reaches of Mexico (particularly the coffee, bananas, sugar, melons, citrus fruits, hardwoods and cotton for which this part of the world is famous) heading straight through Mexico and the United States to Canada, and the same being true in reverse - most railroad cars in all three countries have their reporting marks and information markings in both English and Spanish for this very reason, and as the three countries standardized virtually all aspects of railroad operation in the 1920s and 1930s, seeing rolling stock from anywhere on the continent anywhere else is a common occurrence. Beyond that, starting in the 1960s many railroads began encouraging their customers to commission their own rolling stock, this encouragement done as a way of helping to share the cost of fleet refurbishment in the era. Many leasing companies had existed for decades - General American, Armour, Pacific Fruit Express, Union Tank Car, Merchants Dispatch, Procor, Trailer Train, Pacific Railroad Car, Servicio de Vagones Varracerdo, Sea-Land, Maritime Ontario - many of the largest rail shippers took this request, including major oil and chemical companies, mining firms and agricultural giants, taking advantage in many cases to plaster company logos all over the freight cars. Truck trailers of major intermodal shippers also began doing this (in come cases they even bought their own rail cars as well) and many customers, aware of trains going by being a cheap mode of advertising, made a point of using their cars as rolling billboards for them and their products.