On Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:38:10 -0600, Free Lunch
wrote in misc.transport.urban-transit:

On Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:44:39 +0000, Arthur Figgis
wrote in misc.transport.urban-transit:

Robert Coe wrote:
On Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:19:37 +0000, Chris Tolley
(ukonline really) wrote:
: Robert Coe wrote:
:
: that inscription has also been allowed to deteriorate. It's inlaid (in
: a contrasting color) in a marble floor with high pedestrian traffic
: and has become quite worn. When I was there fifty years ago, it was
: prominent; now some of it is hard to read. It was followed by a verse
: from a poem lamenting the Civil War, and that has been all but
: obliterated.
:
: Some folk might view that as a healthy way to install a memorial of that
: nature. It is after all, only truly a \memorial\ only for as long as
: there are still people around who can put faces to the names, and that
: is becoming a dwindlingly small number in the case of WW2, is more or
: less zero for WW1, and has been zero for the US Civil War for pretty
: well a century. Once everyone with the memory stirred by the memorial
: has gone, it is just a list of names.

Maybe, but virtually every American but the most recent immigrzants had at
least one ancestor killed in the Civil War.

I once knew one who said her ancestor had been killed in the War of
Northern Aggression, and spent an evening and a few bottles of beer
explaining why we shouldn't call it a civil war. :-)

Indeed, it was a war of regional secession, though those are all called
civil wars.

at least if the region loses the war.

wrote:

Not really a Century for the US Civil war, the last Union Veteran died
about 1956 ,last Confederate 1958. Presumably as is the way of
these things there were a fair no that survived to the 1930's and some
long lived ones who made it a further 20 years. Either way there must
be a reasonable no of people around 80 ish who as a child would have
had a Grandad who served in that conflict. By some convoluted method
involving remarriage the last widows pension was paid until 2004.

My "pretty well a century" was a finger-in-the-air job. I'm genuinely
surprised that the veterans lasted that long.
--
http://gallery120232.fotopic.net/p13857145.html
("Europe's Heaviest Train" plaque on 59 005 at Merehead, 26 Jun 1994)