Every railroad in California began as a strip of land: two hundred feet on either side of the track, granted, bought, condemned or borrowed. The trains are mostly gone. This series asks what happened to the land. Fourteen short episodes, about six minutes each, on the railroads that made California: the Central Pacific and the Big Four, the Southern Pacific "Octopus," the Santa Fe and the one-dollar fare that set off the Los Angeles land boom, the Western Pacific, the narrow gauges to the coast, the logging and borax lines, and the electric interurbans built to sell real estate. Who founded each one, what it was for, and how it ended. Then the afterlife. The federal railbanking law and the Supreme Court cases that turned it into a taking. The public agencies that bought back hundreds of miles of corridor from the railroads. The fights over rail versus trail, from Santa Cruz to the Eel River canyon. And a region-by-region look at what California kept and what it lost. The most populous state in the country has only about four percent of the nation's rail-trail miles, and no official count of what remains. The series closes by testing a forecast: that as AI and robots take on more of our work, more of us will be out walking and riding. Will the corridors be there when we are? Start with the trailer, or with Episode 1, "The Corridor Outlives the Train." 🔔 Subscribe: youtube.com/@LetsRethinkHistory?sub_confirmation=1 🎙 This series is AI-narrated (Google NotebookLM), researched from primary sources. 👍 Like and Subscribe, it really helps the channel reach others #History #RightOfWay #ReThinkHistory #California #Railroads #RailTrails