Lost Speedways

[XLR8]

I've been watching this series on a new streaming service called Peacock. I'm 7 episodes in and it's pretty interesting.


I grew up in central Illinois and surrounded by dirt tracks; The Springfield Mile, Shaheen's speedway, Macon Speedway, and DuQuoin just to name a few. Like Shaheen's, many of these old dirt tracks have been abandoned or buried beneath modern urban sprawl and are just memories for those who attended or raced them back in the day.
Although Dale's series doesn't include any of the tracks I've visited, watching it brings back many fond memories of good times spent with great friends.
I would encourage all race fans out there to check out the series when you have time.

[coxbros1]

crap son...southern illinois here! Been to du quion alot growing up

[HS-YZ250]

In a similar vein, I had a bit of an obsession with abandoned airfields after I found this website - www.airfields-freeman.com

[Lowgear]

I last stumbled across that site a number of years ago while looking up the history of a local closed airfield. I see they've added some recent pictures of the place. It's neat but sad to see its current derelict state.

[EvolutionRevolution]

May I introduce people to the following two concepts:

- Urbex (urban exploration) - the act of (often illegally) visiting long closed-down buildings and other places. Many urban explorers take pictures and keep blogs on the web anonymously.
- Bridges to nowhere - expensive constructions that were made in anticipation of later developments which then never happened, leaving orphaned structures strewn across the landscape. Again, there are many blogs dedicated to them.

There's a nice but slightly hidden version of the former in my place of birth (to the west of Schiphol), where many roads and paths follow the course of the extensive 19th century tram system that once existed there before the second world war. There also were various derelict buildings in my youth, but most have been torn down or restored by now.

My favourite local version of a bridge to nowhere is a biking path near my previous place of residence (biking paths in the Netherlands often are really separate roads, not just lines on the pavement) that just stops, with a clear opening in the bushes ahead that ends up at a bunch of underpasses under a large highway that are way too low to pass underneath because the ground almost meets the bottom of the overarching viaduct . If you look at aerial photographs it's clearly visible that the biking path was supposed to continue under the highway towards a crossroads between some other biking paths a few kilometers away - the embankment on which the biking path would have run is also present.