1953 Mixed Train Daily – one of my favourite railway books
One of the things I like about the Internet age is how you can drop in on small communities for a short while.
I often do this whilst browsing the Forgotten Georgia blogpost and its Facebook page.
Reading Mixed Train Daily, I come across little historical nuggets of rural and wild-west America or Americana that have survived into the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The Bowdon Railroad of west Georgia is one such curiousity. Bowdon Railroad used to link up with one of the Georgia main lines at Bowdon Junction, providing the rail link to the City of Bowdon (“The Friendly City”) located in Carroll County, Georgia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowdon_Railway
Bowdon now has a population of about 2,000, twice what it had in the railroad days of the 1940s and 50s This is more like the population numbers of a small town or larger village in the United Kingdom and quite different from the average city in the United Kingdom with its requirement to have a Cathedral, despite the occasional granting of recent smaller Millennium UK cities.
I like this evocative Short Lines Map of Georgia from Mixed Train Daily
The Bowdon empire 
Through the wonders of the Interweb you can drop in on Bowdon as a community today through its website – see http://www.bowdon.net
You can see on the photo gallery who has received Business of the Month this time.
https://www.bowdonmainstreet.com
You can even see the Founder’s Day Parade video on YouTube, as if you’re standing by the side of the road and wandering around. https://youtu.be/IB1W2_LY7Tg
Blog posted by Mark Man of TIN on 20 October 2020.
Sidetracked 
A most interesting post. I popped by Bowdon this morning via your links and enjoyed my visit. I find rail cars fascinating in all their shapes and forms. I like the diy nature of them and the sheer quirkiness they exude.
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Small town America, always fascinating.
Strange to think of all the Covid restrictions there in Bowdon GA and the electioneering going on etc. on the other side of the world. It’s like knowing some of the American gamers through their Facebook groups and blogs, talking about their hobby shops closing down etc.
Mixed Train Daily is quite a melancholy book, the author and photographer knew they were watching these train lines fade away, some slowly, some rapidly.
As well as my favourite Forgotten Georgia blog / Facebook group of bits of bypassed and decaying Americana, I have been watching Stranger Things on a Netflix trial and this is recreated 1980s small town America (Indiana), a feel good movie but with supernatural sci-fi menace, channeling all those 80s ET / Close Encounters / Stand by Me / Goonies / Gremlin Spielberg family / kid movies.
I tried your Cardinal series on BBC Iplayer which was beautifully filmed snowy landscape but the content far far far too gruesome to watch.
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