Adapting with the Times: The Railroad Depot in South Dakota, 1873 to 2006

This study traces tire architectural .and social evolution of passenger depots in South Dakota from 1873 to 2006. This evolution is broken down into four stages: development and expansion; prominence and significance; abandonment and deterioration; preservation and rehabilitation. The first stage, development and expansion, reviews the development of railroads as a primary transportation system and the expansion of that system across the United States and particularly South Dakota. Deficiencies in earlier transportation methods, including stagecoach, horseback, canals, and steamboat, contributed to the emergence and rapid growth of railroads. As railroads ·expanded, they became critical factors in settlement, community development and decline, and the everyday lives of South Dakotans. The prominence and significance of South Dakota\u27s depots during the heyday of railroad activity makes up the second stage of this\u27 study. Architecturally, depots were initially small, simple buildings, often converted box cars that served primarily railroad functions. But as railroads and communities developed, depots also became more significant, both architecturally and socially. Functions and activities entirely unrelated to the railroad started occurring at the local depot and led to them becoming epicenters of community activity. Factors that contributed to the decline in railroad travel, especially the development of transportation alternatives, gave impetus to the third stage, the abandonment, deterioration, and demolition of depots statewide. As automobiles and buses along improved highway systems, and the growing airline industry began to negatively impact railroad travel, the prominence of the local depot also began to decline. Line abandonments and station closures led to hundreds of depots, primarily smaller woodframe depots, to be sold, moved, left to deteriorate, or demolished from the 1960s through the 1980s. Finally, for those that survived the third stage, the fourth stage consisted of the preservation and rehabilitation of South Dakota\u27s depots. The rampant deterioration and demolition of depots during the third stage sparked this final stage. For a variety of reasons/ including preserving history or economics, people began to rehabilitate them into a wide range of new functions, including restaurants, public or private offices, and museums. A nationwide framework and ethic for historic preservation created by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 contributed to this preservation. While railroads initially responded with skeptit ism toward preservation efforts, primarily J:\u3eecause of.the perception of restrictions being placed on their property, some railroads began to support and contribute to such projects

Comment on the letter of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) dated April 21, 2020 regarding “Fossils from conflict zones and reproducibility of fossil‑based scientific data”: Myanmar amber

Non peer reviewe

Multiple star systems in the Orion nebula

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final fersion is available from EDP Sciences via the DOI in this record.This work presents an interferometric study of the massive-binary fraction in the Orion Trapezium cluster with the recently comissioned GRAVITY instrument. We observed a total of 16 stars of mainly OB spectral type. We find three previously unknown companions for θ1 Ori B, θ2 Ori B, and θ2 Ori C. We determined a separation for the previously suspected companion of NU Ori. We confirm four companions for θ1 Ori A, θ1 Ori C, θ1 Ori D, and θ2 Ori A, all with substantially improved astrometry and photometric mass estimates. We refined the orbit of the eccentric high-mass binary θ1 Ori C and we are able to derive a new orbit for θ1 Ori D. We find a system mass of 21.7 M⊙ and a period of 53 days. Together with other previously detected companions seen in spectroscopy or direct imaging, eleven of the 16 high-mass stars are multiple systems. We obtain a total number of 22 companions with separations up to 600 AU. The companion fraction of the early B and O stars in our sample is about two, significantly higher than in earlier studies of mostly OB associations. The separation distribution hints toward a bimodality. Such a bimodality has been previously found in A stars, but rarely in OB binaries, which up to this point have been assumed to be mostly compact with a tail of wider companions. We also do not find a substantial population of equal-mass binaries. The observed distribution of mass ratios declines steeply with mass, and like the direct star counts, indicates that our companions follow a standard power law initial mass function. Again, this is in contrast to earlier findings of flat mass ratio distributions in OB associations. We excluded collision as a dominant formation mechanism but find no clear preference for core accretion or competitive accretion.Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant AgreementFCT-PortugalERC Starting Gran