Working on the Railroad ***NOT FINISHED***
How do you get where you want to go when you don’t know how to get there? If you can’t ask for directions from a person or a computer, and if there are no signs that point the way, a map is your best bet. The map that you got shows you how to get places in Oklahoma on the railroad.
This will be an activity of imagination. You want to get something sent somewhere. Decide what it is that you need to send. If you build cars, you need to ship them to the town where they will be sold. If you are a farmer, you need to ship your crop to the place where it will be made into cereal or corn chips. If you are a coal miner the coal will have to get to where it will be burned to produce steam power. If you’re a lumberjack, the timber that you cut will be sent to a mill to change the logs into boards or paper products. You can use any of these examples or make up your own. If you are working in a small group, decide together what you want shipped.
Your teacher will give you a map, Railroads in Oklahoma. It shows 37 destinations in Oklahoma and others in Colorado, Kansas, and Texas. You also see 13 different companies that run railroads. Rails all look the same, but many different companies own them. When you look at the map, you can see that there are thirteen different companies that own the rails and that not every company’s rails go to every town. Even a big company like the Union Pacific does not go to every town on the map.
How Does This Activity Work?
In the middle of the map, you see OKC, Oklahoma City. Imagine that you want to send your product from OKC to El Reno. You would use the SLWC to get it there. The SLWC is the only railroad that goes to El Reno from OKC. That’s pretty simple right?
Let’s say that you want to send your freight from El Reno to Avard. Find Avard on the map. It is northwest of El Reno. As you look at the map, you see that the most direct way to get to Avard is to take the Union Pacific (the UP) north from El Reno to Enid. Once you get to Enid, you notice that the UP line doesn’t go to Avard. But the BNSF does. So the way to get your goods to Avard is to have the BNSF line take your goods from the UP and include them into their train going to Avard.
So what you see is that sometimes your goods will start their journey on one company’s line and switch one or more times to other companies’ lines in order for your things to get where you want them to go.