Flyover

They form part of the vast electrification and reconstruction schemes which have been in hand for a number of years at Liverpool Street, and in suburban Essex, and include the rearrangement of tracks, of which the Ilford flyover forms part; the modern signal boxes, now needed only at key points; the electric control or sub-stations; and a large electric car shed.

As our train to Paris dashed through the labyrynthine flyovers at Porchefontaine, barely a mile from Versailles, the 75 m.p.h. limit was already almost attained.

The sales of toy motor-cars were enormous, and not only are there cars, there are all the accessories to go with them. In 1960 there were road sections with flyovers and banked corners on which sports and saloons could whizz along at a speed of 250 m.p.h, which apparently was a real speed of from six to seven miles per hour.

Boom Town may not be a definitive text—save that for the historians—but it’s a significant update, one that exchanges the dusty pop-cultural clichés of a “flyover” city for the spark of a sincerely enlightening place.

If Democrats end up flipping state houses in places Trump won in 2016, they will have proved themselves capable of winning in the places coastal elites derisively refer to as “flyover America.”