Martin Luther King Memorial

Martin Luther King Memorial

Monday 30.10.23

Today is spent in Atlanta first with a city tour.  Prime destinations are connected to Martin Luther King whose father was a minister at the Ebenezer Baptist Church which remains much as it was, although no longer used as such.  A new Church has been built across the road adjacent to the Martin Luther King Centre which opens as we arrive and we can wander around the displays telling his story and view the exhibits on display.

The Church across the road is our next stop and we are able to join a 30 minute discourse on King and his family and the events of the sixties around the development of the civil rights movement before and after Rosa Parks refused to leave her seat on a bus in December 1956 and the consequent steps taken when the buses were boycotted and the actions taken to enable travel to be maintained.

We then decide to visit the World of Coca Cola and I think it is fair to say that we are unimpressed – my advice is do not bother.

We are then on our first road journey – to Chattanooga.  Just outside the town is the Incline Railway on Lookout Mountain.  This is the first railway related activity of the trip and from the top there is a view over Chattanooga.  The weather is not the best today so photos of the view are not impressive.  It is approximately a mile from bottom to top and the power is two 100hp winches which take about 15 minutes to lift the car up the Incline.  The original line opened in 1887 and closed in 1899 after a new line (and the one still in use) opened in 1895.   It has been electrically operated since 1911 and the current cars fate from 2020 with one car of an earlier design being on display near the lower station.

Lookout Mountain Railroad

Lookout Mountain Railroad

Whilst on the viewing platform I can hear the horn of a main line train and looking out it is possible to see the locomotives at the head of an absolutely massive freight train which seems to stretch into the far distance.  It is impossible to accurately count the number of wagons and almost certainly there are further locomotives in the centre and at the rear of the train.  Another similar train is passing in the other direction

Being a Monday the dining options this evening are a little limited.  Some investigation had thrown up Bridgeman’s Chophouse inside The Reads Hotel which is a short walk from our hotel.  A cold and wet evening mars out walk but the warm welcome we receive in the restaurant allied with the excellent meal immediately puts things to rights.  Warmly recommended.  And we encounter an amusing quirk of local arrangements.  As we are a group of six, not all drinking I should note, it makes sense to order at least one bottle of wine.  Other drinks turn up rapidly but we later deduce that to access an entire bottle a manager has to arrange for it to be released from a hidden store where all bottles of wine are held captive deep within some cellar or similar.

The hotel has an interesting history and has been restored in recent years and looks magnificent honouring the Jazz era.  In 1932 Winston Churchill stayed whilst on a lecture tour and apparently slammed his suite door in the face of a journalist which made headline news.  The following day he gave the interview but announced that “Prohibition is a bad thing” – in hindsight one might wonder if that underpinned his bad humour the previous day!