Imre E. Quastler (born December 26, 1940) is an American historical transportation geographer and an authority on aspects of regional transportation systems in the United States. He is Emeritus Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography at San Diego State University. He writes professionally under the name I. E. Quastler.
In mid-1939, Quastler's parents and sister moved from Germany to Japan, taking one of the last passenger ships that left an Italian port for East Asia before World War II broke out. They were among those fleeing Germany as non-Aryans were being forced out of their jobs and some were being sent off to concentration camps. Before departing Germany, Quastler's father had found a job with a German engineering company in Japan.
Quastler was born in Tokyo on December 26, 1940. As the Allies advanced on Japan in 1944, Quastler and his mother and sister were relocated to the mountain village of Karuizawa, about 80 miles west of Tokyo, which served as a detention area for foreigners. His father, employed in the war industry, remained in Tokyo. After the war, Quastler's father worked for the American occupation administration. The family relocated to the United States in 1951, eventually settling in Detroit where Quastler's father began a new career with Excello Corporation and eventually with General Motors.
Quastler obtained a B.A. degree from Wayne State University in Detroit in 1962. He earned an M.A. degree from Northwestern University in 1964, where he studied under William Garrison, a transportation geographer and a leader of the "quantitative revolution" that swept geography and other fields in the mid-twentieth century. [1] While at Northwestern, he began specializing in transportation geography, but of the non-quantitative variety. In 1971, he received his Ph.D. in geography from the University of Kansas, writing a dissertation on an historical geography topic. [2]
While in the doctoral program at the University of Kansas, Quastler found that the history of railroad networks was under-studied, leaving an important part of the nation's economy poorly understood in terms of operations, equipment, and network expansion and contraction. Research eventually led to publication of The Railroads of Lawrence, Kansas, 1854-1900 in 1979, followed by eight other books on railroad historical geography.
Quastler joined the faculty of San Diego State University in 1968, remaining there until his retirement in 2002. Over the course of his academic career, he developed undergraduate and graduate level courses in transportation, urban and historical geography. His research interests included the history and development of both regional railroads and commuter (regional) airlines. Since his retirement he has continued writing and publishing on those subjects.
Quastler was a popular teacher who mentored many students over the course of his career. He received the Outstanding Teacher Award at San Diego State University in 1987, and he was twice selected as Exemplary Academic Advisor at the university.
Quastler is one of the few academic geographers to extensively study the historical development of railroad and airline transportation networks. Much of the work in the field has been accomplished by non-academic writers and railroad or airline aficionados. Quastler's career has centered on documentation of the development and operation of regional transportation systems, an area generally without rigorous academic work. Besides writing about those forms of transportation, he also photographed them for historical purposes, starting in the late 1950s. He has photographed hundreds of railroads and airlines, producing one of the largest collection of images of this type from the late 1960s to the present. Additionally, he has mapped the networks of the railroads and airlines he has studied, illustrating and explaining their changes over time. In 2010 San Diego Aerospace Museum scanned 355 images from among of his extensive collection of airliner slides, making them available to the public through Flicker.
Quastler's study of regional transportation systems expanded to include commuter and regional airlines in 1968, shortly after he arrived at San Diego State College (later San Diego State University). His first book documented the rise of Swift Aire Lines, which at the time served such cities as San Luis Obispo, Santa Maria, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento. This was the first in depth study of such airlines. During the 1970s and 1980s, Quastler documented the rise of several other commuter and regional airline networks, including Air Midwest and Scheduled Skyways. Quastler is currently conducting research for a book about the history and historical geography of Pacific Southwest Airlines, the California firm that was one of the most successful intrastate airlines in the history of the industry.
In 1994, Quastler completed Commuter Airlines of the United States, co-authored with R. E. G. Davies (1921-2011), a well-known writer of airline history. The book was sponsored and published by the Smithsonian Institution, and it remains the only comprehensive history written on the commuter airline industry.
Imre E. Quastler has published seventeen books and monographs and he has written twenty professional articles, reviews, and book chapters. Among his articles, he feels that those published by the journal Kansas History are his most important. Quastler's latest book is Unusual Airlines and Airliners: A Photo Journal. The author describes the book as consisting “primarily of more than 200 unusual airline and airliner photos taken by the author since 1969. The subjects range from commuter airliners, often photographed at unusual locations, to jumbo jets. They also range from airlines and services that lasted only a matter of months, to those of longer standing but which are probably unfamiliar to the average reader, whether in the United States, Canada, or elsewhere. Short essays describe the content and setting of each photograph.” [3]
Human geography or anthropogeography is the branch of geography that is associated and deals with humans and their relationships with communities, cultures, economies, and interactions with the environment by studying their relations with and across locations. It analyzes patterns of human social interaction, their interactions with the environment, and their spatial interdependencies by application of qualitative and quantitative research methods.
Regional science is a field of the social sciences concerned with analytical approaches to problems that are specifically urban, rural, or regional. Topics in regional science include, but are not limited to location theory or spatial economics, location modeling, transportation, migration analysis, land use and urban development, interindustry analysis, environmental and ecological analysis, resource management, urban and regional policy analysis, geographical information systems, and spatial data analysis. In the broadest sense, any social science analysis that has a spatial dimension is embraced by regional scientists.
North Platte is a city in and the county seat of Lincoln County, Nebraska, United States. It is located in the west-central part of the state, along Interstate 80, at the confluence of the North and South Platte Rivers forming the Platte River. The population was 23,390 at the 2020 census.
Air Midwest, Inc., was a Federal Aviation Administration Part 121 certificated air carrier that operated under air carrier certificate number AMWA510A issued on May 15, 1965. It was headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, United States, and was a subsidiary of Mesa Air Group. Besides initially flying as an independent air carrier, it later operated code sharing feeder flights on behalf of Eastern Air Lines as Eastern Air Midwest Express, on behalf of American Airlines as American Eagle, on behalf of Trans World Airlines (TWA) as Trans World Express and on behalf of US Airways as US Airways Express. It also operated feeder flights on behalf of Braniff (1983-1990) and Ozark Air Lines in addition to flying for Mesa Airlines. Air Midwest was shut down by its parent company, Mesa Airlines, in June 2008.
Urban geography is the subdiscipline of geography that derives from a study of cities and urban processes. Urban geographers and urbanists examine various aspects of urban life and the built environment. Scholars, activists, and the public have participated in, studied, and critiqued flows of economic and natural resources, human and non-human bodies, patterns of development and infrastructure, political and institutional activities, governance, decay and renewal, and notions of socio-spatial inclusions, exclusions, and everyday life.
A regional airline is a general classification of airline which typically operates scheduled passenger air service, using regional aircraft, between communities lacking sufficient demand or infrastructure to attract mainline flights. In North America, most regional airlines are classified as "fee-for-departure" carriers, operating their revenue flights as codeshare services contracted by one or more major airline partners. A number of regional airlines, particularly in during the 1960s and 1970s, were also known as commuter airlines and classified as such in the Official Airline Guide (OAG).
Wooden railroads, called wagonways, were built in the United States starting from the 1720s. A railroad was reportedly used in the construction of the French fortress at Louisburg, Nova Scotia, in New France in 1720. Between 1762 and 1764, at the close of the French and Indian War (1756–1763), a gravity railroad is built by British military engineers up the steep riverside terrain near the Niagara River waterfall's escarpment at the Niagara Portage in Lewiston, New York.
Golden West Airlines was a commuter airline that operated flights on a high volume schedule in California. It ceased operations in 1983.
Skyway Airlines was an American ramp and aircraft ground handling services and catering company based in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Until April 5, 2008, it operated as a regional airline and banner carrier exclusively for Midwest Express Airlines under the business name Midwest Connect, feeding Midwest's hub at General Mitchell International Airport with twelve 32-seat Fairchild-Dornier 328JET regional jet aircraft, and four 19-seat Beechcraft 1900 commuter turboprops. Skyway Airlines, along with its parent corporation, Midwest Air Group, has since ceased operations.
Commuter rail services in the United States, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Costa Rica provide common carrier passenger transportation along railway tracks, with scheduled service on fixed routes on a non-reservation basis, primarily for short-distance (local) travel between a central business district and adjacent suburbs and regional travel between cities of a conurbation. It does not include rapid transit or light rail service.
Historical geography is the branch of geography that studies the ways in which geographic phenomena have changed over time. It is a synthesizing discipline which shares both topical and methodological similarities with history, anthropology, ecology, geology, environmental studies, literary studies, and other fields. Although the majority of work in historical geography is considered human geography, the field also encompasses studies of geographic change which are not primarily anthropogenic. Historical geography is often a major component of school and university curricula in geography and social studies. Current research in historical geography is being performed by scholars in more than forty countries.
The quantitative revolution (QR)[n] was a paradigm shift that sought to develop a more rigorous and systematic methodology for the discipline of geography. It came as a response to the inadequacy of regional geography to explain general spatial dynamics. The main claim for the quantitative revolution is that it led to a shift from a descriptive (idiographic) geography to an empirical law-making (nomothetic) geography. The quantitative revolution occurred during the 1950s and 1960s and marked a rapid change in the method behind geographical research, from regional geography into a spatial science.
The establishment of America's transcontinental rail lines securely linked California to the rest of the country, and the far-reaching transportation systems that grew out of them during the century that followed contributed to the state's social, political, and economic development. When California was admitted as a state to the United States in 1850, and for nearly two decades thereafter, it was in many ways isolated, an outpost on the Pacific, until the First Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869.
The following is an alphabetical list of articles related to the U.S. State of Nebraska.
Piedmont Airlines was a United States airline from 1948 to 1989, when it was acquired by and merged into USAir. Its headquarters were at One Piedmont Plaza in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a building that is now part of Wake Forest University.
The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is a governmental agency and its purpose is to "provide safe, effective, and efficient movement of people and goods" throughout the state. Though the public face of the agency is generally associated with maintenance of the state's immense highway system, the agency is also responsible for aviation in the state and overseeing public transportation systems.
Swift Aire Lines was a U.S. commuter air carrier that was based in San Luis Obispo, California. The airline's two letter code was "WI". Swift Aire provided scheduled passenger air service wholly within California from the late 1960s until 1981 when it merged with Golden Gate Airlines. Shortly thereafter, Golden Gate experienced financial challenges and ceased all operations.
Geography is a field of science devoted to the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of the Earth and planets. The first person to use the word γεωγραφία was Eratosthenes. Geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks an understanding of Earth and its human and natural complexities—not merely where objects are, but also how they have changed and come to be.
SeaPort Airlines was a US-based regional airline with its headquarters at Portland International Airport in Portland, Oregon.
GP Express Airlines was a scheduled passenger commuter air carrier with its headquarters located in Grand Island, Nebraska The parent corporation of the airline began on-demand air charter operations in December 1975. In December 1985 the Department of Transportation notified GP AIR that its bid to provide Essential Air Service (EAS) service in the Midwest had been accepted, GP AIR subsequently created subsidiary GP Express in order to conduct these operations under 14 CFR Part 135.
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