Dyster Poetic As He Exaggerates New Train Station Impact...

Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster waxed eloquent about the new train station at the groundbreaking event last week.

"This is a great, historic milestone in the development, not just for the city of Niagara Falls, but our bi-national region as a whole," said the mayor.

Historic?

The train station's maximum capacity is 150 arrivals per day, less than the capacity of one common domestic airplane at an average airport.

Estimates by the train station designers acknowledge that the 150 capacity will be hard to achieve and the hoped-for daily average for the train station will be about half that number.

The selling point of the new train station was supposed to have been a museum dedicated to the antebellum Underground Railroad to be housed in the old customs house building adjacent to where the new train station is being built.

Ironically, the City of Niagara Falls did not even exist during the time of the Underground Railroad.

You don't hear much about the Underground Railroad Museum anymore, which was quietly downgraded to an exhibit, now that millions of public dollars have been spent. The phony stories of the Freedom Trail actually being Cuddaback Avenue and Harriet Tubman buying pancake mix at Tops Friendly Markets with Babe the Blue Ox in tow have fallen by the wayside as projected opening dates for the museum have come and gone and not a single artifact or exhibit was procured or prepared.