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Invisible Man

Invisible Man is Ralph Ellison's first novel, the only one published during his lifetime. It was published by Random House in 1952, and addresses many of the social and intellectual issues faced by African Americans in the early 20th century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity.

Invisible Man won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, making Ellison the first African-American writer to win the award. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Invisible Man 19th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Time magazine included the novel in its 100 Best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 list, calling it "the quintessential American picaresque of the 20th century", rather than a "race novel, or even a bildungsroman". Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Ruland recognize a black existentialist vision with a "Kafka-like absurdity". According to The New York Times, Barack Obama modeled his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father on Ellison's novel.

Background
Ellison says in his introduction to the 30th Anniversary Edition that he started to write what would eventually become Invisible Man in a barn in Waitsfield, Vermont (actually in the neighboring town of Fayston ), in the summer of 1945 while on sick leave from the Merchant Marine. The book took five years to complete with one year off for what Ellison termed an "ill-conceived short novel". Invisible Man was published as a whole in 1952. Ellison had published a section of the book in 1947, the famous "Battle Royal" scene, which had been shown to Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon magazine by Frank Taylor, one of Ellison's early supporters.

In his speech accepting the 1953 National Book Award, Ellison said that he considered the novel's chief significance to be its "experimental attitude." Before Invisible Man, many (if not most) novels dealing with African Americans were written solely for social protest, notably, Native Son and Uncle Tom's Cabin. The narrator in Invisible Man says, "I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either", signaling a break from the usual protest novel. In the essay "The World and the Jug," a response to Irving Howe's essay "Black Boys and Native Sons" which "pit[s] Ellison and [James] Baldwin against [Richard] Wright and then", as Ellison would say, "gives Wright the better argument," Ellison makes a fuller statement about the position he held about his book in the larger canon of work by an American who happens to be of African ancestry. In the opening paragraph to that essay Ellison poses three questions: "Why is it so often true that when critics confront the American as Negro they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis? Why is it that Sociology-oriented critics seem to rate literature so far below politics and ideology that they would rather kill a novel than modify their presumptions concerning a given reality which it seeks in its own terms to project? Finally, why is it that so many of those who would tell us the meaning of Negro life never bother to learn how varied it really is?"

Placing Invisible Man within the canon of either the Harlem Renaissance or the Black Arts Movement is difficult. It owes allegiance to both and neither. Ellison's resistance to being pigeonholed by his peers bubbled over into his statement to Irving Howe about what he deemed to be a relative vs. an ancestor. He says to Howe "...perhaps you will understand when I say that he [Wright] did not influence me if I point out that while one can do nothing about choosing one's relatives, one can, as an artist, choose one's 'ancestors'. Wright was, in this sense, a 'relative'; Hemingway an 'ancestor'." It was this idea of "playing the field," so to speak, not being "all-in", that led to some of Ellison's more staunch critics. Howe, in "Black Boys and Native Sons", but also other black writers such as John Oliver Killens, who once denounced Invisible Man by saying: "The Negro people need Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man like we need a hole in the head or a stab in the back. ... It is a vicious distortion of Negro life."

Ellison's "ancestors" included, among others, T. S. Eliot. In an interview with Richard Kostelanetz, Ellison states that what he had learned from his The Waste Land was imagery and also improvisation techniques he had only before seen in jazz. Some other influences include William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Ellison once called Faulkner the South's greatest artist, and in the Spring 1955 Paris Review, Ellison said of Hemingway: "I read him to learn his sentence structure and how to organize a story. I guess many young writers were doing this, but I also used his description of hunting when I went into the fields the next day. I had been hunting since I was eleven, but no one had broken down the process of wing-shooting for me, and it was from reading Hemingway that I learned to lead a bird. When he describes something in print, believe him; believe him even when he describes the process of art in terms of baseball or boxing; he’s been there."

Some of Ellison's influences had a more direct impact on his novel. The first line of Invisible Man ("I am an invisible man") for example, is a conscious echo of Notes from Underground ("I am a sick man"). Ellison acknowledged this borrowing in his 1981 introduction to his novel saying the novel's main character can be "associated, ever so distantly, with the narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground".

Arnold Rampersad, Ellison's biographer, says that Herman Melville had a profound influence on Ellison's way of writing about race: the narrator "resembles no one else in previous fiction so much as he resembles Ishmael of Moby-Dick". Ellison signals his debt in the prologue to the novel, where the narrator remembers a moment of truth under the influence of marijuana and evokes a church service: "Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is the 'Blackness of Blackness'. And the congregation answers: 'That blackness is most black, brother, most black...'" In this scene Ellison "reprises a moment in the second chapter of Moby-Dick", where Ishmael wanders around New Bedford looking for a place to spend the night and enters a black church: "It was a negro church; and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there." According to Rampersad, it was Melville who "empowered Ellison to insist on a place in the American literary tradition" by his example of "representing the complexity of race and racism so acutely and generously" in Moby-Dick.

Political influences and the Communist Party
The letters he wrote to fellow novelist Richard Wright as he started working on the novel provide evidence for his disillusion with and defection from the Communist Party USA for perceived revisionism. In a letter to Wright on August 18, 1945, Ellison poured out his anger toward party leaders for betraying African-American and Marxist class politics during the war years: "If they want to play ball with the bourgeoisie they needn't think they can get away with it... Maybe we can't smash the atom, but we can, with a few well-chosen, well-written words, smash all that crummy filth to hell." Ellison resisted attempts to ferret out such allusions in the book itself however, stating "I did not want to describe an existing Socialist or Communist or Marxist political group, primarily because it would have allowed the reader to escape confronting certain political patterns, patterns which still exist and of which our two major political parties are guilty in their relationships to Negro Americans."

Plot summary
The narrator, an unnamed black man, begins by describing his living conditions: an underground room wired with hundreds of electric lights, operated by power stolen from the city's electric grid. He reflects on the various ways in which he has experienced social invisibility during his life and begins to tell his story, returning to his teenage years.

The narrator lives in a small Southern town and, upon graduating from high school, wins a scholarship to an all-black college after taking part in a brutal, humiliating battle royal for the entertainment of the town's rich white dignitaries.

One afternoon during his junior year at the college, the narrator chauffeurs Mr. Norton, a visiting rich white trustee, out among the old slave-quarters beyond the campus. By chance, he stops at the cabin of Jim Trueblood, who has caused a scandal by impregnating both his wife and his daughter in his sleep. Trueblood's account horrifies Mr. Norton so badly that he asks the narrator to find him a drink. The narrator drives him to a bar filled with prostitutes and patients from a nearby mental hospital. The mental patients rail against both of them and eventually overwhelm the orderly assigned to keep the patients under control, injuring Mr. Norton in the process. The narrator hurries Mr. Norton away from the chaotic scene and back to campus.

Dr. Bledsoe, the college president, excoriates the narrator for showing Mr. Norton the underside of black life beyond the campus and expels him. However, Bledsoe gives several sealed letters of recommendation to the narrator, to be delivered to friends of the college in order to assist him in finding a job so that he may eventually earn enough to re-enroll. The narrator travels to New York and distributes his letters, with no success; the son of one recipient shows him the letter, which reveals Bledsoe's intent never to admit the narrator as a student again.

Acting on the son's suggestion, the narrator seeks work at the Liberty Paint factory, renowned for its pure white paint. He is assigned first to the shipping department, then to the boiler room, whose chief attendant, Lucius Brockway, is highly paranoid and suspects that the narrator is trying to take his job. This distrust worsens after the narrator stumbles into a union meeting, and Brockway attacks the narrator and tricks him into setting off an explosion in the boiler room. The narrator is hospitalized and subjected to shock treatment, overhearing the doctors' discussion of him as a possible mental patient.

After leaving the hospital, the narrator faints on the streets of Harlem and is taken in by Mary Rambo, a kindly old-fashioned woman who reminds him of his relatives in the South. He later happens across the eviction of an elderly black couple and makes an impassioned speech that incites the crowd to attack the law enforcement officials in charge of the proceedings. The narrator escapes over the rooftops and is confronted by Brother Jack, the leader of a group known as "the Brotherhood" that professes its commitment to bettering conditions in Harlem and the rest of the world. At Jack's urging, the narrator agrees to join and speak at rallies to spread the word among the black community. Using his new salary, he pays Mary back the rent he owes her and moves into an apartment provided by the Brotherhood.

The rallies go smoothly at first, with the narrator receiving extensive indoctrination on the Brotherhood's ideology and methods. Soon, though, he encounters trouble from Ras the Exhorter, a fanatical black nationalist who believes that the Brotherhood is controlled by whites. Neither the narrator nor Tod Clifton, a youth leader within the Brotherhood, is particularly swayed by his words. The narrator is later called before a meeting of the Brotherhood and accused of putting his own ambitions ahead of the group. He is reassigned to another part of the city to address issues concerning women, seduced by the wife of a Brotherhood member, and eventually called back to Harlem when Clifton is reported missing and the Brotherhood's membership and influence begin to falter.

The narrator can find no trace of Clifton at first, but soon discovers him selling dancing Sambo dolls on the street, having become disillusioned with the Brotherhood. Clifton is shot and killed by a policeman while resisting arrest; at his funeral, the narrator delivers a rousing speech that rallies the crowd to support the Brotherhood again. At an emergency meeting, Jack and the other Brotherhood leaders criticize the narrator for his unscientific arguments and the narrator determines that the group has no real interest in the black community's problems.

The narrator returns to Harlem, trailed by Ras's men, and buys a hat and a pair of sunglasses to elude them. As a result, he is repeatedly mistaken for a man named Rinehart, known as a lover, a hipster, a gambler, a briber, and a spiritual leader. Understanding that Rinehart has adapted to white society at the cost of his own identity, the narrator resolves to undermine the Brotherhood by feeding them dishonest information concerning the Harlem membership and situation. After seducing the wife of one member in a fruitless attempt to learn their new activities, he discovers that riots have broken out in Harlem due to widespread unrest. He realizes that the Brotherhood has been counting on such an event in order to further its own aims. The narrator gets mixed up with a gang of looters, who burn down a tenement building, and wanders away from them to find Ras, now on horseback, armed with a spear and shield, and calling himself "the Destroyer". Ras shouts for the crowd to lynch the narrator, but the narrator attacks him with the spear and escapes into an underground coal bin. Two white men seal him in, leaving him alone to ponder the racism he has experienced in his life.

The epilogue returns to the present, with the narrator stating that he is ready to return to the world because he has spent enough time hiding from it. He explains that he has told his story in order to help people see past his own invisibility, and also to provide a voice for people with a similar plight: "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"

Reception
Critic Orville Prescott of The New York Times called the novel "the most impressive work of fiction by an American Negro which I have ever read", and felt it marked "the appearance of a richly talented writer". Novelist Saul Bellow in his review found it "a book of the very first order, a superb book...it is tragi-comic, poetic, the tone of the very strongest sort of creative intelligence". George Mayberry of The New Republic said Ellison "is a master at catching the shape, flavor and sound of the common vagaries of human character and experience".

Anthony Burgess described the novel as "a masterpiece".

In 2003, a sculpture titled "Invisible Man: A Memorial to Ralph Ellison" by Elizabeth Catlett, was unveiled at Riverside Park at 150th Street in Manhattan, opposite from where Ellison lived and three blocks from the Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum, where he is interred in a crypt. The 15-foot-high, 10-foot-wide bronze monolith features a hollow silhouette of a man and two granite panels that are inscribed with Ellison quotations.

Adaptation
It was reported in October 2017 that streaming service Hulu was developing the novel into a television series.

title: Invisible Man


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Martin Ryle

Sir Martin Ryle (27 September 1918 – 14 October 1984) was an English radio astronomer who developed revolutionary radio telescope systems (see e.g. aperture synthesis) and used them for accurate location and imaging of weak radio sources. In 1946 Ryle and Derek Vonberg were the first people to publish interferometric astronomical measurements at radio wavelengths. With improved equipment, Ryle observed the most distant known galaxies in the universe at that time. He was the first Professor of Radio Astronomy in the University of Cambridge and founding director of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory. He was the twelfth Astronomer Royal from 1972 to 1982. Ryle and Antony Hewish shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974, the first Nobel prize awarded in recognition of astronomical research. In the 1970s, Ryle turned the greater part of his attention from astronomy to social and political issues which he considered to be more urgent.

Education and early life
Martin Ryle was born in Brighton, England, the son of Professor John Alfred Ryle and Miriam (née Scully) Ryle. He was the nephew of Oxford University Professor of Philosophy Gilbert Ryle. After studying at Bradfield College, Ryle studied physics at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1939, Ryle worked with the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) on the design of antennas for airborne radar equipment during World War II. After the war, he received a fellowship at the Cavendish Laboratory.

Career and research
The focus of Ryle's early work in Cambridge was on radio waves from the Sun. His interest quickly shifted to other areas, however, and he decided early on that the Cambridge group should develop new observing techniques. As a result, Ryle was the driving force in the creation and improvement of astronomical interferometry and aperture synthesis, which paved the way for massive upgrades in the quality of radio astronomical data. In 1946 Ryle built the first multi-element astronomical radio interferometer.

Ryle guided the Cambridge radio astronomy group in the production of several important radio source catalogues. One such catalogue, the Third Cambridge Catalogue of Radio Sources (3C) in 1959 helped lead to the discovery of the first quasi-stellar object (quasar).

While serving as university lecturer in physics at Cambridge from 1948 to 1959, Ryle became director of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory in 1957 and professor of radio astronomy in 1959. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1952, was knighted in 1966 (p 519 of ) and succeeded Sir Richard Woolley as Astronomer Royal from 1972 to 1982. Ryle and Antony Hewish shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974, the first Nobel prize awarded in recognition of astronomical research. In 1968 Ryle served as professor of astronomy at Gresham College, London.

Personality
According to numerous reports Ryle was quick-thinking, impatient with those slower than himself and charismatic (pp 502, 508, 510 of ). He was also idealistic (p 519 of ), a characteristic he shared with his father (p 499 of, ). In an interview (p271 of ) in 1982 he said "At times one feels that one should almost have a car sticker saying 'Stop Science Now' because we're getting cleverer and cleverer, but we do not increase the wisdom to go with it."

He was also intense and volatile (p 327 of ), the latter characteristic being associated with his mother (p 499 of, Folder A.20 of ). The historian Owen Chadwick described him as "a rare personality, of exceptional sensitivity of mind, fears and anxieties, care and compassion, humour and anger." (Folder A.28 of )

Ryle was sometimes considered difficult to work with – he often worked in an office at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory to avoid disturbances from other members of the Cavendish Laboratory and to avoid getting into heated arguments, as Ryle had a hot temper. Ryle worried that Cambridge would lose its standing in the radio astronomy community as other radio astronomy groups had much better funding, so he encouraged a certain amount of secrecy about his aperture synthesis methods in order to keep an advantage for the Cambridge group. Ryle had heated arguments with Fred Hoyle of the Institute of Astronomy about Hoyle's steady state universe, which restricted collaboration between the Cavendish Radio Astronomy Group and the Institute of Astronomy during the 1960s.

War, peace and energy
Ryle was a new physics graduate and an experienced radio ham in 1939, when the Second World War started. He played an important part in the Allied war effort, working mainly in radar countermeasures. After the war, "He returned to Cambridge with a determination to devote himself to pure science, unalloyed by the taint of war."

In the 1970s, Ryle turned the greater part of his attention from astronomy to social and political issues which he considered to be more urgent. With publications from 1976 and continuing, despite illness until he died in 1984, he pursued a passionate and intensive program on the socially responsible use of science and technology. His main themes were:
 * Warning the world of the horrific dangers of nuclear armaments, notably in his pamphlet Towards the Nuclear Holocaust.
 * Criticism of nuclear power, as in Is there a case for nuclear power?
 * Research and promotion of alternative energy and energy efficiency, as in Short-term Storage and Wind Power Availability.
 * Calling for the responsible use of science and technology. "...we should strive to see how the vast resources now diverted towards the destruction of life are turned instead to the solution of the problems which both rich - but especially the poor - countries of the world now face."

In 1983 Ryle responded to a request from the President of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences for suggestions of topics to be discussed at a meeting on Science and Peace. Ryle's reply was published posthumously in Martin Ryle's Letter. An abridged version appears in New Scientist with the title Martin Ryle's Last Testament. The letter ends with "Our cleverness has grown prodigiously – but not our wisdom."

Honours and awards
Ryle was awarded numerous prizes and honours including:

 * Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1952
 * Hughes Medal (1954)
 * Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1964)
 * Fernand Holweck Medal and Prize (1965)
 * Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (1965)
 * Albert A. Michelson Medal of the Franklin Institute (1971)
 * Royal Medal (1973)
 * Bruce Medal (1974)
 * Nobel Prize in Physics (1974)
 * Ryle Telescope at Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory
 * In 1965 Ryle co-delivered the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Exploration of the Universe.

Personal life
In their early years Martin and his elder brother received lessons at home in carpentry (p 498 of ) and manual skills became important for him throughout his life. This was for relaxation – he built boats to his own designs (p 498 of ) – and professionally. In his wartime radar work, his post-war radio-telescope building (p 510 of ) and his late researches into wind energy (p 517 of ) he was a hands-on practical engineer as well as a scientist.

Ryle also had a lifelong interest in sailing (p 498 of ) and this matched his choice when in the 1970s he turned his research subject from astronomy to wind energy (pp 420–422 of )

Another practical skill acquired by Martin in youth that later served him well in his professional career was as a radio 'ham'. While still at School (Bradfield College) he built his own transmitter and obtained a Post Office licence to operate it (pp 498–499 of ), with the GB-Callsign G3CY.

In 1936 the family moved to a house in Cambridge which became Martin's home after the war. In 1947 he and Rowena Palmer married and they lived in this house for rest of Martin's life. They had three children, born in 1949, 1951 and 1952. Ryle died on 14 October 1984, in Cambridge. He was celebrated on a first class stamp issued in 2009 as part of an Eminent Britons set. Lady Ryle died in 2013. Ryle was an amateur radio operator, and held the GB-Callsign G3CY.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Martin Ryle


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Scarface Charley

Chikchikam Lupatkue-latko (c. 1851 – December 3, 1896), known as Scarface Charley, was a chief of the Modoc tribe of Native Americans. He took part in the Modoc War of 1872–1873 in California, and is considered to have fired the first shot at the Battle of Lost River. On April 26, 1873, Scarfaced Charley led a victorious attack against a patrol of 63 soldiers. He killed all five of the officers in the patrol, as well as twenty others. It is widely written that he stopped the slaughter and told the soldiers, "We've killed enough of you, now go home."

After the execution of Kintpuash and three of his warriors for the murder of Major General Edward Canby and Rev. Eleazar Thomas, Scarface Charley was appointed by Colonel Frank Wheaton as chief of the Modocs who were to be sent to Oklahoma. After a year in Oklahoma, Scarfaced Charley was replaced by Indian Agent Hiram Jones, as chief by Bogus Charley, partly due to the latter's better understanding of English. Other accounts hold that he was removed because he refused to accept that white people were "true rulers".

Scarfaced Charley was also a gifted craftsman, designing an elegant typeface for the phonetic transcription of the Modoc language. He also developed a line of traditionally influenced domestic furniture, which was an important source of revenue for him after his political career was ended.

title: Scarface Charley


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Betuweroute

The Betuweroute is a double track freight railway between Rotterdam and Germany. Betuweroute is the official name, after the Betuwe area through which the route passes. The line is popularly called Betuwelijn, after an older local rail line in the same region. The line extends into Germany as the Oberhausen–Arnhem railway, and it is part of Project No. 5 of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T).

History
In 1985 the Van Bonde Commission began to investigate the future of west–east transport. The main advocate of the proposed line was the then minister Neelie Kroes, later Commissioner in the European Union until 2014. In 1992 the German and Dutch governments signed the Treaty of Warnemünde, which addressed enhancing rail traffic and focused on the tracks from Amsterdam and Rotterdam to Duisburg. The original plan was for three branch rail lines towards Germany. The northern branch via Oldenzaal was abandoned in 1999 and the southern branch via Venlo was abandoned in 2004. Also in 2004, the courts forbade the construction of a large logistics centre near Valburg.

In 1988 the Dutch state-owned passenger railway company NS began work on the line. Delayed by two years, the railway was finished mid-2007. The final cost was 4.7 billion euros, more than twice the original budget of 2.3 billion euros, and more than quadruple the initial estimate from 1990 of 1.1 billion euros.

The large and rising costs, and criticism about government funding, promoted the government to seek private financing for the line, without success. On 16 June 2007, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands presided over the opening ceremony for the 160 km line that connects Rotterdam to the German border. Despite the TEN-T and bilateral agreements, Germany did not expect to complete reconstruction of their lines that connect with Betuweroute before 2015.

Route
The route is a direct line from the Maasvlakte to Zevenaar, connecting the Port of Rotterdam to Germany.

Compared with the previous rail route between Barendrecht and Elst the main deviations are:
 * Line now north of Zwijndrecht and Papendrecht
 * Line now north of Gorinchem and south of Leerdam
 * Line now north of Tiel
 * From the south side of Elst the line runs straight to Zevenaar

Infrastructure

The most striking infrastructure that was built or reconstructed as part of the Betuweroute includes:
 * Container terminals in Rotterdam, Rail Service Centre Maasvlakte, Rail Service Centre Waalhaven, and Maasvlakte 2.
 * The 3 km long Botlekspoortunnel under Rotterdam harbour replaces the antiquated Botlek bridge. The bridge remains in service as backup and for regional traffic. Space around the tunnel was so constrained that after completing the first tube, the tunnel boring machine had to be dismantled inside the tube. The parts were then returned to the starting point and reassembled to bore the second tube.
 * The classification yard Kijfhoek between Barendrecht and Zwijndrecht was reconstructed.
 * Barendrecht railway station has 9 tracks in a 1.5 km long structure. Much of the structure is covered with a layer of earth, to reduce noise.  On top is a new city park. At the station itself, 4 of the tracks and their platforms have a glass roof. Nearby tracks cross on two levels.
 * Tunnel were built under Pannerdensch Kanaal near Angeren. Instead of the projected bridge, a 2.7 km tunnel was bored, to protect the landscape and environment. The tunnel entrances were designed to blend in with the landscape. The tunnel itself has large lockable doors at each end, to prevent a flood on one side of the canal inundating the region on the opposite bank. Because two endangered animal species were found in the vicinity of the tunnel, a new habitat was laid out for the Great crested newt and the Natterjack Toad, as this video shows.

Specifications and features

 * The route is electrified at 25 kV AC and signaled using the ERTMS2 standard and AF Track Circuits. Electrification meets new European standards, but Dutch locomotives could not use the line's power because they run on a different voltage. The German extension of the route does not comply with the new ERTMS2 standards, and also uses another voltage, thus limiting usability of the track. Custom-made locomotives were needed.  The first new-spec locomotive was delivered to Railion in December 2007.
 * Tunnels, viaducts and other parts of the railway are engineered to be 4.0 m wide and 6.15 m high in order to allow double stacked container trains under overhead wires, although no such trains will be in use on this route for years to come. The overhead wires were installed at standard height, to accommodate locomotives with standard pantographs. This and viaducts on the connecting lines prevent use of double-stacked containers. In the future, the overhead electrification wires could be raised to allow for double stacking without much effort or cost.
 * For the section from Rotterdam to the large Kijfhoek classification yard, existing track was reconstructed. New construction occurred from Kijfhoek to Zevenaar near the German border, which is most of the remaining three quarters of the line.
 * The total length of noise insulation panels on both sides of the track is 160 km, the same as the route length.
 * Roll bars along the track keep derailed cars from toppling.
 * 5 tunnels and several roofed sections add up to a length of 20 km.
 * There are 190 passages to allow wildlife to cross.
 * There are no level crossings, but instead 130 bridges and viaducts.
 * Once the German line signaling and other infrastructure are updated, the Betuweroute's capacity will be 10 trains per hour in each direction.

Use
When the line opened, project managers hoped within five years to reach a daily average of 150 freight trains. In the first six months of operation, the unfinished German connection and problems with safety equipment caused traffic to be light. Usage increased steeply over the years 2008–2011. By mid-2011, 78% of all freight trains between Rotterdam and the German border took the Betuweroute. The other freight trains travelled via either Venlo or the border at Bad Bentheim, or used the conventional railway through Arnhem to Emmerich am Rhein Beginning in 2009, the heaviest trains in Germany and the Netherlands, 6,000 tonne trains, transported iron ore between the port of Rotterdam and Dillingen in Germany using the Betuweroute. As of 2019, the Betuweroute carried 4.2 billion ton-kilometers of cargo and 2.3 million train kilometers.

Unlike other Dutch rail network tariffs, the tariff charged to train operators to use the Betuwe rail line is not calculated by train weight but by the distance the train travels. Between 2008 and 2011 the tariff has increased progressively from €1.41 per train kilometer to €2.33 per train kilometer.

Controversy
Many Dutch people, experts and politicians such as members of parliament opposed construction of the Betuweroute. The Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management received 14,000 complaints against the northern branch alone, which was cancelled in 1999. GroenFront! (Green Front), one among dozens of activist groups, was responsible for 35 confrontations in 1999–2001. University professors and official institutions heavily criticised the role of the government and ministers in relation to Betuweroute.

The main concerns about the Betuweroute were:
 * Cost - Even at the original budget of 2.3 billion euros, there was much discussion about economic viability. Initial hopes of attracting private investors turned out to be totally unfounded. In 2000 the Court of Audit convicted the government of having issued unrealistic forecasts about cost, environmental effects and usage of the Betuweroute, as well as insufficient cost control. They stated that promoting river transport should have been considered as a realistic alternative. In 2004 the Centraal Planbureau (Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis), concluded that construction of the line would never pay for itself.
 * Landscape - The line passes through the Groene Hart (Green Heart) of the Randstad and the Betuwe. There were concerns the rail line would damage both regions.  The Groene Hart is a more or less rural area amid the Netherlands' largest cities.   The Betuwe is a less densely populated green region along the major Dutch rivers. Both feature classic Dutch polder landscapes.  Opposition to the original plans forced the construction of additional tunnels, which further increased the construction budget.
 * Environmental issues - Many environmentalists and neighbours fiercely resisted the new line due to concerns about noise, dangerous chemical spills and the fragmentation of animal habitats. In response, extra noise insulation panels, tunnels and wildlife passages were built.
 * Alternatives - As the Court of Audit concluded in its 2000 report, river transport was and still is a realistic alternative. River transport is cheaper, more flexible, safer and not much slower. The Dutch barge fleet is the largest and among the most modern in Europe, capable of transporting freight to the German industrial heartland with minimal government investment. Major Dutch rivers including Merwede, Waal and parts of the Rhine, Maas (Meuse), IJssel and Lek run roughly alongside the Betuweroute.  Likewise, the A15, an excellent albeit congested highway, parallels the railway for 95 km.

Several parts of this Controversy section are based on a Dutch scientific investigation.

title: Betuweroute