title: Age of Empires II

text: House also praised the gameplay interface, which he said "couldn't be simpler", as well as the advanced unit grouping and path-finding systems. Nash Werner of "GamePro" said that the battlefield formation tools were wonderful, and complained only that they could not be assigned to naval units. "Computer and Video Games" generally agreed, stating that "the controls are very user-friendly and well explained". GameSpot's Greg Kasavin wrote that despite the game's improved graphics, "there's nothing foreign about its appearance" and that most game features will be "immediately recognizable if you've played a real-time strategy game before". "PC Zone" agreed, but in a negative sense—it argued that "The Age of Kings" "is essentially an update of a two-year-old game".


title: Age of Empires II

text: Richards was surprised by the quality of "The Age of Kings" graphics, considering they were all bitmapped. However, AllGame complained that units were sometimes difficult to tell apart, a point numerous reviewers agreed on. It also considered the sound of "The Age of Kings" a negative, but not something significant enough to draw players away from the game's overall quality. IGN stated that cutscenes were somewhat bland, but that overall the graphics added "an amazing amount of detail to the actual game". IGN's main criticism was directed at the in-game speech used in campaigns; it rhetorically asked "why can't they just find a Frenchman to do a French accent?" Alex Constantides of "Computer and Video Games" rated the graphics highly, saying that some in-game buildings are "so grand you'll even feel guilty about burning them to the ground". Werner agreed: "the most noticeable graphical advancements", he wrote, were "the sheer size and scale of things". Game Revolution stated ""AOE2" is the best looking of the 2D RTS games out there right now".


title: Age of Empires II

text: "The Age of Kings" won GameSpot's Strategy Game of the Year in 1999, and was a nominee for Game of the Year. GamePower also named it Strategy Game of the Year, while "PC Gamer" and "Computer Gaming World" gave it Editor's Choice awards. The editors of "PC Gamer US" named it their 1999 "Best Real-Time Strategy Game", and wrote that it "takes everything we know about the real-time strategy genre and polishes it, and polishes it, and then polishes it some more." "The Age of Kings" won Strategy Game of the Year and Computer Game of the Year at the 2000 Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences awards. It was also nominated for Game of the Year, Outstanding Achievement in Animation, Outstanding Achievement in Game Design, and Outstanding Achievement in Game Play Engineering. IGN ranked "The Age of Kings" the 53rd best game of all time in 2005, and the 10th best PC game of all time in 2007. GameFAQs users placed it 56th in a poll of the best games ever.


title: Age of Empires II

text: "The Age of Kings" was highly influential on its genre. "", a 2001 game by LucasArts, shared "The Age of Kings" game engine, and was heavily influenced by its mechanics. "Empire Earth"s design was also similar to that of "The Age of Kings"; GameSpot said it "borrows most of that game's controls, interface features, and even some of its keyboard shortcuts". Rick Goodman, designer of "Age of Empires" and "The Rise of Rome", designed "Empire Earth". GameSpot's Scott Osborne argued that the gameplay of "" was heavily based on "The Age of Kings".


title: Age of Empires II

text: A PlayStation 2 port was released by Konami in 2001, and a Nintendo DS spinoff, "" was released in 2006.


title: Age of Empires II

text: An expansion for "The Age of Kings", "", was released in 2000. It introduced numerous new game features, including unique technologies for each civilization, and five new civilizations. Two of these, the Aztecs and the Mayans, represent the New World and have a distinctive architectural style. Other new civilizations are the Huns, Koreans, and Spanish.


title: Age of Empires II

text: In 2005, a mobile version of "Age of Empires II" was released for Java mobile devices (J2ME), called "Age of Empires II Mobile" and developed by In-Fusio. It featured much simplified gameplay and graphics, designed for the mobile devices of the time.


title: Age of Empires II

text: The success of "Age of Empires II" also spurred the continuation of the franchise: the third historical game in the series, "Age of Empires III", was released in 2005. The game portrayed the European colonization of the Americas. Aside from one significant feature, the home city, the game's design was largely similar to that of its predecessor.


title: Age of Empires II

text: The multiplayer-only "Age of Empires Online" was released in 2012. While the game was freely accessible, it featured premium content which could either be earned through gameplay or purchased, enabling the player to use higher-tier equipment and new game modes. Active development of the game ended on January 1, 2014, when executive producer Kevin Perry stated that adding new content was "no longer cost effective," and announced that the game would be moving from "development phase" to its "support phase". The game servers were subsequently shut down on July 1, 2014.


title: Age of Empires II

text: In 2012, Hidden Path Entertainment began working on a high-definition remake of "Age of Empires II", an effort spearheaded by Matt Pritchard, an original lead programmer at Ensemble Studios. On March 7, 2013, its release was announced, branded as "Age of Empires II: HD Edition". It has improved graphics, widescreen support and new multiplayer options through Steam. It was released on April 9, 2013, and there was a pre-order available on April 5. "HD Edition" received mixed reviews, with aggregate review website Metacritic assigning a score of 68 out of 100 based on reviews from 20 critics. Critics agreed that the "HD Edition" changed very little from the original game, though Steam Workshop integration was widely praised.


title: Age of Empires II

text: Three official expansion packs were released for "HD Edition". The first, "The Forgotten", is based on a fan-made expansion, "The Forgotten Empires". The pack introduces five new civilizations: the Incas, Indians, Italians, Magyars, and Slavs. It includes new maps, campaigns (Alaric I, Bari, Dracula, El Dorado, Francesco I Sforza, and Prithviraj), units, a new game mode, an increase of the maximum population limit from 200 to 500, and numerous balance and gameplay adjustments. The expansion pack was developed by the team that created the mod with the assistance of SkyBox Labs.


title: Age of Empires II

text: A second expansion pack for "Age of Empires II HD", "The African Kingdoms", was released on November 5, 2015, and introduces four new civilizations: the Berbers, Ethiopians, Malians, and the Portuguese. It includes new maps, campaigns (Francisco de Almeida, Sundjata, Tariq ibn Ziyad, and Yodit), and units, new game modes including Capture the Relic and Treaty, and numerous balance and gameplay adjustments.


title: Age of Empires II

text: The third expansion pack, "Rise of the Rajas", was released on December 19, 2016. It is set in Southeast Asia, and adds four civilizations (Burmese, Khmer, Malay, and Vietnamese), each with its own fully voice-acted campaign (Bayinnaung, Gajah Mada, Lê Lợi, and Suryavarman I), as well as a new map type with environments, units such as the ballista elephant, improved AI, and more.


title: Age of Empires II

text: On August 21, 2017, at Gamescom, Microsoft announced a remaster titled "Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition" was in development by Forgotten Empires, Tantalus Media, and Wicked Witch Software. On June 9, 2019, Microsoft revealed the gameplay trailer at Xbox E3 2019. The game includes all content from the previous editions and expansions, as well as four new civilizations (Bulgarians, Cumans, Lithuanians, and Tatars), additional campaign missions (Ivaylo, Kotyan Khan, Pachacuti, and Tamerlane), and new 4K graphics. It was released via Xbox Game Pass for PC, the Microsoft Store, and Steam on November 14, 2019.


title: Age of Empires II

text: On December 15, 2020, Microsoft announced an expansion to the definitive edition titled "Age of Empires II DE: Lords of the West". It was released on January 26, 2021. This expansion features two new civilizations – the Burgundians and the Sicilians – as well as three new campaigns (Edward I Longshanks, Grand Dukes of Burgundy, and The Hautevilles). The new campaigns consist of one for each new civilization, as well as a new campaign for the existing Britons civilization.


title: Age of Empires II

text: On April 10, 2021, Microsoft announced an expansion to the definitive edition titled "Age of Empires II DE: Dawn of the Dukes". It was released on August 10, 2021. The expansion's focus is on Eastern Europe and includes new campaigns and civilizations. During E3 2021, it was announced the new civilizations are the Poles and the Bohemians. There are campaigns based on the aforementioned new civilizations (Jadwiga and Jan Žižka) as well as a campaign for the existing Lithuanian civilization (Algirdas and Kęstutis).


title: Age of Empires II

text: On April 14, 2022, Microsoft announced an expansion to the definitive edition titled "Age of Empires II DE: Dynasties of India". It was released on April 28, 2022. It features three new civilizations, the Bengalis, the Dravidians, and the Gurjaras. Additionally, the expansion also features reworks to the existing Indian civilization, which was renamed the Hindustani. Three new campaigns, featuring Babur, Rajendra, and Devapala, were also introduced.


title: Mary Brunner

text: Mary Theresa Brunner (born December 17, 1943) is a former member of the "Manson Family" who was present during the 1969 murder of Gary Hinman, a California musician and Ph.D. candidate. She was arrested for numerous offenses, including credit card theft and armed robbery, and she served a prison sentence at the California Institution for Women.


title: Mary Brunner

text: Brunner was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin to George and Elsie Brunner. She moved to California upon graduating from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1965 and took a job as library assistant at University of California, Berkeley. She met 33-year-old career criminal Charles Manson who had been released from Terminal Island prison several weeks earlier. She let him stay at her apartment and the two became lovers after several weeks. She was thus the first person whom Manson recruited into his "Family". She quit her job and the two began to drift around California in a van meeting other young women.


title: Mary Brunner

text: Brunner became pregnant by Manson during the summer of 1967 and she gave birth to a son on April 15, 1968 whom she named Valentine Michael, nicknamed "Pooh Bear". They were living in a condemned house in Topanga Canyon, and she was assisted during the birth by several of the young women from the Family. She acquired a number of aliases and nicknames, including "Marioche", "Och", "Mother Mary", "Mary Manson", "Linda Dee Manson", and "Christine Marie Euchts".


title: Mary Brunner

text: Brunner and Manson met 18-year-old Lynette Fromme in Venice, California, and the three began living together in a rented house at 636 Cole Street in San Francisco. Over the course of the following two years, the Family enlarged to include between 20 and 30 individuals living communally; some became ardent followers of Manson, such as Brunner and Fromme, while other young people drifted in and out of the group. The Manson group traveled along the California coast and made excursions to Washington state, Oregon, and Nevada. The ever-growing number of young women and men eventually settled down at the Spahn Ranch, an occasional film set and location operated by George Spahn near the Los Angeles suburb of Chatsworth. Manson ostensibly based his commune on principles of freedom and love, but he exerted dictatorial control, ordering the women to have sex with Spahn and others. Manson sent his female followers to the city on criminal activities, such as theft and fraud. He also had illegal firearms and played host to a motorcycle gang.


title: Mary Brunner

text: On April 21, 1968, Brunner and Family members Manson, Susan Atkins, Ella Jo Bailey, Dianne Elizabeth Lake, Nancy Laura Pitman, Bruce Van Hall, Marcus John Arneson and Suzanne Scott were arrested near Little Sycamore Canyon, in southern Ventura County, California. They were found sprawled nude around a campfire beside a 1952 bus "stuck in a deep ditch", that had been reported stolen in San Francisco on April 12. Manson was remanded into custody under the suspicion of grand theft auto and possession of two driver's licenses.


title: Mary Brunner

text: Scott, Atkins, Lake and Van Hall were charged with possessing fictitious and fraudulent driver's licenses. Pitman, Arneson and Bailey were jailed on charges of disorderly conduct and not possessing proper identification. Five other Family members were released without being charged. Brunner was booked on endangering the life and health of a child, after her one-week-old son, Valentine, was found by deputies improperly dressed and shivering. The baby was placed in the care of the Ventura County General Hospital.


title: Mary Brunner

text: Charges against Brunner were later reduced to contributing to the delinquency of a minor and she was given two years' probation and a 15-day suspended jail sentence. She subsequently told authorities she planned to return to her parents' home in Wisconsin and Valentine was returned to her.


title: Mary Brunner

text: Just a few months later, in June 1968, Brunner along with other members of the Manson Family were arrested in Mendocino County, California for supplying narcotics to minors.


title: Mary Brunner

text: Bobby Beausoleil left Spahn Ranch on July 25, 1969 accompanied by Brunner and Susan Atkins to visit Gary Allen Hinman in Topanga Canyon. Hinman had been friendly with the Family and had often allowed members to stay at his home. Both Beausoleil and Brunner had previously lived with him for short periods of time and Brunner was close friends with him. Beausoleil had a knife and a 9 mm Radom pistol that he had borrowed from Family member Bruce Davis.


title: Mary Brunner

text: After two friends of Hinman contacted the police, Hinman was found by Malibu deputy Paul Piet murdered in his home on July 31, 1969. His face had been deeply slashed on the left side and he had two stab wounds in his chest. His house had been ransacked, and "Political Piggy" and a paw print (intended to be symbolic of the Black Panther Party) were drawn on the wall in his blood. His Volkswagen van and Fiat station wagon were missing. The California Highway Patrol found Beausoleil asleep in the back of Hinman's Fiat on August 5 near San Luis Obispo, California. He had a sheath knife attached to his belt. Beausoleil was arrested and charged with the murder of Gary Allen Hinman.


title: Mary Brunner

text: Brunner and Family member Sandra Good were arrested in San Fernando, California on August 8 at a Sears store for purchasing items with a stolen credit card. Brunner had signed for her purchases with the alias "Mary Vitasek" and the two women fled the store when a cashier became suspicious. The store manager followed them, and the police found them in possession of numerous stolen credit cards and fake identification cards. They were charged with violating Section 459 (burglary) and 484e (grand theft by fraudulent use of credit card) of the California Penal Code and booked into the Sybil Brand Institute Reception Center later that evening.


title: Mary Brunner

text: On the night of August 9, Family members Charles "Tex" Watson, Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel went to 10050 Cielo Drive and murdered pregnant actress Sharon Tate and her guests Wojciech Frykowski, Jay Sebring, and Abigail Folger, as well as 18-year-old Steven Parent who was visiting William Garretson, who was house-sitting in the guesthouse normally occupied by Tate's landlord.


title: Mary Brunner

text: There is agreement that Manson was behind the killing of Hinman. Brunner was present throughout and was the key witness for the prosecution. She testified at Beausoleil's trial that Beausoleil killed Hinman (a musician), because Hinman had refused to join Manson's pop group.


title: Mary Brunner

text: There have been many other suggestions. Vincent Bugliosi, who was the prosecutor in the Tate-LaBianca case, claimed in his 1974 book "Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders", that Manson instructed Beausoleil, Brunner and Atkins to go to Hinman's house to get money and titles to Hinman's vehicles. This account was later corroborated by various Family members. However, Beausoleil denied Manson's direct involvement and disputed that neither Brunner nor Atkins had any direct knowledge of why he was visiting Hinman.


title: Mary Brunner

text: Beausoleil contended that he went to Hinman's home in order to confront Hinman and collect $1,000 from him. Beausoleil claimed that he had purchased from Hinman tabs of mescaline that he then sold to a biker gang called the Straight Satans. He further explained that several hours after the gang purchased the mescaline from Beausoleil, they showed up at Spahn Ranch, claiming the mescaline was poisoned with strychnine, demanded their money back and threatened to kill Beausoleil.


title: Mary Brunner

text: Beausoleil contended that both Brunner and Atkins merely went along with him to Hinman's because they "liked" Hinman and wanted to visit. In a 1981 interview with "Oui" magazine, he states that neither he nor Brunner nor Atkins were instructed by Manson to go to Hinman's and that he initially had no intention to kill him. This contradicted Beausoleil's own testimony at his first trial in 1969, when he claimed that Manson did in fact instruct him to kill Hinman. Beausoleil claimed "Mary Brunner was just scared to death. She just faded into the woodwork" during the murder, but that Atkins went back into the house after Beausoleil stabbed Hinman and placed a pillow over Hinman's face. He also contended that it was Atkins who wrote the words "Political Piggy" on Hinman's wall (at Beausoleil's instructions).


title: Mary Brunner

text: In October 1969, police raided the Family's new residence at Barker Ranch near Death Valley, California, holding most of the group in custody on charges of automobile theft. Among those arrested were Atkins, who, while being questioned by police sergeants Whitley and Guenther on October 13, 1969, implicated herself in the murder of Hinman and told the officers that Manson had sent her and Beausoleil to Hinman's residence to force Hinman to hand over money that Manson believed Hinman had inherited. Atkins also told the police that Beausoleil alone acted in the murder of Hinman, stabbing him twice in the heart after detaining him in his home for over two days. Atkins also maintained that it was Beausoleil who slashed Hinman's face, not Manson. However, Atkins gave several differing accounts of the murder of Hinman; at times claiming that she killed Hinman, Manson killed Hinman or that Beausoleil killed Hinman.


title: Mary Brunner

text: Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins were subsequently charged along with Bobby Beausoleil for the murder of Gary Hinman. Brunner later received immunity from prosecution to testify against both Beausoleil and Atkins.<ref name="Crime/Punishment">Mary Brunner profile , crime.about.com; accessed March 17, 2017.</ref> His first trial, which began in November 1969 ended in a hung jury, with Beausoleil claiming that Manson alone had murdered Hinman.


title: Mary Brunner

text: However, during Beausoleil's March 1970 trial, Brunner repudiated her testimony that Beausoleil murdered Hinman and Beausoleil produced an affidavit signed by Brunner stating that he did not stab Hinman. Called to the stand to testify, Brunner eventually repudiated her previous testimony and insisted that she had said Beausoleil stabbed Hinman to death in her attempt to absolve Charles Manson of any participation in the crime. Various former Family members such as Ella Jo Bailey contradicted this testimony and testified that Manson confessed to them that he in fact was present at the Hinman house and that he fully participated in the murder.


title: Mary Brunner

text: Beausoleil was sentenced to death, later commuted to life (See "California v. Anderson"); Atkins pleaded guilty for her participation in Hinman's death and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Bruce Davis was charged in the murder after it was learned Beausoleil had called Davis at Spahn Ranch and asked him to come over and pick up Hinman's Volkswagen van. Separate trials were held for the murders of Gary Hinman and Spahn Ranch worker Donald "Shorty" Shea, for Family members Davis, Charles Manson, and Steve "Clem" Grogan.


title: Mary Brunner

text: Brunner subsequently returned to the remaining members of the Family and rallied support for those incarcerated for the Tate–LaBianca murders. Her son was sent to live with her parents.


title: Mary Brunner

text: Brunner drove a white van to a Hawthorne, California Western Surplus Store on August 21, 1971, accompanied by Family members Catherine "Gypsy" Share, Dennis Rice, Charles Lovett, Larry Bailey, and Kenneth Como. The group brandished guns and ordered patrons and clerks to lie on the ground. They then took 143 rifles, loading them into their van, while a store clerk tripped the silent alarm. According to police officers, the group then debated whether to kill all of those in the store.


title: Mary Brunner

text: Police alleged that the group's plan was to hijack a Boeing 747 and threaten to kill one passenger every hour until Manson and fellow Family members were released from prison. A police squad car arrived, and Share opened fire on the vehicle, shattering the windshield. As more squad cars arrived, they blocked the van from fleeing, hitting it with more than 50 bullets; the Family members fired nearly 20 rounds at the officers. Police gained control and apprehended the group; Brunner, Share, and Bailey were injured.


title: Mary Brunner

text: Brunner received a sentence of 20 years to life. She was sent to the California Institution for Women where Leslie Van Houten, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel were serving their sentences for their participation in the Tate-LaBianca murders. Brunner disappeared from the public eye after being paroled in 1977.


title: Languages of Mexico

text: Many languages are spoken in Mexico, though Spanish is the "de facto" national language spoken by the vast majority of the population, making Mexico the world's most populous Hispanophone country. The indigenous languages are from eleven language families, including four isolates and one that immigrated from the United States. The Mexican government recognizes 68 national languages, 63 of which are indigenous, including around 350 dialects of those languages. The large majority of the population is monolingual in Spanish. Some immigrant and indigenous populations are bilingual, while some indigenous people are monolingual in their languages. Mexican Sign Language is spoken by much of the deaf population, and there are one or two indigenous sign languages as well.


title: Languages of Mexico

text: The government of Mexico uses Spanish in most official purposes, but in terms of legislation, its status is not that of an official primary language. The Law of Linguistic Rights establishes Spanish as one of the country's national languages, along with 63 distinct indigenous languages (from seven large families, plus four counted as language isolates). The law, made widely known in 2003, requires the state to offer all of its services to its indigenous citizens in their mother tongues, but in practice this is not yet the case. Note that, as defined by mutual intelligibility, the number of spoken languages in Mexico is much greater than the 63 national languages, because National Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI) counts distinct ethnic groups for the purposes of political classification. For instance, the Mixtec are a single ethnicity and therefore count as a single language for governmental/legal purposes, but there are a dozen distinct Mixtec dialect regions, each of which includes at least one variety that is not mutually intelligible with those of the other dialect regions (Josserand, 1983), and "Ethnologue" counts 52 varieties of Mixtec that require separate literature. "Ethnologue" currently counts 282 indigenous languages currently spoken in Mexico, plus a number of immigrant languages (Lewis et al. 2018).


title: Languages of Mexico

text: Due to the long history of marginalization of indigenous groups, most indigenous languages are endangered, with some languages expected to become extinct within years or decades, and others simply having populations that grow slower than the national average. According to the Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples (CDI) and National Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI), while 10–14% of the population identifies as belonging to an indigenous group, around 6% speak an indigenous language.


title: Languages of Mexico

text: From the arrival of the first Franciscan missionaries, Spanish, Latin, and indigenous languages played parts in the evangelization of Mexico. Many sixteenth-century churchmen studied indigenous languages in order to instruct native peoples in Christian doctrine. The same men also found Castilian and Latin appropriate in certain contexts. All told, there existed a kind of "linguistic coexistence" from the beginning of the colonial period.


title: Languages of Mexico

text: Some monks and priests attempted to describe and classify indigenous languages with Spanish. Philip II of Spain decreed in 1570 that Nahuatl become the official language of the colonies of New Spain in order to facilitate communication between the natives of the colonies.


title: Languages of Mexico

text: In 1696 Charles II reversed that policy and banned the use of any languages other than Spanish throughout New Spain. Beginning in the 18th century, decrees ordering the Hispanization of indigenous populations became more numerous and Spanish colonizers no longer learned the indigenous languages.


title: Languages of Mexico

text: After independence the government initiated an educational system with the primary aim of Hispanization of the native populations. This policy was based on the idea that this would help the indigenous peoples become a more integrated part of the new Mexican nation.


title: Languages of Mexico

text: Except for the Second Mexican Empire, led by the Habsburg Maximilian I, no Mexican government tried to prevent the loss of indigenous languages during the 19th century.


title: Languages of Mexico

text: In 1889, Antonio García Cubas estimated that 38% of Mexicans spoke an indigenous language, down from 60% in 1820. By the end of the 20th century, this figure had fallen to 6%.


title: Languages of Mexico

text: For most of the 20th century successive governments denied native tongues the status of valid languages. Indigenous students were forbidden to speak their native languages in school and were often punished for doing so.


title: Languages of Mexico

text: In 2002, Mexico's constitution was amended to reinforce the nation's pluricultural nature by giving the State the obligation to protect and nurture the expressions of this diversity. On June 14, 1999, the Council of Writers in Indigenous Languages presented Congress with a document entitled "Suggested legal initiatives towards linguistic rights of indigenous peoples and communities", with the goal of beginning to protect the linguistic rights of indigenous communities. The Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas was passed in March 2003, establishing a framework for the conservation, nurturing and development of indigenous languages. Critics claim that the law's complexity makes enforcement difficult.


title: Languages of Mexico

text: Spanish is the "de facto" national language spoken by the vast majority of Mexicans, though it is not defined as an official language in legislation. The second article of the 1917 Constitution defines the country as multicultural, recognizes the right of the indigenous peoples to "preserve and enrich their languages" and promotes "bilingual and intercultural education".


title: Languages of Mexico

text: In 2003, the Mexican Congress approved the General Law of Linguistic Rights of the Indigenous Peoples, which is a law that recognizes that Mexico's history makes its indigenous languages "national languages". Accordingly, they "have the same validity [as Spanish] in their territory, location and context". At the same time, legislators made no specific provisions for the official or legal status of the Spanish language. This law means that indigenous peoples can use their native language in communicating with government officials and request official documents in that language. The Mexican state supports the preservation and promotion of the use of the national languages through the activities of the National Institute of Indigenous Languages.


title: Languages of Mexico

text: Mexico has about six million citizens who speak indigenous languages. That is the second-largest group in the Americas after Peru. However, a relatively small percentage of Mexico's population speaks an indigenous language compared to other countries in the Americas, such as Guatemala (42.8%), Peru (35%), and even Ecuador (9.4%), Panama (8.3%), Paraguay and Bolivia.


title: Languages of Mexico

text: The only indigenous language spoken by more than a million people in Mexico is the Nahuatl language; the other Native American languages with a large population of native speakers include Yucatec Maya.


title: Languages of Mexico

text: According to the Law of Linguistic Rights, Mexico recognizes sixty-two indigenous languages as co-official National languages. With Spanish being the dominant language, Mexico has become a site for endangered languages. "Indigenous people’s disadvantaged socioeconomic status and the pressure of assimilation into mestizo society have been influential on indigenous language loss." The result of the conflict between indigenous languages and Spanish has been a language shift in Mexico from indigenous languages being spoken to more people using Spanish in every domain. Due to this situation there have been many language revitalization strategies implemented in order to create a language shift to try to reverse this language shift. Literature projects done with the Nahua people include "Keeping the fire alive: a decade of language revitalization in Mexico" showing the experiences of language revitalization in South Mexico.


title: Languages of Mexico

text: The deaf community uses Mexican Sign Language, Yucatan Sign Language, and, in northern Baja California, American Sign Language.


title: Languages of Mexico

text: The non-indigenous languages spoken in Mexico include English (by English-speaking as well as by the residents of border states). One example of this group is of the American Mormon colony of Nueva Casas Grandes in Chihuahua, which settled in the late 19th century. German (spoken mainly in Mexico City and Puebla), Greek (spoken mainly in Mexico City, Guadalajara and especially in Sinaloa state), Arabic, Venetian (in Chipilo), Italian, French, Occitan, Catalan, Basque, Galician, Asturian, Filipino, Polish, Hebrew, Korean, Ladino, Plautdietsch, Armenian, Japanese, Chinese and other languages are spoken by smaller numbers. Some of these languages (Venetian and Plautdietsch) are spoken in isolated communities or villages. The rest are spoken by immigrants or their descendants who tend to live in the larger cities and towns.


title: Languages of Mexico

text: As far as second languages go, many educated Mexicans (and those with little education who have immigrated to the US and returned) have different degrees of fluency in English. Many Mexicans working in the tourist industry can speak some English.


title: Languages of Mexico

text: In a study conducted by the Alliance française in 2019 revealed that Mexicans have begun to take a greater interest in studying the French language, with 250,000 people being French speakers and 350,000 learning French.


Rail transportation in the United States consists primarily of freight shipments, with a well integrated network of standard gauge private freight railroads extending into Canada and Mexico. Passenger service is mainly mass transit and commuter rail in major cities. Intercity passenger service, once a large and vital part of the nation's passenger transportation network, plays a limited role as compared to transportation patterns in many other countries. The United States has the largest rail transport network size of any country in the world.


title: Rail transportation in the United States

text: The nation's earliest railroads were built in the 1820s and 1830s, primarily in New England and the Mid-Atlantic region. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, chartered in 1827, was the nation's first common carrier railroad. By 1850, an extensive railroad network had begun to take shape in the rapidly industrializing Northeastern United States and the Midwest, while relatively fewer railroads were constructed in the primarily agricultural Southern United States. During and after the American Civil War, the first transcontinental railroad was built to connect California with the rest of the national network in Iowa.


text: Railroads continued to expand throughout the rest of the 1800s, eventually reaching nearly every corner of the nation. The nation's railroads were temporarily nationalized between 1917 and 1920 by the United States Railroad Administration, as a result of U.S. entry into World War I. Railroad mileage in the nation peaked at this time. Railroads were affected deeply by the Great Depression in the United States, with some lines being abandoned during this time. A major increase in traffic during World War II brought a temporary reprieve, but after the war railroads faced intense competition from automobiles and aircraft and began a long decline. Passenger service was especially hard hit, with the federal government creating Amtrak in 1971 to take over responsibility for intercity passenger travel. Numerous railroad companies went bankrupt starting in the 1960s, most notably Penn Central Transportation Company in 1971, in the largest bankruptcy in the nation's history at the time. Once again, the federal government intervened, forming Conrail in 1976 to assume control of bankrupt railroads in the Northeast.


text: Railroads' fortunes began to change following the passage of the Staggers Rail Act in 1980, which deregulated railroad companies, who had previously faced much stronger regulation than competing modes of transportation. With innovations such as trailer-on-flatcar and intermodal freight transport, railroad traffic began to increase. Following the Staggers Act, many railroads merged, forming major systems such as CSX and Norfolk Southern in the Eastern United States, and BNSF Railway in the Western United States, while Union Pacific Railroad purchased a number of competitors as well. Another result of the Staggers Act was the rise of shortline railroads, which formed to operate lines that major railroads abandoned or sold off. Hundreds of these companies were formed by the end of the century. Freight railroads invested in modernization and capacity improvements as they entered the 21st century, and intermodal transport continued to grow, while traditional traffic such as coal fell.


text: Between 1762 and 1764 a gravity railroad (mechanized tramway) (Montresor's Tramway) was built by British Army engineers up the steep riverside terrain near the Niagara River waterfall's escarpment at the Niagara Portage (which the local Senecas called ""Crawl on All Fours."") in Lewiston, New York.


text: In the 1820s–1840s, Americans closely watched the development of railways in Great Britain. The main competition came from canals, many of which were in operation under state ownership, and from privately owned steamboats plying the nation's vast river system. In 1829, Massachusetts prepared an elaborate plan. Government support, most especially the detailing of officers from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – the nation's only repository of civil engineering expertise – was crucial in assisting private enterprise in building nearly all the country's railroads. Army Engineer officers surveyed and selected routes, planned, designed, and constructed rights-of-way, track, and structures, and introduced the Army's system of reports and accountability to the railroad companies. More than one in ten of the 1,058 graduates from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point between 1802 and 1866 became corporate presidents, chief engineers, treasurers, superintendents and general managers of railroad companies. Among the Army officers who thus assisted the building and managing of the first American railroads were Stephen Harriman Long, George Washington Whistler, and Herman Haupt.


text: State governments granted charters that created the business corporation and gave a limited right of eminent domain, allowing the railroad to buy needed land, even if the owner objected.


text: The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) was chartered in 1827 to build a steam railroad west from Baltimore, Maryland, to a point on the Ohio River. It began scheduled freight service over its first section on May 24, 1830. The first railroad to carry passengers, and, by accident, the first tourist railroad, began operating 1827. It was the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, initially a gravity road feeding anthracite coal downhill to the Lehigh Canal and using mule-power to return nine miles up the mountain; but, by the summer of 1829, as documented by newspapers, it regularly carried passengers. Later renamed the Summit Hill & Mauch Chunk Railroad, it added a steam powered cable-return track for true two-way operation by 1843, and ran as a common carrier and tourist road from the 1890s to 1937. Lasting 111 years, the SH&MC is described by some to be the world's first roller coaster.


text: The first purpose-built common carrier railroad in the northeast was the Mohawk & Hudson Railroad; incorporated in 1826, it began operating in August 1831. Soon, a second passenger line, the Saratoga & Schenectady Railroad, started service in June 1832.


text: In 1835 the B&O completed a branch from Baltimore southward to Washington, D.C. The Boston & Providence Railroad was incorporated in 1831 to build a railroad between Boston, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island; the road was completed in 1835 with the completion of the Canton Viaduct in Canton, Massachusetts.


text: Numerous short lines were built, especially in the south, to provide connections to the river systems and the river boats common to the era. In Louisiana, the Pontchartrain Rail-Road, a route connecting the Mississippi River with Lake Pontchartrain at New Orleans was completed in 1831 and provided over a century of operation. Completed in 1830, the Tuscumbia, Courtland & Decatur Railroad became the first railroad constructed west of the Appalachian Mountains; it connected the two Alabama cities of Decatur and Tuscumbia.


text: Soon, other roads that would themselves be purchased or merged into larger entities, formed. The Camden & Amboy Railroad (C&A), the first railroad built in New Jersey, completed its route between its namesake cities in 1834. The C&A ran successfully for decades connecting New York City to the Delaware Valley, and would eventually become part of the Pennsylvania Railroad.


text: By 1850, over of railroad lines had been built. The B&O's westward route reached the Ohio River in 1852, the first eastern seaboard railroad to do so. Railroad companies in the North and Midwest constructed networks that linked nearly every major city by 1860.


text: The First Transcontinental Railroad in the U.S. was built across North America in the 1860s, linking the railroad network of the eastern U.S. with California on the Pacific coast. Finished on May 10, 1869, at the Golden spike event at Promontory Summit, Utah, it created a nationwide mechanized transportation network that revolutionized the population and economy of the American West, catalyzing the transition from the wagon trains of previous decades to a modern transportation system. It achieved the status of first transcontinental railroad by connecting myriad eastern U.S. railroads to the Pacific Ocean. However it was not the world's longest railroad, as Canada's Grand Trunk Railway (GTR) had, by 1867, already accumulated more than of track by connecting Portland, Maine, and the three northern New England states with the Canadian Atlantic provinces, and west as far as Port Huron, Michigan, through Sarnia, Ontario.


text: Authorized by the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 and heavily backed by the federal government, the first transcontinental railroad was the culmination of a decades-long movement to build such a line and was one of the crowning achievements of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, completed four years after his death. The building of the railroad required enormous feats of engineering and labor in the crossing of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains by the Union Pacific Railroad (UP) and Central Pacific Railroad, the two federally chartered enterprises that built the line westward and eastward respectively. The building of the railroad was motivated in part to bind the Union together during the strife of the American Civil War. It substantially accelerated the populating of the West by homesteaders, leading to rapid cultivation of new farm lands. The Central Pacific and the Southern Pacific Railroad combined operations in 1870 and formally merged in 1885; the Union Pacific originally bought the Southern Pacific in 1901 and was forced to divest it in 1913, but took it over again in 1996.


text: Much of the original roadbed is still in use today and owned by UP, which is descended from both of the original railroads.


text: Many Canadian and U.S. railroads originally used various broad gauges, but most were converted to by 1886, when the conversion of much of the southern rail network from gauge took place. This and the standardization of couplings and air brakes enabled the pooling and interchange of locomotives and rolling stock.


text: The railroad had its largest impact on the American transportation system during the second half of the 19th century. The standard historical interpretation holds that the railroads were central to the development of a national market in the United States and served as a model of how to organize, finance and manage a large corporation, along with allowing growth of the American population outside of the eastern regions.


text: In 1944, American economic historian Leland Jenks (having conducted an analysis based on Joseph Schumpeter's theory of innovation) similarly claims that railroads had a direct impact on the growth of the United States' real income and an indirect impact on its economic expansion. In his Rostovian Take-off Thesis, Walt W. Rostow systematically developed the Jenks model that railroads were crucial to American economic growth. According to Rostow, railroads were responsible for the "take-off" of American industrialization in the period of 1843–1860. This "take-off" in economic growth occurred because the railroad helped to decrease transportation costs, transport new products and goods to commercial markets, and generally widen the market. Furthermore, the development of railroads stimulated the growth of the modern coal, iron, and engineering industries, all of which were essential for wider economic growth. According to Rostow's Take-off Thesis, railroads generated new investment, which simultaneously helped develop financial markets in the United States.


text: Contemporary American economic historians have challenged this conventional view. The respective findings of Robert Fogel and Albert Fishlow do not support Rostow's claim that railroads stimulated widespread industrialization by increasing demand for coal, iron, and machinery. Drawing upon historical data, Robert Fogel found that the impact of railroads on the iron and steel industries was minimal: from 1840 to 1860, railroad production used less than five percent of the total pig iron produced. In addition, Fogel argues, only six percent of total coal production from 1840 to 1860 was consumed by railroads through consumption of iron products. Like Fogel, Fishlow showed that most railroads used very little coal during this time period because they were able to burn wood instead. Fishlow also found that iron used by railroads was only 20% of net consumption in the 1850s.


text: Fogel concludes that railroads were important but not "essential" to late 19th-century growth in the U.S. in the sense that a possible alternative existed even if it was never tried. Fogel focuses on the "social saving" created by railroads, which he defines as the difference between the actual level of national income in 1890 and the theoretical level of national income if transportation somehow existed in the most efficient way possible to the absence of the railroad. He found that without the railroad, America's gross national product (GNP) would have been 7.2% less in 1890. While the largest contribution to GNP growth was made by any single innovation before 1900, this percentage only represents 2–3 years of GNP growth.


text: Fogel makes several key assumptions and decisions in his analysis. First, his calculations comprise transportation between the primary markets of the Midwest and the secondary markets of the East and South (interregional) and transportation between cities and rural areas (intraregional). Second, he chooses to focus on the shipment of four agricultural commodities: wheat, corn, beef, and pork. Third, Fogel's social saving calculation accounts for costs not included in water rates (which include the cargo losses in transit, transshipment costs, extra wagon haulage, time lost because of slower speed, and because canals froze in the winter, and capital costs). One criticism of Fogel's analysis is that it does not account for the externalities or "spill-over" effects of the railroads, which (if included) may have increased his estimate for social savings [definition needed]. Railroads provided much of the demand for technological advances in a number of areas, including heat dynamics, combustion engineering, thermodynamics, metallurgy, civil engineering, machining, and metal fabrication. Furthermore, Fogel does not discuss the role railroads played in the development of the financial system or in attracting foreign capital, which otherwise might not have been available.


text: Fishlow estimates that the railroad's social savings—or what he terms "direct benefits"—were higher than those calculated by Fogel. Fishlow's research may indicate that the development of railroads significantly influenced real income in the United States. Instead of Fogel's term "social saving", Fishlow uses the term "direct benefits" to describe the difference between the actual level of national income in 1859 and the theoretical level of income using the least expensive, but existing alternative means. Fishlow calculated the social savings in 1859 at 4 percent of GNP and in 1890 at 15 percent of GNP—higher than Fogel's estimate of 7.2% in 1890.


text: Industrialists such as Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould became wealthy through railroad ownerships, as large railroad companies such as the New York Central, Grand Trunk Railway and the Southern Pacific spanned several states. In response to monopolistic practices (such as price fixing) and other excesses of some railroads and their owners, Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) in 1887. The ICC indirectly controlled the business activities of the railroads through issuance of extensive regulations. Congress also enacted antitrust legislation to prevent railroad monopolies, beginning with the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890.


text: The principal mainline railroads concentrated their efforts on moving freight and passengers over long distances. But many had suburban services near large cities, which might also be served by Streetcar and Interurban lines. The Interurban was a concept which relied almost exclusively on passenger traffic for revenue. Unable to survive the Great Depression, the failure of most Interurbans by that time left many cities without suburban passenger railroads, although the largest cities such as New York City, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia continued to have suburban service. The major railroads passenger flagship services included multi-day journeys on luxury trains resembling hotels, which were unable to compete with airlines in the 1950s. Rural communities were served by slow trains no more than twice a day. They survived until the 1960s because the same train hauled the Railway Post Office cars, paid for by the US Post Office. RPOs were withdrawn when mail sorting was mechanized.


text: As early as the 1930s, automobile travel had begun to cut into the rail passenger market, somewhat reducing economies of scale, but it was the development of the Interstate Highway System and of commercial aviation in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as increasingly restrictive regulation, that dealt the most damaging blows to rail transportation, both passenger and freight. General Motors and others were convicted of running the streetcar industry into the ground purposefully in what is referred to as the Great American Streetcar Scandal. There was little point in operating passenger trains to advertise freight service when those who made decisions about freight shipping traveled by car and by air, and when the railroads' chief competitors for that market were interstate trucking companies.


text: Soon, the only things keeping most passenger trains running were legal obligations. Meanwhile, companies who were interested in using railroads for profitable freight traffic were looking for ways to get out of those legal obligations, and it looked like intercity passenger rail service would soon become extinct in the United States beyond a few highly populated corridors. The final blow for passenger trains in the U.S. came with the loss of railroad post offices in the 1960s. On May 1, 1971, the federally funded Amtrak took over (with a few exceptions) all intercity passenger rail service in the continental United States. The Rio Grande, with its Denver-Ogden "Rio Grande Zephyr" and the Southern with its Washington, D.C.–New Orleans "Southern Crescent" chose to stay out of Amtrak, and the Rock Island, with two intrastate Illinois trains, was too far gone to be included into Amtrak.


text: Freight transportation continued to labor under regulations developed when rail transport had a monopoly on intercity traffic, and railroads only competed with one another. An entire generation of rail managers had been trained to operate under this regulatory regime. Labor unions and their work rules were likewise a formidable barrier to change. Overregulation, management and unions formed an "iron triangle" of stagnation, frustrating the efforts of leaders such as the New York Central's . In particular, the dense rail network in the Northeastern U.S. was in need of radical pruning and consolidation. A spectacularly unsuccessful beginning was the 1968 formation and subsequent bankruptcy of the Penn Central, barely two years later.


text: Historically, on routes where a single railroad has had an undisputed monopoly, passenger service was as spartan and as expensive as the market and ICC regulation would bear, since such railroads had no need to advertise their freight services. However, on routes where two or three railroads were in direct competition with each other for freight business, such railroads would spare no expense to make their passenger trains as fast, luxurious, and affordable as possible, as it was considered to be the most effective way of advertising their profitable freight services.


text: The National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP) was formed in 1967 to lobby for the continuation of passenger trains. Its lobbying efforts were hampered somewhat by Democratic opposition to any sort of rail subsidies to the privately owned railroads, and Republican opposition to nationalization of the railroad industry. The proponents were aided by the fact that few in the federal government wanted to be held responsible for the seemingly inevitable extinction of the passenger train, which most regarded as tantamount to political suicide. The urgent need to solve the passenger train disaster was heightened by the bankruptcy filing of the Penn Central, the dominant railroad in the Northeastern United States, on June 21, 1970.


text: Under the Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970, Congress created the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (NRPC) to subsidize and oversee the operation of intercity passenger trains. The Act provided that


text: The original working brand name for NRPC was "Railpax", which eventually became "Amtrak". At the time, many Washington insiders viewed the corporation as a face-saving way to give passenger trains the one "last hurrah" demanded by the public, but expected that the NRPC would quietly disappear in a few years as public interest waned. However, while Amtrak's political and financial support have often been shaky, popular and political support for Amtrak has allowed it to survive into the 21st century.


text: Similarly, to preserve a declining freight rail industry, Congress passed the Regional Rail Reorganization Act of 1973 (sometimes called the "3R Act"). The act was an attempt to salvage viable freight operations from the bankrupt Penn Central and other lines in the northeast, mid-Atlantic and Midwestern regions. The law created the Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail), a government-owned corporation, which began operations in 1976. Another law, the Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act of 1976 (the "4R Act"), provided more specifics for the Conrail acquisitions and set the stage for more comprehensive deregulation of the railroad industry. Portions of the Penn Central, Erie Lackawanna, Reading Railroad, Ann Arbor Railroad, Central Railroad of New Jersey, Lehigh Valley, and Lehigh and Hudson River were merged into Conrail. On December 31, 1996 the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway merged with the Burlington Northern Railroad, creating the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway.


text: The freight industry continued its decline until Congress passed the Staggers Rail Act in 1980, which largely deregulated the rail industry. Since then, U.S. freight railroads have reorganized, discontinued their lightly used routes and returned to profitability.


text: Freight railroads play an important role in the U.S. economy, especially for moving imports and exports using containers, and for shipments of coal and oil. According to the British news magazine "The Economist," "They are universally recognised in the industry as the best in the world." Productivity rose 172% between 1981 and 2000, while rates decreased by 55% (after accounting for inflation). Rail's share of the American freight market rose to 43%, the highest for any rich country.


text: U.S. railroads still play a major role in the nation's freight shipping. They carried 750 billion ton-miles by 1975 which doubled to 1.5 trillion ton-miles in 2005. In the 1950s, the U.S. and Europe moved roughly the same percentage of freight by rail; by 2000, the share of U.S. rail freight was 38% while in Europe only 8% of freight traveled by rail. In 2000, while U.S. trains moved 2,390 billion ton-kilometers of freight, the 15-nation European Union moved only 304 billion ton-kilometers of freight. In terms of ton-miles, railroads annually move more than 25% of the United States' freight and connect businesses with each other across the country and with markets overseas. In 2018, US rail freight had a transport energy efficiency of 473 tons.miles per gallon of fuel.


text: U.S. freight railroads are separated into three classes, set by the Surface Transportation Board, based on annual revenues:


text: In 2013, the U.S. moved more oil out of North Dakota by rail than by the Trans-Alaska pipeline. This trend—tenfold in two years and 40-fold in five years—is forecast to increase.


text: There are four different classes of freight railroads: Class I, regional, local line haul, and switching & terminal. Class I railroads are defined as those with revenue of at least $346.8 million in 2006. They comprise just one percent of the number of freight railroads, but account for 67 percent of the industry's mileage, 90 percent of its employees, and 93 percent of its freight revenue.


text: A regional railroad is a line haul railroad with at least and/or revenue between $40 million and the Class I threshold. There were 33 regional railroads in 2006. Most have between 75 and 500 employees.


text: Local line haul railroads operate less than and earn less than $40 million per year (most earn less than $5 million per year). In 2006, there were 323 local line haul railroads. They generally perform point-to-point service over short distances.


text: Switching and terminal (S&T) carriers are railroads that primarily provide switching and/or terminal services, regardless of revenue. They perform pick up and delivery services within a certain area.


text: U.S. freight railroads operate in a highly competitive marketplace. According to a 2010 FRA report, within the U.S., railroads carried 39.5% of freight by ton-mile, followed by trucks (28.6%), oil pipelines (19.6%), barges (12%) and air (0.3%). However, railroads' revenue share has been slowly falling for decades, a reflection of the intensity of the competition they face and of the large rate reductions railroads have passed through to their customers over the years.


text: In 2011, North American railroads operated 1,471,736 freight cars and 31,875 locomotives, with 215,985 employees. They originated 39.53 million carloads (averaging 63 tons each) and generated $81.7 billion in freight revenue of present 2014. The average haul was 917 miles. The largest (Class 1) U.S. railroads carried 10.17 million intermodal containers and 1.72 million piggyback trailers. Intermodal traffic was 6.2% of tonnage originated and 12.6% of revenue. The largest commodities were coal, chemicals, farm products, nonmetallic minerals and intermodal. Other major commodities carried include lumber, automobiles, and waste materials. Coal alone was 43.3% of tonnage and 24.7% of revenue. Coal accounted for roughly half of U.S. electricity generation and was a major export. As natural gas became cheaper than coal, coal supplies dropped 11% in 2015 but coal rail freight dropped by up to 40%, allowing an increase in car transport by rail, some in tri-level railcars. US coal consumption dwindled from over 1,100 million tons in 2008 to 687 million tons in 2018.


text: The fastest growing rail traffic segment is currently intermodal. Intermodal is the movement of shipping containers or truck trailers by rail and at least one other mode of transportation, usually trucks or ocean-going vessels. Intermodal combines the door-to-door convenience of trucks with the long-haul economy of railroads. Rail intermodal has tripled in the last 25 years. It plays a critical role in making logistics far more efficient for retailers and others. The efficiency of intermodal provides the U.S. with a huge competitive advantage in the global economy. A major factor in making U.S. rail intermodal freight competitive is the use of double-stack rail transport, where shipping containers are loaded two-high on special freight cars, potential doubling the number of containers one train can carry, with corresponding reductions in operating costs.


text: Prior to Amtrak's creation in 1970, intercity passenger rail service in the U.S. was provided by the same companies that provided freight service. When Amtrak was formed, in return for government permission to exit the passenger rail business, freight railroads donated passenger equipment to Amtrak and helped it get started with a capital infusion of some $200 million.


text: The vast majority of the 22,000 or so miles over which Amtrak operates are actually owned by freight railroads. By law, freight railroads must grant Amtrak access to their track upon request. In return, Amtrak pays fees to freight railroads to cover the incremental costs of Amtrak's use of freight railroad tracks.


text: The sole long-distance intercity passenger railroad in the continental U.S. is Amtrak, and multiple current commuter rail systems provide regional intercity services such as New York-New Haven, Stockton-San Jose and West Palm Beach-Miami. In Alaska, intercity service is provided by Alaska Railroad instead of Amtrak. Commuter rail systems exist in more than a dozen metropolitan areas, but these systems are not extensively interconnected, so commuter rail cannot be used alone to traverse the country. Commuter systems have been proposed in approximately two dozen other cities, but interplays between various local-government administrative bottlenecks and ripple effects from the 2007–2012 global financial crisis have generally pushed such projects farther and farther into the future, or have even sometimes mothballed them entirely.


text: The most culturally notable and physically evident exception to the general lack of significant passenger rail transport in the U.S. is the Northeast Corridor between Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston, with significant branches in Connecticut and Massachusetts. The corridor handles frequent passenger service that is both Amtrak and commuter. New York City itself is noteworthy for high usage of passenger rail transport, both subway and commuter rail (Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North Railroad, New Jersey Transit). The subway system is used by one third of all U.S. mass transit users. Chicago also sees high rail ridership, with a local elevated system, one of the world's last interurban lines, and fourth most-ridden commuter rail system in the United States: Metra. Other major cities with substantial rail infrastructure include Philadelphia's SEPTA, Boston's MBTA, and Washington, D.C.'s network of commuter rail and rapid transit. Denver, Colorado constructed a new electrified commuter rail system in the 2000s to complement the city's light rail system. The commuter rail systems of San Diego and Los Angeles, Coaster and Metrolink, connect in Oceanside, California. The San Francisco Bay Area additionally hosts several local passenger rail operators, the largest of which are Caltrain, the Altamont Corridor Express, Sonoma–Marin Area Rail Transit, and Bay Area Rapid Transit.


text: Privately run inter-city passenger rail operations have also been restarted since 2018 in south Florida, with additional routes under development. Brightline is a higher-speed rail train, run by All Aboard Florida. It began service in January 2018 between Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach; its service was extended to Miami in May 2018, with an extension to Orlando International Airport planned by 2022. Brightline has also proposed a further extension of its service from Orlando to Tampa via Walt Disney World, and a high-speed rail service from Victorville, California to Las Vegas. In addition, the Texas Central Railway is currently developing plans for a proposed greenfield high-speed rail line using Japanese Shinkansen trains between Dallas and Houston, which is expected to begin construction in 2020 and open in early 2026.


text: The basic design of a passenger car was standardized by 1870. By 1900, the main car types were: baggage, coach, combine, diner, dome car, lounge, observation, private, Pullman, railroad post office (RPO) and sleeper.


text: The first passenger cars resembled stagecoaches. They were short, often less than long, tall and rode on a single pair of axles.


text: American mail cars first appeared in the 1860s and at first followed English design. They had a hook that would catch the mailbag in its crook.


text: As locomotive technology progressed in the mid-19th century, trains grew in length and weight. Passenger cars grew along with them, first getting longer with the addition of a second truck (one at each end), and wider as their suspensions improved. Cars built for European use featured side door compartments, while American car design favored a single pair of doors at one end of the car in the car's vestibule; compartmentized cars on American railroads featured a long hallway with doors from the hall to the compartments.


text: One possible reason for this difference in design principles between American and European carbuilding practice could be the average distance between stations on the two continents. While most European railroads connected towns and villages that were still very closely spaced, American railroads had to travel over much greater distances to reach their destinations. Building passenger cars with a long passageway through the length of the car allowed the passengers easy access to the restroom, among other things, on longer journeys.


text: Dining cars first appeared in the late 1870s and into the 1880s. Until this time, the common practice was to stop for meals at restaurants along the way (which led to the rise of Fred Harvey's chain of Harvey House restaurants in America). At first, the dining car was simply a place to serve meals that were picked up en route, but they soon evolved to include galleys in which the meals were prepared.


text: By the 1920s, passenger cars on the larger standard gauge railroads were normally between long. The cars of this time were still quite ornate, many of them being built by experienced coach makers and skilled carpenters.


text: With the 1930s came the widespread use of stainless steel for car bodies. The typical passenger car was now much lighter than its "heavyweight" wood cousins of old. The new "lightweight" and streamlined cars carried passengers in speed and comfort to an extent that had not been experienced to date. Aluminum and Cor-ten were also used in lightweight car construction, but stainless steel was the preferred material for car bodies. It is not the lightest of materials, nor is it the least expensive, but stainless steel cars could be, and often were, left unpainted except for the car's reporting marks that were required by law.


text: By the end of the 1930s, railroads and car builders were debuting car body and interior styles that could only be dreamed of before. In 1937, the Pullman Company delivered the first cars equipped with roomettes—that is, the car's interior was sectioned off into compartments, much like the coaches that were still in widespread use across Europe. Pullman's roomettes, however, were designed with the single traveler in mind. The roomette featured a large picture window, a privacy door, a single fold-away bed, a sink and small toilet. The roomette's floor space was barely larger than the space taken up by the bed, but it allowed the traveler to ride in luxury compared to the multilevel semiprivate berths of old.


text: Now that passenger cars were lighter, they were able to carry heavier loads, but the size of the average passenger load that rode in them didn't increase to match the cars' new capacities. The average passenger car couldn't get any wider or longer due to side clearances along the railroad lines, but they generally could get taller because they were still shorter than many freight cars and locomotives. As a result, the railroads soon began building and buying dome and bilevel cars to carry more passengers.


text: Carbody styles have generally remained consistent since the middle of the 20th century. While new car types have not made much of an impact, the existing car types have been further enhanced with new technology.


text: Starting in the 1950s, the passenger travel market declined in North America, though there was growth in commuter rail. The higher clearances in North America enabled bi-level commuter coaches that could hold more passengers. These cars started to become common in the United States in the 1960s.


text: While intercity passenger rail travel declined in the United States during the 1950s, ridership continued to increase in Europe during that time. With the increase came newer technology on existing and new equipment. The Spanish company Talgo began experimenting in the 1940s with technology that would enable the axles to steer into a curve, allowing the train to move around the curve at a higher speed. The steering axles evolved into mechanisms that would also tilt the passenger car as it entered a curve to counter the centrifugal force experienced by the train, further increasing speeds on existing track. Today, tilting passenger trains are commonplace. Talgo's trains are used on some short and medium distance routes such as Amtrak Cascades from Eugene, Oregon, to Vancouver, British Columbia.


text: In August 2016, the Department of Transportation approved the largest loan in the department's history, $2.45 billion to upgrade the passenger train service in the Northeast region. The $2.45 billion will be used to purchase 28 new train sets for the high-speed Acela train between Washington through Philadelphia, New York and into Boston. The money will also be used build new stations and platforms. The money will also be used to rehabilitate railroad tracks and upgrade four stations, including Washington's Union Station and Baltimore's Penn Station.


text: As of 2022, the only operating high speed rail service in the United States is Amtrak's Acela, between Washington, DC, and Boston. It currently has a maximum speed of , and only in some sections between Boston and Providence, RI, soon to be after introduction of new Avelia Liberty trains, eventually to be upgraded to over some sections. The state of California is constructing its own HSR system, California High-Speed Rail, constructed to standards in some places. The first section in the Central Valley is due to open around 2027.


text: Every piece of railroad rolling stock operating in North American interchange service is required to carry a standardized set of reporting marks. The marks are made up of a two- to four-letter code identifying the owner of the equipment accompanied by an identification number and statistics on the equipment's capacity and tare (unloaded) weight. Marks whose codes end in X (such as TTGX) are used on equipment owned by entities that are not common carrier railroads themselves. Marks whose codes end in U are used on containers that are carried in intermodal transport, and marks whose codes end in Z are used on trailers that are carried in intermodal transport, per ISO standard 6346). Most freight cars carry automatic equipment identification RFID transponders.


text: Typically, railroads operating in the United States reserve one- to four-digit identification numbers for powered equipment such as diesel locomotives and six-digit identification numbers for unpowered equipment. There is no hard and fast rule for how equipment is numbered; each railroad maintains its own numbering policy for its equipment.


text: Federal regulation of railroads is mainly through the United States Department of Transportation, especially the Federal Railroad Administration which regulates safety, and the Surface Transportation Board which regulates rates, service, the construction, acquisition and abandonment of rail lines, carrier mergers and interchange of traffic among carriers.


text: Railroads are also regulated by the individual states, for example through the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Grand Admiral Thrawn (full name: Mitth'raw'nuruodo) is a fictional character in the "Star Wars" franchise. He is notable for appearing as the eponymous character in the "Thrawn" trilogy of novels (1991–1993) by Timothy Zahn. Thrawn is an imperial military leader and member of the Chiss race who returns from the unknown and leads the remnants of the scattered Galactic Empire in a campaign against the New Republic. Thrawn faces off against classic "Star Wars" characters Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, and Lando Calrissian in the "Thrawn" trilogy, but is ultimately defeated. He is seemingly resurrected in the "Hand of Thrawn" duology (1997–1998), and his backstory is explored in various other novels, short stories, comics, and video games in the "Star Wars" expanded universe.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: In 2014, these early works were among those rebranded as "Star Wars Legends" by Lucasfilm, and rendered non-canon. Thrawn reentered official canon in the 3D animated TV series "Star Wars Rebels" from 2016 to 2018, and Zahn published a new "Thrawn" trilogy (2017–2019) and then the "Thrawn Ascendancy" trilogy (2020–2021).


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Thrawn has been called one of the most significant and popular characters in the "Legends" continuity. Several "Star Wars" action figures and other merchandise have been produced of the character.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Thrawn first appeared in the 1991 Timothy Zahn novel "Heir to the Empire", the first installment of what became known as the first "Thrawn" trilogy. He is a grand admiral in the Imperial Navy, and categorically "the most brilliant of the Emperor's minions". A member of the alien Chiss species, native language Cheunh, Thrawn is described as a tall, solidly built humanoid with blue skin and glowing red eyes who wears the white uniform befitting his rank. He has risen in power thanks to his "tactical brilliance and cunning", and has been described as "one of the most threatening antagonists" in the "Star Wars" universe. He is an unparalleled military strategist and tactical genius who has made extensive study of military intelligence and the artwork of other cultures, and the "Thrawn" trilogy finds him commanding the remnants of the Imperial Fleet in a series of stunning victories against the New Republic. His full name was given as Mitth'raw'nuruodo.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: IGN described the character as "diabolical, brilliant and ruthless". Zahn describes Thrawn's command style as considerably different from that of Darth Vader and other typical Imperial commanders; instead of punishing failure and dissent, Thrawn promotes creativity among his crew and accepts ideas from subordinates. Zahn said in 2017:


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Referencing Zahn's annotations in the 20th Anniversary Edition of "Heir to the Empire", John Booth wrote in "Wired" that Zahn "created and developed Thrawn as a character [by] deliberately establishing the Grand Admiral as a villain who leads not by coercion and fear but through valuing strategy and loyalty". Zahn explained in 2008 that Thrawn's version of the Empire is different from that of Palpatine because Thrawn does not have Palpatine's megalomania and xenophobia. Calling Thrawn and Mara Jade his favorite of the characters he created, Zahn noted in 2006 that writing the Grand Admiral "provides the intellectual challenge of trying to come up with new, clever, and (hopefully) workable tactics and strategies". Zahn has also stated that Thrawn's entire motivation, both serving in the and the Ascendancy, is to protect the Chiss people and "everything else flows from that."


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Thrawn is voiced by Tris King in the 1994 computer game "", and by Tim Russell in the 1997 audio drama "Dark Forces: Soldier for the Empire". In seasons three and four of "Star Wars Rebels", Thrawn is voiced by Lars Mikkelsen.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: According to Zahn, Lou Aronica of Bantam Spectra had negotiated a book deal with Lucasfilm in 1989, and the publisher put Zahn's name at the top of their list of possible authors. He said, "My original instructions from LucasArts consisted of exactly two rules: the books were to start 3–5 years after "Return of the Jedi," and I couldn't use anyone who'd been explicitly killed off in the movies." Zahn used information from the original film trilogy as his primary source, but supplemented that with details from the many sourcebooks created for West End Games' "", saying that they "saved me from having to reinvent the wheel many times". In turn, each novel in the trilogy had its role-playing game sourcebook created for it by West End Games.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Introduced in the "Thrawn" trilogy (1991–93), Thrawn became a fan favorite and subsequently appeared in multiple works in what became known as the "Star Wars" Expanded Universe, including novels, comics and video games, through 2006. He is often cited as one of the most popular characters in the franchise. "Star Wars Rebels" executive producer Dave Filoni said of the character in 2016, "You couldn't have grown up a "Star Wars" fan without encountering Thrawn in "Heir to the Empire". It was a dark time when there weren't any more movies, and it blew our minds that there could be more." The "Thrawn" trilogy itself is widely credited with reviving interest in the "Star Wars" franchise. In 2010, "" creator Filoni expressed interest in using Thrawn in that series. Some fans of Zahn's "Thrawn" series had long hoped the books would be adapted, and after the 2012 announcement that The Walt Disney Company had acquired Lucasfilm and planned to produce film sequels to "Return of the Jedi", Zahn commented that if material from the expanded universe was used in the films, "we'd all be thrilled to death".


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: With the 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm by Disney, most of the licensed "Star Wars" novels and comics produced since the originating 1977 film "Star Wars" were rebranded as "Star Wars Legends" and declared non-canon to the franchise in April 2014. Though Lucasfilm made it clear that new media would "not tell the same story told in the post-"Return of the Jedi" Expanded Universe", it was also established that "creators of new "Star Wars" entertainment have full access to the rich content of the Expanded Universe." Acknowledging that Thrawn had long been considered by Lucasfilm when developing projects, Filoni later said in 2016 that in particular the character had been on his list of potential villains when developing "Star Wars Rebels".


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: The Thrawn" trilogy, also known as the Heir to the Empire" trilogy, was written by Timothy Zahn between 1991 and 1993. Approximately five years after the events depicted in "Return of the Jedi", the Rebel Alliance, now known as the New Republic, has driven out the remnants of the old Imperial Starfleet to a distant corner of the galaxy and is attempting to set up a functional government. Princess Leia and Han Solo are married and expecting twins. Luke Skywalker has become the first in a long-awaited new line of Jedi Knights. Thousands of light years away, Grand Admiral Thrawn, the last and most brilliant of the 12 grand admirals, has taken command of the shattered Imperial Fleet and prepared it to attack the New Republic. Thrawn is searching for a Dark Jedi to join his side and is confident he can restore the Empire.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: In Heir to the Empire (1991), master tactician Grand Admiral Thrawn plots to destroy the New Republic despite their numerical advantage over the remaining Imperial forces. He sets his sights on the Wayland storehouse of the late Emperor Palpatine, which contains a massive array of Spaarti cloning cylinders and a working cloaking shield. To this end, Thrawn and his subordinate Gilad Pellaeon, captain of the Star Destroyer "Chimaera", enlist the help of smuggler Talon Karrde and his second-in-command Mara Jade to obtain several salamander-like creatures called ysalamiri. Thrawn uses the ysalamiri, which possess the natural ability to disrupt the Force, to subdue the storehouse's guardian Joruus C'baoth, a twisted clone of a Jedi Master whom the Grand Admiral had killed years before. C'baoth offers his allegiance in exchange for two acolytes to bend to his will: Darth Vader's twin children, Luke and Leia. Thrawn sends some of his Noghri killers to capture Luke and a pregnant Leia, but their attempts repeatedly fail. Leia defends herself from one attack and is surprised when the Noghri suddenly surrenders. Thrawn launches his first offensive, a series of hit-and-run attacks into New Republic territory, and then steals a complement of mole miners from Lando Calrissian's mining operations on Nkllon. In need of warships, and with his previous tactics having forced over 100 lightly crewed ships to be stationed at the Sluis Van shipyards as he planned, Thrawn invades. His stormtroopers use the stolen miners to board and hijack the ships, but they are thwarted when Lando can seize control of the miners remotely. The Grand Admiral withdraws his forces, but thanks to Thrawn's plotting, his New Republic nemesis Admiral Ackbar is soon arrested for treason.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Dark Force Rising (1992) reveals that before the Clone Wars, the Old Republic had constructed a fleet of highly automated heavy cruisers, known as the "Katana" fleet. A virus infected the crews of the entire fleet and drove them insane. The fleet was never seen again until smuggler Talon Karrde discovered it (several years before the events of the first book). With access to Palpatine's private storehouse on the planet Wayland, Thrawn presses his advantage to marshal more forces for the battle against the New Republic. Mara Jade, in an attempt to exonerate the Empire's warrant for Karrde's arrest, goes to Thrawn and offers to reveal the location of the "Katana" fleet. Instead, he has her followed and Karrde is captured. Luke and Mara rescue Karrde from Thrawn's Star Destroyer as Thrawn attempts to capture another man who knows about the "Katana" fleet. Meanwhile, Leia learns that the Noghri serve the Empire because they revere her late father, Darth Vader, who they believe saved their planet Honoghr from ecological disaster. Leia convinces them that they have been deceived and effectively enslaved by the Empire, and they switch sides. With Ackbar temporarily neutralized as a tactical opponent, Thrawn leads an army of clones to claim the so-called ""Katana" fleet", outmaneuvering Luke, Lando, and Han Solo.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: In The Last Command (1993), set about a month after the previous book, Thrawn uses the "Katana" fleet, crewed with clones, to mount a successful offensive against the New Republic. Seizing one planet after the other, the Grand Admiral soon immobilizes the galactic capital world, Coruscant. He has placed multiple cloaked asteroids around the planet, and through a ruse, he has led the New Republic leadership to believe that Coruscant is surrounded with them. Learning of the deception, the Republic fleet attacks the Imperial shipyards at Bilbringi to capture a device that can find the cloaked asteroids, but Thrawn's forces intercept and surround them. Meanwhile, Luke and Leia lead a group to destroy the cloning facility on Wayland, killing C'baoth and destroying the cloning cylinders. Just as Thrawn and Pellaeon learn that the Noghri aided in the attack on Wayland, Thrawn's Noghri bodyguard, Rukh, kills the Grand Admiral—whose last words are, "But ... it was so artistically done." The tide of battle at Bilbringi turns, and with the hope of victory dashed by Thrawn's death, Pellaeon orders the Imperial forces to retreat.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Zahn's Specter of the Past (1997) finds Thrawn seemingly resurrected ten years after his death when he reappears to lead the decimated Imperial forces against the unstable New Republic. A record surfaces called the Caamasi Document, which indicates that a small group of Bothans were perpetrators in the tragic destruction of the planet Caamas and causes more than a hundred alien warships to gather in orbit over the Bothans' homeworld, which the Empire hopes to use to its benefit.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: In Vision of the Future (1998), Admiral Gilad Pellaeon admits that the Empire, down to only a few sectors, is now fighting a losing battle, and initiates peace talks with Princess Leia. However, Moff Disra hires a con artist, Flim, to impersonate the deceased Grand Admiral Thrawn to motivate the Imperial forces. Major Grodin Tierce, the clone of a former stormtrooper imbued with Thrawn's tactical intellect by the grand admiral himself, strategizes that the false Thrawn could also rally support for the Empire and intimidate the New Republic. The tactic is successful until Pellaeon and Talon Karrde—on opposing sides but both desiring peace—expose Flim. Meanwhile, at a fortress called the Hand of Thrawn, Luke and Mara discover a gestating and near-complete clone of Thrawn, which is killed during their escape. An expedition by Thrawn to the galaxy's Unknown Regions is also mentioned. Finally, a peace treaty is signed by Pellaeon and the New Republic's president.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Thrawn appears as a captain in the 1997 William C. Dietz novella "". He also appears in the 1998 young reader's book "".


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Before the theatrical release of "Attack of the Clones", Lucasfilm suggested that Zahn write a prequel-era book. Zahn decided to have his 2004 novel "Survivor's Quest" (the sequel to "The Hand of Thrawn" duology) cover the end of the Outbound Flight story arc before exploring its beginning in his prequel novel. In "Survivor's Quest", Luke and Mara journey to investigate the wreckage of Outbound Flight, a Jedi expedition destroyed by Thrawn years before. Newly discovered by the Chiss, the remains turn out to be the lure in a trap laid by the bloodthirsty Vagaari to avenge themselves on the Chiss.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Zahn's 2006 novel Outbound Flight is set fifty years before "Survivor's Quest". It follows the story of the doomed titular expedition, led by Jedi Master Jorus C'baoth, that is attacked by a young Chiss commander named Mitth'raw'nuruodo—informally known as Thrawn. In the story, a Republic fleet comes across the Chiss for the first time. The alien commander, Thrawn, can handily defeat the Republic ships despite inferior weapons and numbers. Darth Sidious, Palpatine's alter-ego, seeks to destroy the "Outbound Flight", and he and his agent Kinman Doriana convince Thrawn that the ship and its Jedi pose a threat to the peaceful future of the galaxy. Thrawn agrees, hoping to get C'baoth to turn back before taking more drastic action. The Jedi refuses and Thrawn fires on the ship, but Doriana launches an assault that kills every Jedi and sends the "Outbound Flight" careening to its destruction on a nearby planet. Thrawn's brother Thrass and Lorana, the sole surviving Jedi, sacrifice their lives to save what survivors they can. Thrawn is reprimanded by his Chiss superiors for his hostile behavior, and summoned back to his home planet Csilla. "Publishers Weekly" called Thrawn the "true star" of the novel, noting that his attack on the ship, secretly influenced by Palpatine's agents, "insures his own eventual exile from his race and sets other sinister wheels in motion". Zahn said of writing the novel, "as always, it was immensely fun to play tactics with Thrawn". Though StarWars.com suggests that in "Outbound Flight", Thrawn is "too smart and basically decent to become the servant of Palpatine that he later becomes", Zahn explains:


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Set between "Star Wars: A New Hope" and "The Empire Strikes Back", Zahn's "Choices of One" (2011) pits Thrawn against the alien warlord Nuso Esva, his nemesis from the Unknown Regions.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Thrawn, exiled by the Chiss to an inhospitable planet, is found by the Imperial Captain Voss Parck in "Mist Encounter" a short story by Zahn that was originally published in "Star Wars Adventure Journal" #7 (August 1995). Parck realizes Thrawn's value as a strategist and decides to bring him to the Emperor. In "Command Decision", a November 1996 short story by Zahn published in "Star Wars Adventure Journal" #11, Thrawn is an admiral in the Imperial Navy with Parck as his subordinate. Thrawn orchestrates a plan to locate a Rebel base in "Side Trip" by Zahn and Michael A. Stackpole, published in "Star Wars Adventure Journal" #12 (February 1997) and #13 (May 1997), and reprinted in the November 1997 anthology "Tales from the Empire". The success of this mission earns him the command of Darth Vader's Noghri commandos. Zahn's novella "Crisis of Faith", published with the 20th Anniversary Edition of "Heir to the Empire" on September 6, 2011, is set immediately before "Heir to the Empire" and finds Thrawn finally able to defeat Nuso Esva.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: In the 1997 Dark Horse comic " 25: The Making of Baron Fel", set four years after "A New Hope", Imperial pilot Soontir Fel participates in an ambush on a Rebel convoy. He realizes that the operation was planned by the "alien Admiral" Thrawn, who is given no acknowledgement by Vader or the Emperor. Fel understands that such reliance on an alien undercuts the xenophobic foundation of the Empire, and Thrawn goes unrewarded after the successful mission.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: In the "Tour of Duty III" segment of the 1994 space flight simulator/combat computer game "", then-Vice Admiral Thrawn establishes order in a "wild" system at the frontiers of the Empire. The game expansion packs "Defender of the Empire" and "Enemies of the Empire" follow the story of how Thrawn thwarts the efforts of the traitorous Grand Admiral Zaarin to depose the Emperor, and Thrawn is promoted to Grand Admiral in his place. Thrawn is also a recruitable character for The Empire in the 1998 strategy computer game "", and later appears in "" expansion pack for the 2006 real-time strategy game "". Thrawn cameos in "" as a "Leader" character for the Galactic Empire in Galactic Conquest, earned by conquering all planets in the Northern Quadrant of the map and allows an army to move twice in one turn if the first move is begun within said quadrant. This power is shared with Admiral Ackbar for the Rebel Alliance. He is also a collectible character in the 2015 mobile collectible Role-playing video game, "".


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: With the sequel film "" in production, in April 2014 most of the licensed "Star Wars" novels and comics produced since the 1977 film "Star Wars" were declared non-canon to the franchise. However, "Star Wars Rebels" executive producer Dave Filoni announced at the London "Star Wars" Celebration in July 2016 that Thrawn would be reintroduced into the franchise in the third season of the "Rebels" series. The character debuted in the season 3 premiere, "Steps into Shadow", which aired on September 24, 2016.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Though in "Legends" works Thrawn was mostly used in post-"Return of the Jedi" storylines, "Rebels" takes place within the five years before the events of the original 1977 film. After seeing an advanced clip from the series, Zahn told StarWars.com, "even that short bit was awesome, and just a bit surrealistic. Authors don't get to see our creations come to life very often, and it was a real treat to see a walking, talking Grand Admiral Thrawn".


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Acknowledging that Thrawn had long been considered by Lucasfilm when developing projects, Filoni said that in particular, the character had been on his list of potential villains when developing "Rebels". He explained that unlike how the character Ahsoka Tano has been a foil for Darth Vader in previous seasons of "Rebels", "There's no one to defend [the Rebels] against Thrawn. We want to treat him like a big-time villain, as much as Darth Vader, but on the strategic, military side of things."


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: In "Steps into Shadow", Thrawn is the commander of the Seventh Fleet, recently promoted to Grand Admiral for crushing a rebel insurgency on Batonn without regard for civilian casualties. He is brought in by Imperial Governor Arihnda Pryce to help destroy the series' eponymous rebel cell. A patient tactician, Thrawn allows the rebels to escape, intending to manipulate them into orchestrating the complete downfall of their rebellion. In "Hera's Heroes", he takes command of the Imperial occupation of Ryloth, home planet of Hera Syndulla, and has his first face-to-face contact with the rebels. He reappears in "Iron Squadron", where he orders the incompetent Admiral Konstantine to deal with rebels and rebel sympathizers in the Mykapo system; after Konstantine's ship is disabled, Thrawn arrives in his personal Star Destroyer, the "Chimaera", and is revealed to have previously encountered rebel Commander Jun Sato. "An Inside Man" reveals Thrawn now in charge of the Imperial occupation of the planet Lothal, overseeing the factory where the new TIE Defender and various other pieces of equipment are manufactured. He puts an end to rebel acts of sabotage by enforcing a policy of the workers testing their creations and is also shown to be studying pieces of artwork that grant insight into each member of the "Ghost" crew. He also determines that there is a rebel spy within the Imperial ranks, but intends to use this to his advantage. In "Warhead", Thrawn uses probe droids to determine that Sato's hidden rebel base is located on one of less than a hundred planets. Thrawn is shown to be skilled in hand-to-hand combat in "Through Imperial Eyes", and learns that Agent Kallus is the rebel spy. In "Secret Cargo", Thrawn and Pryce pursue Senator Mon Mothma, who is being transported to safety by the rebels after speaking out publicly against Palpatine. In "Zero Hour", Thrawn confronts Kallus about being Fulcrum, and executes his carefully planned attack on the rebel base on Atollon. He is thwarted by the ingenuity of the rebels and the assistance of Bendu, who cryptically warns Thrawn of his impending defeat, "like many arms surrounding you in a cold embrace". In the series finale "Family Reunion and Farewell", Thrawn's Star Destroyer is attacked by Purrgil while hovering over Lothal. Ensnared in the creatures' tentacles while simultaneously being confronted by the Force-wielding Ezra Bridger, who brought the Purrgil to defend Lothal, the Star Destroyer is dragged from the planet's vicinity by them, leaving both Thrawn's and Bridger's fates unknown.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: In a prerecorded video also presented at the July 2016 London "Star Wars" Celebration, Zahn announced that he was writing a new novel titled "", which was released by Del Rey Books in April 2017. According to Zahn, it was "very exciting" to write the character again, and he noted that "with this book I'll be visiting a part of his life that I never before had a chance to explore". Zahn later said, "I get to show how he's treated by his fellow officers and shipmates on his way up the military ladder, particularly when he's not in a command position over them."


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Although in "Legends" works Thrawn was mostly placed in post-"Return of the Jedi" storylines, "Thrawn" is set before the events of the original 1977 film. It covers several years between Thrawn's "first encounter" with the Empire and the events of the third season of "Rebels", chronicling his rise to power. In the novel, exiled Chiss warrior Thrawn is rescued by Imperial soldiers, and soon proves a valuable asset to the Empire. His cunning and expertise as a tactician soon attract the attention of Emperor Palpatine, though Thrawn's renegade tactics ignite the ire of his superiors. As he rises in rank, Thrawn trains his "aide-de-camp" Ensign Eli Vanto in the ways of war, and finds himself in an uneasy alliance with ruthless administrator Arihnda Pryce.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: A sequel to the novel, titled "", was released on July 24, 2018. This novel is set during the reign of the Empire. The main story line follows Grand Admiral Thrawn a "brilliant strategist" and the "ruthless enforcer" Darth Vader on a mission to investigate a threat to the Empire on a planet called Batuu, which resides at the edges of the Unknown Regions. This is the same planet that many years previously Thrawn, then an officer of the Chiss Ascendancy, crossed paths with General Anakin Skywalker, flashbacks to this encounter tells of their "uneasy alliance" while facing several dangers.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: At the 2019 New York Comic Con, a new trilogy from Timothy Zahn was announced, to be entitled "Thrawn: The Ascendency Trilogy", or simply the "Thrawn Ascendancy" trilogy, to launch with "Book I: Chaos Rising" in May 2020. After being delayed twice, the first novel was ultimately released on September 1, 2020. In the novel, it was revealed that Thrawn was born as Kivu'raw'nuru (core name Vurawn) before being adopted by the Mitth family, changing his name to Mitth'raw'nuru (core name Thrawn). The novel also covered more of Thrawn's backstory alongside other Chiss characters, such as Ar'alani, that also appeared in "", the previous novel by publication order.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Grand Admiral Thrawn is mentioned by Ahsoka Tano in "The Mandalorian" in episode "", as the master to the Magistrate of Corvus.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Thrawn is mentioned in the 2017 Chuck Wendig novel "" as the source of the information about the Unknown Regions which Palpatine uses in his Contingency plan. This plan results in the creation of the First Order.


title: Grand Admiral Thrawn

text: Thrawn appears as a playable character in the 2017 real-time strategy mobile game "", and was later introduced to "", a turn-based role-playing game, that summer, as both a special event boss and playable character. He is a bonus playable character in "", available in the "Star Wars Rebels" character pack sold as downloadable content