An interesting piece in Stamford’s The Advocate begins:
NEW YORK – Grand Central Terminal provides visitors with frequent train service, dining and shopping options, and to some, the meaning of life.
Some Metro-North Railroad employees say one of mankind’s greatest achievements lies in New York City’s deepest basement – a rotary power converter that once provided electricity to the entire railroad and to the historic train terminal.
Recently, nine Grand Central visitors got to see the converter close up to compare it with its literary equivalent – John Galt’s motor in novelist Ayn Rand’s 1957 magnum opus “Atlas Shrugged.”
To celebrate the book’s 50th anniversary, the visitors, who dubbed themselves “Friends of Atlas Shrugged,” a subgroup of the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif., went to Grand Central for an exclusive tour in hopes of seeing some of the philosophical and technological inspirations for the novel.
“I have never been down in the bowels of a train station before,” said Jean Binswanger of New York, one of the terminal’s visitors, who included former Ayn Rand Institute board Chairman Peter Schwartz, a Danbury resident. “I think this is a fitting way to celebrate the anniversary.”
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