Americans love trains, and so does The Takeaway! So we’re telling the stories of how trains built America. Today, we go inside the trains and explore the experiences of passengers riding the rails in the 20th and 21st centuries.

We hear how trains were sites of civil rights struggles long before the 1960s, with Miriam Thaggert, associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo and author of "Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad."

And we speak with Jarred Johnson, executive director of Transit Matters in Boston, about how the struggle to ensure that trains are engines of freedom for all Americans continues to the present day throughout the country's public transit systems. 

Check out the first episode in this mini-series, "How How Trains Built America's Labor Movement."