Sixty-two years ago, this past August, I packed a steamer trunk with a year’s worth of personal belongings and boarded a Union Pacific Railroad passenger train en route, through Chicago, Illinois, to Washington, D.C. Accepted to George Washington University, the first member of my family to attend college, and the son of a pipefitter/sheet metal worker in the Union Pacific’s Cheyenne rail yards, I was entitled to free use of a railroad pass to take me to university.

In the words of the late Steve Goodman’s country folk song, City of New Orleans, eight years later, like “the sons of Pullman porters, and the sons of engineers,” I was riding my “father’s magic carpets made of steel.” For five years, twice annually, I made the two-day round trip from the western edge of the Great Plains at the foot of the Rocky Mountains across two-thirds of the country to the nation’s Capital, which I entered through its magnificent Union Station.

THE WEST CELEBRATES THE END OF RACIAL GERRYMANDERING

The District of Columbia, established in 1791 as a congressionally designated federal territory to which the federal government moved from Philadelphia in 1800, was designed by Major Peter Charles L’Enfant, a Frenchman who met George Washington during the Revolutionary War. One hundred years later, the U.S. Senate Park Commission retained master American architect and planner Daniel Burnham to update L’Enfant’s design as befitting a world capital.

“Make no little plans,” Burnham said, “They have no magic to stir men’s........

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