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By Chris Kaltenbach

Americans have been whooshing from place to place for more than a century, in ever- increasing numbers and at ever- increasing speeds. Beginning today, those who whoosh their way to Washington's Smithsonian Institution can see just where they've been going, how they've been getting there and why any of that makes any difference.

Step inside the National Museum of American History, and visitors will find themselves strolling down a genuine piece of blacktop from the fabled Route 66, "riding" a car on Chicago's elevated line in December 1959, listening in as a traveler tries to rent a tourist cabin at a Laurel-area motor court in the 1930s or experiencing the tumult surrounding the New York City docks in the 1920s.

America on the Move, at 26,000 square feet the largest exhibit ever mounted by the Smithsonian, opens at noon today at the NMAH, 14th Street and Constitution Avenue. Its 300-plus artifacts, everything from a train engine to a driver's license, do more than simply chronicle the evolution of American transportation. They explain how all that movement has shaped this nation's history, affected its people and necessitated changes both good and bad.

"Mobility is a defining experience in American life," NMAH director Brent D. Glass said during a preview of the exhibit earlier this week, as visitors wove their way through a reconfigured museum wing (until recently, it housed the Smithsonian's Road & Rails Hall) broken into 19 components. Each is set in a specific place at a specific time, beginning with Santa Cruz, Calif., in 1876 and ending with Los Angeles in 1999, and displays artifacts and text that follow the development of ground-level transportation from the coming of the railroad to the information superhighway.

The exhibit "shows how much transportation has sculpted our lives over the last century," said U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta. Initial funding of America on the Move included a $3 million congressional appropriation administered through the Department of Transportation.

Arranged chronologically, the exhibit opens with the arrival of the railroad in Santa Cruz in 1876. At its center is the Philadelphia-built steam engine Jupiter, glistening in its new home (an improvement, no doubt, over its former life as part of a D.C.-area playground).

The Jupiter and its story - it operated on 15 miles of track laid by the Santa Cruz Railroad - is typical of what happened in towns throughout the United States at the time, as civic leaders, anxious to avail themselves of the riches that inevitably accompanied the arrival of the iron horse, raised whatever money was necessary and moved whatever earth needed to be moved to make that happen. Here, they envisioned the railroad helping Santa Cruz challenge San Francisco for commercial dominance; that never happened, but the railroad, which connected with the far-larger Union Pacific, did prove vital to farmers trying to move their crops.