Rusty Shackleford

TGIFriday's has always meant exactly three things to me: hot, greasy sandwiches, hot, greasy potato skins, and hot, greasy french fries. Now you can get almost all of that at Penn Station. :)

The way I saw it, from direct inspection... The "bridge" being formed by this work started life as a berm on which the US 35 lanes sat. IE, there was no bridge before. The box culverts that form the tunnels are as tall as the surface of the road. There's no way I can see that you could simply slide the culvert "under" the lanes without collapsing them. So each side the of the freeway had to be excavated and rebuilt. You can see this in the photos I posted.

Here's apparently the definitive word on this subject of completion date: http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/bike-trail-tunnel-under-us-35-to-be-complete-in-sp/nSBp5/

http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/local/crews-raid-dayton-house-for-meth/nSHrr/ http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/local/meth-lab-discovery-leads-to-drug-indictment/nRLbr/ I have it on some eyewitness authority that there is a known drug scene (dealing) that takes place in some houses on Wilmington Avenue just south of Bellaire Avenue. Can anyone currently familiar with Dayton at a street level put these events in context, if possible?

http://thelaughingnoodle.com/ What a WEIRD! WEIRD! WEIRD! juxtaposition. Sort of like if Long John Silver's unveiled a new sushi lineup. Their marketing people must be on crack. I suppose all of the noodle based food will be trucked in and re-heated. I don't guess that the skill level at the average White Castle is high enough to make the experience anything like Noodles and Co.

All it needs now is some apes on horseback riding around and Charleton Heston in a loin cloth pounding the ground and cursing.

Your comments about the robustness of large towns vs. small ones in Ohio are extremely insightful. You named N. Ohio towns but we see exactly the same rot in Springfield and Middletown in the southern part of the state, and rampant drug problems in areas like Kenton. As far as the eastern smaller sized cities, I agree completely. Even in small PA or NY towns you see normal people (not just kids) out walking, you see specialty retailers, and you see signs of uniqueness and life. Similar scenes in small town Ohio are almost impossible to find. You usually see Quick Check Cashing places, Rite-Aids, and terrible fast food franchises - and deadness, no sign of life, nobody on foot unless it's someone pushing a shopping cart filled with bottles. I wonder if there is simply a much stronger "sense of place" in the east than in Ohio due to later industrialization, as well as closer access to areas of high employment with eastern big cities? Ohio 50 to 100 years ago was a boom state with natural resources and manufacturing, and attracted waves of immigrants from Europe and the southern US and Appalachia. I'm guessing that the roots in most medium sized Ohio cities simply don't run that deep and so everyone here finds them very easy to abandon. I know that on a personal level. I'm from Dayton and most people I grew up around in the 70s talked like they'd leave Dayton ASAP like rats leaving a sinking ship. Specific examples - it's VERY hard to see why *anyone* would be sentimental about staying around a city like Middletown or Springfield. They have become high-unemployment high underclass ****holes with little visible history. And the smaller towns in Ohio, esp. Appalachia, are poverty and meth infested. The eastern small cities probably already went through that cycle 40-50 already, years ago, and now are desirable exburban destinations from NYC, Boston, Philly. The problem Ohio small cities have is that they are not anchored by nearby cities of the size and "depth" of a Boston or Philly. Lastly, there is a shared contempt among natives of some parts of Ohio for the state and area itself. Cincinnati actually has always confused me because natives there are so pro-their area. I'm not used to that. I'm used to the attitude that I grew up around in Dayton, that you leave and let the place rot when it no longer suits you and you have the opportunity to do so. Thus the meme around hillbilly Dayton of "moving down south where people are real and it's real country." Bet that's kind of common across most small town Ohio.

I love NY . Great photo essay, Robert.

There was no suggestion box at the site. :-) "Bridge" may be a misnomer. With the box culvert thingies in place both rebuilt sides of the expressway will effectively be bridges of sorts. They started life, though, as roadways on top of solid berms. IE, when the bypass was first constructed, they just cut off the old railroad R.O.W. So my description of the original structure wasn't correct. I didn't see the first section (the eastbound lanes) get laid, and I had assumed, probably incorrectly, that they tunneled under the freeway. What they are now doing is more like "cut and cover", if I have the nomenclature correct. One other thing - this new construction (wb lanes cut off) is new, since August 12. When I was down on the trail then, I looked through the one culvert to a solid hillside which was the berm for the wb lanes. Hopefully, the trail will be built under the freeway during the remaining "riding weather" this fall.

Small update (and excuse this, please, if your reaction is "duh! about time you noticed!" :) ) Driving by the site on Rt 35 today I noticed that the bridge for the westbound lanes is now removed. They've got the west bound traffic diverted with barriers to the eastbound lanes, each direction of travel temporarily being single lane. Apparently the rest of the tunnel will go in very soon so that they can rebuild the freeway bridge. This is the first time I've seen construction this extensive for a "mere" bike trail. I've never seen a freeway bridge being rebuilt around here just for a bike trail.

Ah hah. Yes, I remember driving through a (seemingly) 50 mile long construction zone on 71 back in 2007 and 2008. Great info, thanks. It does seem, though, that a continuous tunnel that long and that low would be quite dark. Example, the rail tunnels along the North Bend trail in WV that are > 300 feet long don't seem to be safe to ride without a light. We started to go into one (#12), which is about 500 feet long, and on a cloudy day it's quite dark in the middle. And those are 30 ft high tunnels. Safety for cyclists would seem to be an issue here. Assuming that the connector trail ever gets built.

Huh, no kidding! But Sherman said it was filled in. I see that the photos are dated from 2005.

I ran across this utility when I was looking for a way to modify the date stamp of a bunch of images that I took with an erroneous setting of the month part of the date. (I messed up the camera's time setting.) http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php It's *free*. The company that distributes it has a PC backup program that is their real money maker. Here is a screen shot from the web site. It gives you the idea. For example, you can replace like named strings in file names with a different string, or you can institute your own numbering pattern of a group of files.

Up until perhaps 2009 (I think) the Jamestown trail ended dead at Jasper Road, and the right of way across the road was in brush. Since that time, the paved trail has been incrementally built out from Jasper to Hoop Rd., then Bickett Rd., and most recently it was extended to the side of US 35 maybe in spring of last year. Considering how little mileage was involved, the pace has seemed glacial - much slower than when the Little Miami bikeway was extended north of Morrow in the mid 90s, which involved many more miles of trail. Sherman, as far as I know there is no paved trail planned out there around Octa, OH. You'd be talking about a connection from Washington Courthouse to the existing trail which ends just east of Rosemoor Road at the Fayette line. Is there current work on such an extension?

I recently took a ride on the Xenia-Jamestown Connector Trail. I usually start from Frank Seaman park (a little league and tennis park in back of Jamestown's high school) and I ride west to the paved trail terminus outside Xenia. During a ride Sunday, August 12, I finally saw the long-anticipated tunnel being built under the US 35 bypass. This is the area of construction on the freeway just east of the US 68/Home Ave. exit. I say it was 1/2 done because a tunnel spanning one of the two lanes (the eastbound side of the road) has been completed. Hopefully this thing will get completed this fall. Here's the photos, from trail level. Cell Phone panoramic shot: This is kind of a moderately big deal for local cyclists because it opens Xenia up in a completely new direction of travel, on a paved bike trail. With this trail completely open with no on-street sections, you can ride from Xenia to within 2 miles of the Jeffersonville Outlets (not that I plan to incorporate this fact into my shopping expeditions. :-P) The trail currently ends eastward, at the Fayette County line. Hopefully, it will one day connect to the trail network that connects Washington CH and Chillicothe. I will soon be posting a photo thread on sights along the Xenia-Jamestown trail.

"Drinky bird." Love it! :-) Yes, that's the style we saw in WV. One side seems to be a counterweight with a variable number of lead or steel weights, and the other side of the see-saw is the piston end (apparently.)

Loretto and Eighth and State, thanks for the details and background information. Ok, so this is low budget entrepreneurship at work. I did see one such well actually running, in someone's front yard. The gas engine operated a drive belt that went to another part of the well mechanism. It just looks so industrial to see this stuff out in the middle of nowhere. And I would have thought that economies of scale would drive them out of operation. Since oil is now $90/barrel, it makes sense to see them running.

We recently came back from a trip to ride the North Bend Rail Trail in West Virginia. (That will be the subject of a photo thread.) I have this question, and I can't seem to find another section that is a natural fit for it: What are the economics of all of these small oil and gas wells that you see around areas in Southeastern Ohio and western West Virginia? I kept running into small oil wells that seem to still be in operation - usually there's a gasoline engine (about the size and appearance of a lawnmower engine) that is powering the pumping (I suppose), and an oil tank of about 10-15' diameter standing next to it to receive the oil. Sometimes they stand by themselves on a plot along the road, and sometimes they seem to be sitting in someone's back yard or small farm. I am curious about stuff like: Who typically owns the well equipment itself? Is the land leased or owned? What are typical lease payments, if leased? What were the economics of constructing and placing these wells in the first place? I assume that the one big expense is drilling. What sort of periodic volume of oil do such wells produce? What are we talking per week, month, year? What kind of revenue does such a well produce? It just seems incredibly anachronistic to see this stuff in 2012. But they're out there.

^ Er, "Breaking Away"?

1952. Here's the overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_%28novel%29 I didn't mention "City" as any kind of playbook of the current state of urban sprawl. It's a work of fiction that was written far in advance of modern problems. The deurbanization that the novel portrayed was supposed to occur over a few hundred years due to technological progress in power generation and food supply. We really don't have a pattern of diaspora in real life like the novel describes. And the novel (like most classic SF) was socialistic in that it ignored the profit motive completely, and didn't anticipate that humans would want to stay socialized tightly for the purpose of commerce. IE: we're always gonna have cities as commercial and finance hubs. Just not a variety of sizes and flavors based upon manufacturing diversity as we had 50+ years ago. IE, we will always have Chicagos and Torontos and New Yorks. We will see "Daytons" - cities that lack some core, strategic regional knack that stays renewed over decades - dying off like flies. Unless the economics of manufacturing change in favor of decentralized production.

Wow! A country festival in the city core. How surreal. I love your photo essays. This one is short and simple but it's so out of left field. Yep, Dayton sure is an October kind of city. That wording evokes "The October Country" by Ray Bradbury.

My impression of Oinkadoodlemoo is that it's a cut-down City BBQ. They don't have beer, they didn't have table sauces when I was there last summer (you have to ask at the counter), the value for what you get is (IMO) much less than what City BBQ offers, and the variety of meats and sides are both less than City. Their food that matches City BBQ is comparable in quality and flavor, which is why I compare the two. I just enjoyed the experience of eating at City BBQ much more than Oinka... Oinkadoodlemoo is too antiseptic to be accepted widely as a legit BBQ place. I think Oinka has a long way to go to expand regionally and stay stable. They're too expensive and selections are too limited. I have always enjoyed the branding on Cold Beer and Cheeseburgers' logo - very "R. Crumb" in style with the hamburger and beer bottle characters. Went there a while back and it seemed like just another boring Fricker's type fried food and beer place.

It's as useless as Middletown's endlessly looping major thoroughfares - IE, just for fun, try driving SR 122 through Middletown from west to east. Ramps, loops, turns ad nauseum. It's a straight through state highway through a nothing city and Middletown managed to engineer a "spaghetti bowl" out of it. I think there is a large amount of pure municipal ego at work in such decisions. "Everyone will respect Middletown and will think we're awesome if it's a complete pain in the ass for through traffic to navigate our city." Sorry for the thread drift but that is another local example of useless traffic over engineering. I wonder what that continuous flow intersection will be like when the traffic lights go out due to a storm. Lulz.

One tiny and unimportant correction: this site has been around for at least five-seven years. It retooled with a new look within the last few months. (Looked like they went from a hand coded or FrontPage coded site to Drupal.) It looks much nicer than it used to. This site has always been a great resource for bicycling in the Miami Valley.

Wow! That's a a great point. The meme "bad cyclists making the rest of us look bad" has been around since the 1970s and the first rumblings of a "cycling movement". It seems to imply that all cyclists will be paid back by motorists due to a few bad riders. You're right, motorists don't start profiling cyclists because they see a few cyclists running red lights. They just don't give a s---. Is cycling a movement? It's certainly not like Occupy Wall Street. Unless you're right in a city that has cycling activists, you aren't aware that anything in particular is going on. There's an element of pomposity in making it seem more than it is. (Maybe related to the being held to a higher standard meme.) IE, maybe the message here is: stop worrying what people who aren't practicing your hobby think and do what you want to do. About the boring nature of cycling trails (rail trails): the main problem with rail trails is lack of services and access to points of interest. Rail trails are usually separated from stuff that you'd like to travel to or from. IE, there's no way to do your shopping using most separated bike paths.