Robert Pence

Interesting drives & photos.

In that era the Broadway Limited had a major derailment in the yards east of the depot in Fort Wayne. I didn't try to go and see it because the yards were heavily secured, and I heard that it wasn't possible to get within sight of the wreck because of parked freight cars.

Impressive! I marvel that such massive, complex structues were built with hand labor and animal power. Even the people for whom they were built lived lives that didn't have a lot of comfort by contemporary standards, but the people who labored to build them and tend them and serve the owners must have had exceedingly bleak existences.

Yes, I think Delco-Light systems were pricey. So far as I know, there was only one dealer in my home town who sold them, and he was a greedy skinflint whom Ebenezer Scrooge would have been proud to have had as a son. The generator sets came with a set of tools necessary to service them, all bundled up in a cloth bag. For years after the old guy died and the hardware store closed, the one-time loft apartment in the upstairs of his building was left unused and untouched. Some years ago the current owner of the building decided to renovate the space for his own residence, and in cleaning it out, they found dozens of those tool sets all piled in one of the rooms. The old guy had kept the tool sets and instruction manuals for all the systems he sold, so that his customers would have to call on him (and pay him) for maintenance and repair. When we moved to our farm in 1947 a few neighbors still didn't have electricity even though the lines ran down their roads, simply because they couldn't afford or weren't willing to pay for connection and service. All of those still used kerosene lamps for lighting and coal- or wood-burning stoves for heating and cooking and none had Delco-Light systems, for the same reason they weren't hooked up to commercial power; they were too poor or too cheap. The place where our family moved had been a prosperous operation, with the owner running a carpentry and construction business in addition to farming. He had made a bundle, too, selling walnut trees that were abundant on the property during WWI, when they were used to make military rifle stocks. Although the generator and batteries were long-gone when we moved there, the commercial electrification simply had been connected into the existing wiring. Houses with Delco-Light systems were wired to the same standards as city houses on commercial power, in order to facilitate future conversion. They used cloth-covered 10AWG wire and porcelain insulators, with either recessed push-button switches or surface-mounted twist-knob switches.

Neat trip! I like the way you worked in so many different transportation modes. Milwaukee's Amtrak station is vastly improved from when I was there in 2005, but I see they still haven't updated the abysmal, dank, leaky trainshed. If you want to see the photos from that trip, for a SSP forum meet, click here. I haven't visited Milwaukee in the dead of winter in more than 20 years, but the experience was memorable. I thought the icy wind would rip out my lungs. The family resemblance between you and your dad is strong. By the way, photos 49 & 50 are the same.

Doesn't look like many of that town's buildings amounted to much, anyway. From the way the dozer was blowing steam at one point, it looks like his cooling system may have been his Achilles' heel. I'll make it a point to remember that when I build me one o' them. I have a welder, but I'm gonna' need a bigger garage.

Some good historical freight footage here. An acquaintance posted this link to a professional film from 1974, produced as part of the effort to persuade Congress to invest capital in Penn Central. This film likely contributed to the formation of Conrail, which resulted in a a viable, profitable enterprise that ultimately was sold to CSX and NS. http://www.lubetkin.net/blog/2008/12/penn-central-1974-movie.html

"Schantz" sometimes became "Johns" in America. Joseph Schantz founded Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Another fascinating piece of research, Jeffrey. In the museum at Cass, WV, is a letter from one of the Wright Brothers, inquiring about the purchase of spruce lumber to be used in airplane construction. Nerd Stuff - My brother once picked up a workable Delco-Light generator at an auction, and we set it up in the workshop with some automobile batteries and wired up a couple of lights. Here's a diagram that I found at http://www.oldengine.org/, showing a Delco-Light farm lighting system. A single-cylinder air-cooled engine is direct-coupled to a 32-volt direct-current generator that charges a set of 16 series-connected 2-volt lead-acid battery cells. The batteries used replaceable separators and lead plates in glass jars with the top sealed in place with high-temperature wax or tar, and every town had at least one business that rebuilt lighting batteries. To start the generator, you prime it with gasoline or naptha and then pull up on a small lever attached to a relay. The generator draws power from the batteries and functions as a starting motor to spin the engine until it starts. Once started, the engine runs on kerosene from its fuel tank. Once the batteries reach full charge, if there is no other load on the system, the start/run relay de-energizes and shuts off the engine. Later models are able to sense a load or low batteries and start themselves. Some use small four-cylinder inline air-cooled engines. In the era when these systems were built, there were other makers like Western Electric who built competing systems. Usually they used different voltages (WE used 40 volts) to lock buyers into buying their line of appliances. There were refrigerators, washing machines, light bulbs, etc. that ran with these systems. The light bulbs fit a standard screw base; I still have some 30-volt GE bulbs squirrelled away somewhere.

Old cemetaries are fascinating. That one probably is beautiful in summer, but the bleakness of winter seems appropriate, too. Excellent photos.

LL Bean suites me just fine. Their stuff is nicely made, comfortable, and wears like iron. The price is right, too, considering that it'll outlast the cheaper stuff by a factor three or four to one.

If the involvement of bees is a problem for vegans, I wonder that they don't all starve. Many of the plants that people eat depend upon bees for pollination, and the pollination is an incidental result of the gathering of nectar for food that is stored by the bees as honey.

NKP 765 headed west on the former Wabash main line out of Fort Wayne, en route to Peoria IL for its first public excursions, between Peoria and Keokuk IA. The date is May 2, 1980.

Edited the first post in this thread to add a link to a beautiful video clip by the same photographer.

Jared's screen name cracks me up. 2Hot4You -- WTF?!! :laugh: :laugh: Miss Thing needs some man lessons! :roll: I've seen Louis' clip somewhere before. He really thinks he's looking for a woman? He's not only a classic nerd; he's a clueless big sissy! :-D

Lovely city, so much opportunity for improvement! I pass through there frequently on South Shore trains (which stop at the elevated platform across from the city hall), and I've been through there on Amtrak (which doesn't stop). I've often thought it might be interesting to explore but I've been a bit afraid. It doesn't look like there's anyone else around though.

Precious!

Interesting. I used to volunteer with steam locomotive NKP 765, and traveled with it a few times to locations where we ran excursions for sponsoring organizations. I recall staying in the railroad YMCA at Bellevue, Ohio. Clean and cheap describes it pretty well; the room, maybe 6 x 9, was more like a cell except that the door wasn't bars and wasn't locked from the outside. Cement floor with a small throw rug, walls of the vitreous glazed block shown in your photos, the bed was an institutional steel-framed model with a thin stuffed mattress atop a stretched sprung lattice, like a military bunk. There was a bare lightbulb suspended from a cord in the center of the room and a small window high on the end wall with a roller blind. Community showers were down the hall. The cafeteria was open 'round the clock and served filling, satisfying comfort food of the kind that sticks to your ribs and arteries. I ordered a beef manhattan, and got an open-faced roast beef sandwich on white bread and home fries, all smothered in an abundance of thick, brown gravy. The roast beef was tender and juicy, the potatoes had been fried in a more-than-adequate quantity of grease, and the gravy was tasty. I was ravenously hungry, and wolfed it down before going upstairs, taking a shower, and going to bed. About two hours later I awoke thinking my guts were about to explode. It took two hours of walking around outside in the chilly late-autumn night air to get the inner seismic aftershocks to subside. Your photos bring back fond memories!

A friend forwarded the NS Christmas e-card. Maybe it would appease the passengers who were held up by the frozen switch at Porter (NS territory?) before getting stranded on CSX at Holland. It is pretty cute: http://www.nscorp.com/nscorphtml/ecard/norfolk_southern_ecard.html

It's a fascinating place! I was waiting one Saturday morning when they unlocked the doors, and it seemed like I had barely gotten started when an announcement came over the PA that it was almost 5 p.m. and they were getting ready to close up. Only then did I realize that I had gone all day without sitting down to eat or take a break. They've grown, and I need to go back. Outstanding photography, too! Welcome to Urbanohio.co.

You're all welcome to add your own greetings to this thread. I don't have mailing addresses for all the Urbanohio folks, but I treasure most of you as much as the family and friends who received my cards in the mail. :wink: Here's the card I sent out this year: message back To see the 4.5mb large version of the photo, click here

That's good news. Ohio Central's restoration work is top-notch both in function and in appearance.

I have quite a few more of my own photographs to post after we get through the holiday humbug, and after I resolve some weather-related damage issues on my rental house. Here are a few of Nickel Plate Berkshire 2-8-4 locomotive 765 on display August 19, 2007 at the Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society's facility. NKP 765 was built by Lima Locomotive Works, Lima, Ohio, in 1944:

... and the many cars and locomotives already in existence that could help alleviate the equipment shortages if the money were available to make needed repairs. Regarding the delayed Chicago-Grand Rapids train, it's only about 25 miles from Holland where the train was halted to Grand Rapids, the destination of the passengers on board. If the roads were at all passable and buses could be chartered, that's what should have been done. Of course, I still call for a public flogging for CSX officials who refused local law enforcement access to the passengers in the yard at Holland. Twice I was on trains from San Francisco to Chicago that were delayed 14 hours. One occasion was in 1978, because of a detour via the Rio Grande to get past a freight derailment at on the UP at Green River, Wyoming. The other was in 1984 because of a series of weather-related problems from a blizzard that had swept the western plains. On both occasions Amtrak provided complimentary meals after the time the train should have arrived, and put connecting passengers up in a good hotel in Chicago and provided vouchers for cab fare to and from the hotel and meals until the next day's eastbound trains. The outdoor temperature during my 1984 layover never rose above minus 8; that slowed but didn't stop my sightseeing and taking photos. The delays are often very rough on the on-board service crews (car attendants, dining car workers, bartenders, etc.). They have to work additional hours on top of an already-demanding schedule, and if they're working on a same-train turnaround, they get little or no time to rest before they start it all over again. On the 1984 trip I talked with the attendant in my sleeper. He said they were allowed four hours sleep out of every 24 hours on the road, and those were never four consecutive hours because of late-night detrainings and boardings. The train was very late arriving in Oakland from Chicago, and he had worked sixty hours with fewer than 8 hours' sleep, and they got 4 hours to go to a hotel, shower, change clothes, and "rest" while the train was turned and prepared for the return trip to Chicago, which subsequently ran 14 hours behind schedule. Some passengers couldn't understand why some of the car attendants were a little snippy with their bratty kids. Had I been in their situation, I might have chucked the little bastards out a vestibule door while nobody was looking.

:laugh: :laugh: Craigslist twink! :roll: :laugh: :laugh: Anybody who's really gorgeous/sexy doesn't have to advertise in that smutpit full of disgusting trolls!