Robert Pence

Near Fannettsburg, Pennsylvania (PA 533 & PA 75, south of Turnpike exit 189)

Heavy industry built a lot of the cities in that part of the U.S. 1500-horsepower engines powering gas compressors on a pipeline. Installed in 1937, these engines were capable of running as long as 10 years continuously without shutdown. There were five of these in this building.

Not my job, hon. :-(

I'll second that!

Lancaster's town square, Penn Square is the focus of downtown activity. The Central Market and historical museum, are located right on the square, and a new MarriottConvention Center is under construction there, incorporating an existing historic, ornate building.

Thanks for the threads, KJP. I recall driving along the Ohio River through the Youngstown - Steubenville area around 1963 and seeing an almost endless procession of ore trains on the tracks that are, for the most part, no longer there. Here are three from last week's visit to Youngstown. I'll have a bunch more when I get home where it's much easier to work with them. There were photo murals and reproductions of old movie posters and other expressions of optimism posted on this old theatre, but on the second level a fire door had been kicked in from the fire escape so long ago that the unrepaired damaged was rusty and decaying. A sculpture outside the Historical Center for Industry and Labor. If you haven't visited this, I recommend it strongly. It's walkable distance from the Butler Museum, and overlooks downtown.

P&LE Yard, Struthers, circa 1986. Nothin' goin' on; not a single train arrived, departed or passed through overnight. Headed to Ashtabula, meeting a southbound train of ore jennies.

OK. I'll deal with that sh!t tomorrow. Now that I got it off my chest, here's today's photo, taken between raindrops in Strasburg. There's nothing wrong with Strasburg except the kitsch tourists, and that's a large part of what has trashed this entire area since I used to hang out here sometimes on weekends in the mid-sixties. Here's a stone house built in 1754, one of many in the area that date to the 18th century: Sorry 'bout the cables. I forgot my bolt cutters this trip.

I may be cutting the whole trip short tomorrow and going home with the photos I have (nearly 800, anyway, with a lot of dups and culls). I'm up to here with the traffic and this sh!thole of a motel. I don't think I've ever had a really bad Super 8 before, but this filthy, run-down pig is one for the books. The building's lack of security made me nervous from the start, and last night I neglected to lock my car for about an hour in the motel parking lot and somebody went through it and stole stuff that's absolutely meaningless to anybody but me - an old straw farmer's hat that I wear when I'm out in the sun for a long time, and my maps, gazetteers and itinerary and a large amount of genealogical material that I was going to follow up on tomorrow and that I don't know if I'll ever be able to replicate or replace. I know it ws my fault for failing to lock up. I love the area around here, and almost everybody I meet is nice until they get behind a steering wheel, and the town of Lancaster Rocks! Lancaster Rocks! Let's hear it again! Lancaster Rocks! Love the historic buildings and neighborhoods! Laaan - caaas - ter Rooocks! :clap: :clap: Edit: After spending a few hours walking downtown Lancaster, I'm changing my jeer to a cheer. It's a gorgeous historic downtown with a lot of wonderful buildings and a few utilitarian dogs. I took photos of the immediate downtown, and it will take a while to sort them out. After getting smacked upside the head again for dilly-dallying, I decided that it really is time to call and end to this fiasco and head home. I'll be stopping only for sleep, gas, food & coffee. I'm at the Hampton in Gettysburg tonight, twice the price I'm used to paying. No more sh!thole motels for me.

Gotta get up to Cass, W.Va.! That shot's from East Broad Top, at Orbisonia, Pennsylvania, an intact narrow-gauge operation from the coal-mining days, complete with shops and roundhouse. Rockhill Trolley Museum is next door and shares some facilities. In case you're still jonesin' for some Cass, I got some here. Today's photo from the road is from Gettysburg National Military Park. The temperature was pushing 90 degrees, so my coverage was more exhausting than exhaustive. After three or four consecutive days of intense sun and excessive heat, I'm actually looking forward to the rain that's in tomorrow's forecast. I have a rain sleeve for my camera, so a little precipitation won't stop the photos.

How long has it been since Youngstown had Amtrak service? I photographed this sign there last week. The sign designating Amtrak parking is still on the fence along part of the parking lot at the B&O station, and the wooden stairway to trackside is dangerously deteriorated and not blocked off.

Out of sequence, here's yesterday's photo from the road: Cambria County (PA) Courthouse, Ebensburg.

Today's photo from the road: Railroad, that is.

The very political correctness that Rob Anderson denounces is all that protects wingnuts like him from being summarily ejected from public hearings and denounced by public officials as raving lunatics.

I saw a red moon just a night or two ago, but it wasn't full like that. A photo from Thursday 8/21 What's a Jolly Bar? Is it anything like a gay bar, only with more laughter and less heavy cruising?

Shot from another den of iniquity, the steps of the Indiana State Capitol. I hung around for a while hoping to get early photos of the rapture in action that I could sell to Satan's minions in the Liberal Press, but eventually I got bored and went in search of some sin to indulge in.

Let that be a lesson to you! I'll bet you never burned your tongue on a Burning River Pale Ale!

True about the South Shore. Most trains are standing-room-only on the western end of the line, even off-peak. They're popular because they offer frequent, on-time service, even though the on-board amenities are spartan. In the late seventies the service nearly was discontinued, but a general public uprising saved it, made it a public agency and ever since, has spurred continuous investment to maintain and upgrade the equipment and infrastructure.

Probably it's increased ridership. The weight of passengers is almost insignificant compared with the weight of cars and locomotives, so if you add, say, 25 passengers to a train that was averaging 250 passengers on each run, you're most likely doing it without having to add a car and you hardly increase energy consumption at all but you increase the passenger-miles per btu significantly. The same concept applies to any form of transit, but especially to rail; if the system is operating below capacity, increased utilization increases efficiency when measured on a per-capita basis. When you have to add capacity in the form of new cars and perhaps additional employees to operate or attend to them, the calculation changes. When you have to add infrastructure (new routes, double-track a formerly single-tracked route, add substation capacity for electrified systems), the calculation changes again. It's all in identifying fixed vs. variable costs and the effect that ridership has on each of those. The notion of saving money on urban mass transit by cutting service to offset increased fuel costs assumes that the same people will just wait longer and ride the reduced number of buses, increasing per-capita efficiency, but it seldom works out that way. More often, ridership declines sharply and revenues decline more than costs.

Nice! Philadelphia is a photogenic city. I'm headed for Pennsylvania later this week and hope to make a day-trip into Center City during my visit. Mostly I'll be in the Lancaster area, I think, and there's frequent Amtrak service that only takes about an hour. Looking at some of my archives, I just realized that I haven't been there since 1991. It's time for a refresher.

If only Cincinnati still had at least some of its inclines. It seems to me they would be a blessing to bicycle commuters.

Neat photo. That's some sort of excursion or celebrity train, judging by the crowd and the consist of Amtrak Amfleet cars with what probably are private cars on the rear end. Penn Central discontinued passenger service there in 1969, Amtrak didn't exist before 1971 and the Amfleet cars went into service about 1976. Incidentally, I've never particularly cared for the Amfleet cars. They were designed to emulate the look and feel of airline travel, and they felt cramped with low overhead baggage racks and small windows, some of the very things that passenger trains don't need, and that make them more comfortable than airplanes. At least they had decent legroom.

Quite a contrast between those two photos. It looks like the railyard is now defunct. In the sixties, my Air Force buddy's entire family worked there, as did a large portion of Renovo's population.

Pretty cute, looks affluent. What's up with the mix-and-match angle parking? Some are backed in, and some are nosed in.

That's wishful thinking.