Robert Pence

A beautiful city in a great setting, with a handsome state capitol. Wonderful West Virginia -- there's a lot to love about that state. The scenery is magnificent, the state parks are gorgeous and impeccably cared for, and folks there are hospitable. Excellent aerial photo tour.

Great views! Were you allowed to carry your cell phone all the way into the courtroom? Cell phones and cameras aren't allowed inside the Allen County (Indiana) Courthouse, and likewise with the Federal Courthouse. I think the restriction on the Federal Courthouse, though, applies to all federal courthouses in the Northern District, maybe all of them anywhere.

Pretty amazing. It's wonderful that so much of the building's original detail has been preserved, and it looks like they keep it in excellent condition. Regarding the Levi Coffin plaque - The Coffins later settled in Newport (now Fountain City), Indiana, and helped great numbers of fugitive slaves as they traveled northward. The Levi Coffin House is a designated National Historic Site beside US 27 in East Central Indiana. The Coffins were Quakers, as were many anti-slavery activists, and there's still a significant Quaker presence in that part of Indiana.

There's some history on the diner here. The most popular menu item is Garbage.

There may yet be a use for all those SUVs. They might provide shelter for the folks who got in over their heads on their suburban McMansion mortages and got foreclosed. Except that their SUVs are probably being repo'd, too.

Me, neither. I'd much rather have pigs' knuckles & sauerkraut with dumplings.

I wonder how they qualified the question. I know a lot of people who wouldn't consider transit a viable alternative if they had to change their schedule by 10 minutes or walk more than a block at either end of their ride. They might consider it if it picked them up at their door on demand and delivered them directly to the front door of their workplace. Fort Wayne Public Transportation Corp (Citilink) will probably vote at this week's board meeting for major cuts to its already marginally adquate service, including reduced availability of its handicap access vans, and raise fares from $1 to $1.25. The system is facing a half-million dollar budget shortfall, partly because recent annexations expanded its service area and the state has reneged on promised funds to cover the addition. Yesterday I saw one local station at $4.09 for regular unleaded; it's the only station near the airport, and they probably count on gouging business travelers who top off their rental cars before returning them. Most stations were at $3.99

Those towns in the oil and gas fields must have been something in their hey-day. Like North Baltimore, there were several in Indiana in the area around Winchester and Dunkirk and up through Montpelier that had thriving glass industries, foundries, forges and rolling mills. The oil fields and associated industries brought with them a pretty rowdy bunch of laborers, and the towns, or at least certain sections of them, were often avoided by "respectable" folks. Montpelier, Indiana was notorious for its extraordinary number of saloons and prostitutes per capita. Long after the oil and gas played out, Montpelier retained its a reputation as a tough and nasty town. Now, it's just tired. In the early days people thought oil and gas were inexhaustible, and they used to light gas wells and let them burn just for the spectacle. On their promotional materials the Toledo St Louis and Kansas City (Clover Leaf) Railroad had illustrations of gas wells shooting plumes of fire into the sky.

Mansfield looks a lot nicer than I expected! Excellent photos. Aultman-Taylor was a pioneering maker of quality farm machinery and built steam traction engines for agriculture and then moved into big internal-combustion tractors. I believe they were bought out by Rumely Co. of La Porte, Indiana during the great depression. They were best known for their 30-60 tractors that were used a lot in road construction in the 1920s as well as in farming in the prairie states.

Some neat buildings! I love the City News sign.

Great photos and it looks like a fun day! The forumers from Columbus and Cincinnati should post some rail tours of their cities. ( :? ) For comparison, a few archive shots: Terminal Tower 1978, Airport-Windermere: Shaker Rapid: Approaching Shaker Square: Airport:

Highland Square, huh? I haven't used that one since it was plain, ratty-ass old W. 117th & Madison: My grand-nephew a year ago, when he was pushing three years old: He's a long-time fan of Thomas on TV. Last year we took him to Hesston where he saw and rode real steam trains. Later, when his mom and dad took him to a Thomas event at Whitewater Valley Railroad, he was not impressed. His reaction? "Fake!"

I've hit a new high -- or low, depending on how you look at it. In the past 24 hours I've gotten 72 spam emails offering male enhancement pharmaceuticals. I'm beginning to wonder who's been spreading malicious rumors! Funny thing is, almost half of them are in German. Maybe they have me mixed up with some overcompensating Neo-Nazi. :?

We visit the memorials year after year, place flowers on the graves, mourn the dead and commiserate with the maimed, listen to the speeches and take part in the parades and the marches and demonstrations demanding peace. The wars go on and probably will so long as humanity exists, just as they have since prehistoric times. One of the attributes that distinguish people from forest animals is the ability to organize the disputes over feeding and breeding territory, extending sources of contention to abstractions like religion and expanding conflict beyond one-on-one fights and family or tribal brawls to massive global wars that inflict all-consuming collateral damage reaching far beyond the sometimes-trivial incidents that triggered them and destroying the lives of people who had no stake in the original disputes. The propensity toward conflict seems to be an ancient hereditary trait among humans, manifesting itself more aggressively in some than in others but present at some level in all of us. I think wars won't ever cease so long as people are around to conduct them. Dreaming of world peace is a pleasant but futile fantasy, and we'd be better occupied if each individual were to direct his/her efforts toward living in harmony with the creation that surrounds us.

The program was Scripture for Americans. I can't remember the preacher's name, but I used to see it regularly in the SPLC's publications. ... During his broadcast he was plainly advocating violence to the point of murder against gays, even while saying that he wasn't ("I'm not telling you to do this, I'm just telling you what the Bible says.") ... Okay, then it's worse than Phelps. "Christian Identity" wouldn't just kill gays, it would kill "adulterers" and even kids who don't heed their parents. They're just plain nuts. ... It took a while to retrieve this one from the mental archives, but it surfaced early this morning in that hazy state between sleep and wakefulness. The preacher was Pastor Pete Peters. Google him and you'll find that he was one of the more dangerous among the far right because of his no-holds-barred extremism and his ability to use broadcast media to appeal to the nutjobs who feel a need to take revenge on society.

Looks like a fella oughta be able to buy the whole town pretty cheap. Kinda cute with some nice relics and bike path, but it looks like a lot of it is being allowed to fall apart.

Here are a couple of prominent memorials from Indianapolis. Fort Wayne has Memorial Coliseum, but I don't have any photos on line. Centerpiece of Indianapolis' Circle, the 1902, 285-foot Soldiers and Sailors Monument honors Indiana's heroes who died in wars before World War I. Considering what was to come in just a few years, it's ironic that the monument was designed by Bruno Schmitz, one of Germany's foremost of designers of monuments, and most of the sculptures and bronze work, mainly referencing the Civil War, were designed and executed there. From the observation deck at the top - In the center distance, the 1928 World War Memorial. People called it the Great World War and thought it had been a war to end all wars. Now, we call it World War I, remember World War II, and some believe World War III is inevitable. Pro Patria, designed by Henry Hering and installed in 1929, was the largest bronze sculpture cast in America up until that time.

It's sad that some communities have so little respect for their veterans and martyrs as to let their memorial buildings fall into disrepair and abandonment. On the other hand, some of those are magnificent. Here are some photos from Cleveland, lifted from a post on my web site:

Wympee is an icon from another era, and the Buick fits perfectly. Fort Wayne has Cindy's Diner, moved several years ago from a location farther east on the edge of downtown: Also there's Powers Hamburgers, next to the Federal Courthouse. It's a local that dates to the '40s, with tiny burgers fried with onions. I thought I had a photo uploaded to my site, but I can't find it now.

It's sobering to think how much money was spent on some of those entertainment establishments and how busy and exciting they once were, and then to see what's become of them. Good photos; you cover some interesting territory.

That's pretty exciting news. A steam locomotive is a wonderful machine that appeals to the primal in some of us, and it has to be experienced up close to be appreciated. Most of the tourist trains don't give the whole experience because they're running small engines with two or three cars at 5mph over rickety track. On the other hand, a big engine at 40mph with a trainload of sand is the real deal; you get the sharp, almost concussive exhaust and the rumble and vibration in the ground as the train passes. Add the mingled smells of coal smoke, steam and hot oil, and the experience pretty well saturates the senses. Steam locomotives were standard stuff when I was a little kid, and even into my teens some were still in use on branch lines and in switching industrial yards. The olfactory memory is still vivid, and any time I encounter those smells now, it all comes back. One doesn't encounter working steam locomotives very often any more, but the steam traction engines at the antique farm machinery shows do it for me, too. One of those Chinese locomotives operates on the Boone & Scenic Valley RR in Iowa, and there's one on another tourist road in Alberta, in the Calgary area, I think. The Chinese continued to build them until fairly recent years, and if I remember correctly, some of the ones that came to the U.S. were rebuilt in the Chinese railroad shops before being shipped and at least one may have been built new to order for an American buyer. For a long time, steam was best suited to some of China's demanding service in mountainous areas, and the Chinese accomplished the conversion to diesel with some of the most powerful diesel locomotives built until that time. Edit: R.J. Corman moves 350,000 tons of sand annually on that line, for asphalt and concrete road construction. All that sand formerly went on trucks on I-75. There's an excellent article on R.J. Corman's railroad enterprise in the June 2007 issue of Trains Magazine.

I didn't even know R.J. Corman was considering a steam locomotive; he's known as a very good, all-business, service-oriented short-line operator, and that breed often regards steam as an unnecessarily expensive diversion. Maybe he's seeing some PR value in it.

Florida Guy, amazing sky and gorgeous reflection! My contribution to gearheads and machinery geeks everywhere:

Maybe this was before I started lurking at UO, but I'm glad it got bumped. This is some delicious stuff!

Beautiful flowers, wonderful photos! I always thought there would be nothing that would appeal to me in Las Vegas, but apparently there is.