Robert Pence

I think the PRR intended to electrify the whole mainline, but the great depression stalled the plan and then I think WWII killed it. Electrification surely would have given them a big boost in the mountains of Pennsylvania. West of Pittsburgh they ran some steam locomotives that had a pretty long stride. A local old-timer who ran T-1 duplexes on the Broadway said they could make 120mph on the long, flat, straight stretches between Crestline and Fort Wayne and regularly cracked 100 between Fort Wayne and Chicago.

Beautiful shots! It was a perfect evening for light & clouds, if a bit chilly and windy. At times the sky was dramatic. It'll take me a few days to work through my stuff and make a post. I spent Friday night with friends in Cleveland, had a leisurely breakfast and socializing time, and then made a pilgrimage to the West Side Market, an essential part of every Cleveland visit for me, before hitting the road. I didn't get home until 4:30 this afternoon. I've been tinkering with the pics, but after the 4 1/2 hour drive I'm seriously in need of an early bedtime.

Nice job. Those storage sheds are a good value, and they turn out really well when you take the time to properly prepare a site and use good workmanship in setting them up.

Me, too! :wave:

Excellent skyline view.

A few years ago I found a site with extensive photos of the dismantling of a Tod engine. I can't tell if this is the same engine, but it looks like it may be a different one. It's hard to comprehend the massiveness of one of these things without seeing one, but the photo with the guy standing on it gives a pretty good idea. They drove rolling mills directly, running at low speed and producing enormous torque, and were equipped with Corliss valves, rotary valves that enabled precise speed control and maximum efficiency in use of steam. It's hard to imagine the size of the casting equipment and machine tools that were used to build them. </ :speech: > ( :oops: )

Yeah, they do roll up the sidewalks at sundown and turn out the lights soon afterward, but Nebraskans are among the friendliest and most hospitable folks I've met on any of my travels. I enjoyed visiting there several years ago, and I wouldn't mind going back.

The courthouse is spectacular, and its tower is wonderfully ornate. The copper roof must be new; it hasn't started to weather at all. Looks like a very pleasant, well-kept town.

Ahh, but properly worn by a deserving cyclist, the sight has few equals in splendor. On long group rides, to keep myself motivated I used to pick out a nice view to follow, and work to keep it in sight! :-D

When archaeologists in the distant future discover that thing, they'll think that the civilization that built it worshiped automobiles, and textbooks will refer to ours as the "Car Culture." Imagine that! :|

Pleasant looking neighborhoods. The entrance on the Wilson Middle School is wonderful!

Good stuff! Rapid City looks interesting, but Pierre doesn't look like much of anything in the aerials, especially for a state capital. The Badlands photos are startling. That looks like a terribly forbidding place.

We had a Tennessee Walking Horse who was a biter. He and I were pretty good pals, but he didn't like my dad or my cousin. Neither one dared turn his back on him; he'd bite them hard right on top of the shoulder, and it made a nasty bruise. I'm the skinny kid standing on the left. I was about 16 or 17 when this photo was taken.

Great tour! I've heard of Pendleton, and went through Klamath Falls on a train, but never seen them at street level. They both look like interesting places. The aerial shots are stunning. They bring back memories of a flight from Portland to Chicago about ten years ago, some of the most memorable sights I've seen from a plane.

Neat shots!

I remember driving through that area in the mid-1960s and being amazed at the constant parade of ore trains that seemed to be moving on every rail line I saw. In 2000 I made an involuntary 3-day visit to Youngstown (truck transmission broke on I-80, and I spent three days at the Super 8 waiting for parts & repairs). I took a cab downtown to the Industry & Labor museum, and then walked around a little bit. It was mid-day on a weekday and I literally saw no other pedestrians and few cars. The same cabby picked me up downtown to take me back to the motel, a black man, and he was concerned about where I'd been. He asked if I had any idea how risky it was to be down there walking around alone. That was when they had the pedestrian mall, and it was deserted and tired-looking.

Looks like fun! I'll bet the food made the whole place smell good.

New Harmony is also a functioning town with an attractive historic business district and private homes. There's a great gallery/museum with historic paintings of the settlement. My trip was before my approach to photography was transformed by going digital and by hanging out on forums, and back then a consideration was that every time I pressed the shutter release it cost about a quarter. I may have to revisit some of these places. A lot of the settlement of this area came via the Ohio River and its tributaries, and it seems like there's history around every corner and in every crossroads village down there, from the American Revolution and the Northwest Territory on up through Indiana Statehood, the Civil War and into more recent times.

Spring Mill is one of my favorite places. The mill was restored from a ruin in the 1930s by the state; they searched downstream to find enough pieces of the water wheel to determine how it was built. The spring that feeds the mill flume is a remarkable sight in spring and early summer when its flow is at peak. There's an opening about three or four feet across in a rock face, and it gushes water like a culvert pipe after a storm. There are flooded caves in the park, too, with boat tours in one of them. Southern Indiana woodlands have a unique aroma, very different from the woods in the northern part of the state where I live, probably because of different types of vegetation, soil and soil organisms. I first noticed it in the 1960s when I spent time at Indiana University and made weekend drives into the surrounding countryside. It's very rich and pleasing, and whenever I return the smell of the woods takes me back to those days. Despite the growth of tourism around Nashville (IN), it's still fairly easy to find places where you're out of sight and hearing from the commotion and immersed in surroundings that probably look and feel very much as they did in the nineteenth century.

Youngstown's steel industry was its economic backbone, and the whole thing collapsed rather abruptly. I believe I read somewhere that more than 27,000 highly-paid jobs disappeared in less than four years. This building, designed by Michael Graves, is the Historical Center of Labor and Industry. It tells the story of the area's steel and coal-mining and other industries very powerfully, and is well worth a visit when you're in the area:

Great avatar, Noozer! The GG-1 locomotive was more remarkable for its day than anything now running in the U.S. It was developed in the 1930s and styled by Raymond Loewy, and its implementation by the Pennsylvania Railroad was part of the road's extensive East-Coast electrification to increase commuter capacity by giving trains faster acceleration when leaving stations, in order to allow more trains on shorter headways. The locomotives were splendid in the original Loewy scheme of dark green with gold stripes: (from http://www.spikesys.com/Bin/GG1/Paint/) If I recall correctly, in a 1930s test a GG-1 officially was clocked at around 135mph and still accelerating perceptibly when the engineer had to cut back because he was approaching the end of the segment of track that had been specially groomed for the test. No one ever found out how fast one could actually run on perfect track, because even regular good passenger track wasn't adequate to turn one loose and let it run. I think a GG-1's peak horsepower output was somewhere above 4,000. Its maximum speed was probably only limited by the rpm at which centrifugal force would have blown the windings out of the traction-motor armatures. The first thing to come along with higher performance specs in the U.S. was the E-60 in the early Amtrak era, and it had to be restricted to lower speeds because of suspension resonance problems inherent in its truck design that apparently couldn't economically be corrected. After a couple of derailments, one of which, at 104mph, took down a bunch of catenary and shut down a large segment of the Northeast Corridor, they were speed-restricted to around 100mph, and I think eventually most of them were sold and regeared for freight service. I did see one on the west end of a Keystone Service train at Lancaster around 1991. I recall seeing GG-1s pulling passenger trains at blistering speeds on the stretch along US 30 in the area around Lancaster and Strasburg in the sixties. Pretty dramatic. Two looking nasty in weathered Penn Central black, finishing their run on the westbound Broadway Limited at Harrisburg in 1979. Note the paint literally blasted off the leading surfaces, something you almost never see on most diesels, no matter how carelessly they're maintained:

Great event; I love the stickers on the pickup truck! That plaza is such a wonderful public space, and when I've visited Dayton it seems there's often something going on, or just people hanging out.

Great shots! The towpath trail is wonderful; I've biked part of it. I was amazed at the crowds that gather in Peninsula on summer weekends.

In September 2002 I set out on a road trip. My plan was to fairly-well cover the southern half of Indiana, but there's so much more to see than I anticipated that I barely saw the southwestern quadrant; even then, I skipped several places I would have liked to have visited. A communitarian German religious sect, the Rappites, under the leadership of George Rapp, established a settlement first called Harmonie along the Wabash River in Posey County about 1815. They were industrious, producing silk, lumber, woolens, bricks and wine, which were traded as far away as New Orleans via the rivers. Their brick homes and buildings were among the most imposing and their standard of living among the highest in Indiana at the time. Frontier isolation and distance from eastern markets for their manufactured products led the Rappites to return to Pennsylvania after only ten years. They sold the settlement to Scottish industrialist Robert Owen, who envisioned a utopian communal society based on learning. He brought in a "boatload of knowledge", via the river, brilliant scientists, educators and scholars, but the community failed to prosper because it lacked people with knowledge of or inclination toward the basic skills of growing food and creating the artifacts necessary for the physical functioning of the community. The Athenaeum is the gateway to New Harmony, functioning as a visitors' center and educational facility. The building, designed by Richard Meier and built in 1979, is faced with white porcelain-enameled steel panels. It received an AIA Honor Award in 1982. Most photographs show it surrounded by lush green grass, under a cloudless blue sky. My visit came on a stormy day after a long drought, and the parched lawn and dark skies made a very different sort of photo. What follows is a light skimming of the surface. Historic New Harmony has many homes and othe buildings open for tour, although not all are open every day. Two different sets are open on alternate days, and for the serious history enthusiast a two-day stay to see them all would be worthwhile. The Rapp Granary was built by the Harmonists in 1818 to store great quantities of grain against the famine and drought that they expected to precede the arrival of the Millennium. After the departure of the Harmonists the building passed through several uses including serving as the laboratory of David Dale Owen, a geology pioneer who became Indiana's first State Geologist in 1837. An 1878 fire destroyed the upper two stories, and by the 1990s the building was in severe disrepair and in danger of being lost. An extensive restoration began in 1997 to restore its original five storeys and appearance. Local artisans used authentic local materials and historic construction techniques to recreate an imposing structure that now functions as a musem, reception hall and performance space. Restored private homes, like the one with red shutters, are interspersed among the properties that are part of the self-guided walking tour. Upon arrival, the Harmonists built log cabins for shelter until more comfortable, permanent buildings could be constructed. Doctor's Office The Posey County Courthouse in Mount Vernon was designed by J.A. Vrydagh and Levi Clark and built 1875 - 1876. Ohio River at Mount Vernon, Indiana Harmonie State Park sits along the Wabash River, about 25 miles northwest of Evansville. The park is underutilized but well kept, and has decent trails and a pleasant, clean campground. I stayed there during my two-day visit to New Harmony. Francis Vigo was an Italian-American fur trader with Spanish citizenship, who aided American forces during the Revolutionary War. The George Rogers Clark Memorial is a National Historical Park commemorating Clark's capture of Fort Sackville in February, 1779 with a suprise attack on the British Garrison. The foundation of St. Francis Xavier was laid in 1826, and in 1834 the church became the cathedral for the new Diocese of Vincennes. The building's crypt holds the remains of the first four bishops of the diocese. It was designated a basilica in 1970. William Henry Harrison built Grouseland 1803 - 1804 while he was governor of Indiana Territory. The home also served as the center of territorial government during that time. His name for the home came from the abundance of grouse in the area at the time. Fairly busy freight line. Several buildings significant in Indiana's history have been relocated to a grouping adjacent to Grouseland. The one in the foreground is Jefferson Academy, established in 1801 by Governor William Henry Harrison. Students were enrolled at age 15 and received three years of instruction in Latin classics, English literature and Euclidian Geometry. Typical enrollment was 25 students and tuition was $16 per year plus a cord of firewood. The head master was the village priest, Father Jean Francois Rivet, former professor of Latin at the Royal College of Limoges, France. In 1806 the academy was chartered as Vincennes University. The Northwest Territory was divided in 1800 and Indiana Territory was established. Indiana Territory included the present states of Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, eastern Minnesota and western Michigan. Vincennes was the territorial capital, and the red building used in 1811 is the only one surviving of four different buildings in Vincennes that served as a meeting place for the Territorial legislature. It has passed through many owners and uses and four different locations en route to its present site and state of preservation. The Knox County Courthouse at Vincennes was designed by Edwin C. May and Adolph Scherrer and was built 1873 - 1876 from Indiana Limestone. Edwin May designed the 1886 Indiana State Capitol in Indianapolis, along with courthouses in other counties. Vincennes has a compact business district with an interesting assortment of handsome buildings but little activity. A lot of the upper storeys have boarded-up windows. Cecil M. Harden Lake is one of the newest Indiana DNR properties, with the best campground amenities I found on my trip. The brick restroom/shower buildings have stainless steel counters and sinks and everything is well-lighted and spotlessly clean. The foundation under the Mansfield Roller Mill was laid in 1819 for a one-storey log building. In 1880, a two-storey building was built along with a new dam providing a nine-foot head to power two turbines of 40 and 60 horsepower, respectively, that drove roller mills to produce corn meal and high-quality white flour. In 1893 a third storey was added to house the full complement of roller-milling equipment. The mill's grain-handling system was based on that devised in the 1780s by New England millwright Oliver Evans, whose concepts are still in use. In full production the mill employed three men. One roller mill was used to grind wheat for flour, and the other to grind corn for meal. The mill's products were sold as far away as Cincinnati under the brand names Victory Flour and Domino. Unable to compete with large commercial mills after 1929, the mill was converted to a feed mill. The water wheel is ornamental and was added by a later owner. It never was used to power the mill. The 1867 Mansfield Covered Bridge spans Big Raccoon Creek and once carried Indiana Route 59 traffic. A new highway route now bypasses the bridge. In 1995 the owners donated the mill to the Indiana Department of Resources. The DNR has restored the mill and staffed it with a historian and operators, and it is open from late March until late October.

There's a similar-themed place on the northwest corner of Des Moines, Iowa, called Living History Farms, that's very authentic and well-executed. I visited there in 1995; I need to find the negs and scan them. Conner Prairie has seen a lot of changes and additions. I think you might enjoy a return visit, and right about now is a good time of year to visit, especially on a weekday when it's pretty quiet and slow-paced. I think the bridge came from a county road near Fort Wayne, and was replaced on its original site because development and heavier vehicles rendered it inadequate to serve the traffic. I took the photos in 2002, and I think the bridge had been reconstructed there recently as part of Liberty Corner, the 1886 settlement. I haven't been back since that part was opened. The silos are all that remain of the grain elevator/feed mill/farm store that was the reason a lot of those villages existed. That day was oppressively hot and muggy, and it never occurred to me to look around for evidence of a long-abandoned rail line; most grain elevators were built with rail access for shipping farm supplies in and grain out.