Robert Pence

Wonderful sights!

Damn fine photos of a remarkable neighborhood.

How about a wheelbarrow, instead? We can put a pillow in it, if that helps.

Nice courthouse! Xenia has more good old buildings than I expected, having seen photos of the town after the tornado hit. The whole place looked like somebody took a giant weedeater and scalped it down to the dirt.

Beautiful place and excellent photos!

It's a shame that we've lost most of those classic school buildings, and many of the ones that remain are in pretty sad condition. When I was a kid, the old schools had a characteristic smell that came from the oil-mopped wood floors and the varnish and maybe just a hint of mustiness, especially when school started up in the fall. The smell was the first thing that would trigger memories when I visited a school, long after I graduated. The newer schools that I've visited mostly smell of vinyl, synthetic carpet and raw concrete, and it's institutional and unpleasant to me.

Neat stuff! Cemeteries are some of the most beautiful outdoor spaces in many cities. I'd like to see them used more by the public for things like picnics, but a lot of people seem to have a real hangup about that, and I've heard that some cemeteries even prohibit any activity other than that associated with burials and visitations. Lindenwood Cemetery, not far from my house, is an old cemetery with big old trees and acres of rolling terrain, absolutely gorgeous. They had some problems years ago with kids on bikes riding off-road, so they put up a sign that prohibits bikes altogether. I rode my bike out there to visit my grandparents' graves, thinking they certainly wouldn't have a problem with an old guy on an ancient three-speed, but they stopped me and told me I had to leave my bike at the gate if I wanted to visit the graves. I left and came back in a noisy, smelly, three-quarter-ton diesel pickup, and nobody paid any attention.

Wow! Great thread! As an American in a city of 200K population with no rail service, about an hour away from a third-world-class open platform with with a plexiglas bus shelter and no restroom, for a daily train that may or may not run within three hours of schedule, I'm terribly envious of Europeans. Where do Americans get their attitude of superiority? I know, from ignorant provincialism. :roll:

Looks just about right for me! :-D

Beautiful pics.

Somewhere around twenty-five years ago, maybe a little more, Harper's Magazine published a detailed story by Jonathan Kwitney titled The Great Transportation Conspiracy. Kwitney researched the complex web that grew after GM started financing National City Lines' acquisition of many rail systems in order to convert them to bus operation. I have a copy of the article stashed somewhere in my archives, but it hasn't worked its way to the surface, lately. I seem to recall that GM's intent, and later that of Firestone, Standard Oil, and highway construction interests, was not simply to sell buses, tires and fuel to the transit systems, but to make transit so unattractive by implementing smelly, uncomfortable buses and gerrymandering schedules to make cross-town connections unworkable except for people who had no alternatives, that transit systems would either shut down or minimize services, creating a larger market among city dwellers for automobile ownership.

The secret to contentment is resisting the pressure to grow up! :speech: When I was a little kid, I observed that grownups didn't have nearly so much fun as kids, and I resolved never to grow up. Now, when someone asks me, "Good God, man! What are you, twelve?", I say "Thank You!" Now, where did I put those old bus passes? :-D

Fun!

Thanks for posting those; I always enjoy your photo sets. Not many photographers get the people shots like you do.

Nice! I wish I could have been there. It looks like you had a pretty decent day for the meet.

The demands on truck drivelines for horsepower and torque, and for sustained near-capacity operation, are so much higher than the demands on passenger-car drivelines, that I doubt if $20K would even touch it. It takes a lot to start rolling with 40,000 pounds or more and accelerate it at a reasonable pace, and the weight of batteries to do that would be another big factor. Hybrid systems in heavy trucks would have to be very ruggedly-designed, and might still require a lot of maintenance. Existing truck drivelines have been developed with years of experience and continue to evolve, and are extremely reliable. Their energy efficiency is probably pretty close to the maximum now obtainable with rubber-tire-on-asphalt freight transport. As mentioned earlier in this thread by others, a more productive answer is to shift more of the long-haul freight to rail instead of running it over the highways on rubber tires. TOFC (Trailer-on-flatcar) and double-stack container traffic on the railroads is booming, and Norfolk Southern is doing a big business with its Road-Railer service, where highway-ready trailers are attached to railcar wheelsets and made up into trains without the extra weight of flatcars or double-stack cars. Road-Railers simplify the transition between road and rail at both ends of the trip, allowing local pickup and deliverywith the flexibility of trucks, and long-haul with the energy efficiency of rail. NS has a major Road-Railer hub in Fort Wayne, and I've seen as many as 100 trailers roll through town in a single train.

What a tragedy! Linden looks like a pretty nice town.

Nevermind the rain. That's an excellent tour. Newark has some good buildings, and I'm always amazed that Sullivan's Home Building Association has survived intact; it would be great to see the downtown make a comeback. It looks like they're trying to take care of what they have, and overall not too bad.

I sort of get the impression that the last couple of decades haven't been very kind to Blissfield. It looks like it once was pretty prosperous, but not so much, nowadays.

Not necessarily. When the time comes to reinstate light rail, the old tracks probably wouldn't be serviceable. Usually they were laid on wood crossties that have long since decayed, and because of deferred maintenance during WWII, and later as ridership declined, a lot of systems had rail that was worn out by the time they were shut down. The old infrastructure would probably have to come out, anyway. Bluffton, Indiana (home town) recently had to tear up Washington Street to remove ties that had been left in place when the interurban tracks were pulled up and scrapped in 1941. The street was developing a washboard surface as the ties decayed. I wanted to get down there and take photos, but didn't make it before the project was finished.

Kick-ass tour!

Excellent pics and narrative. Thank you.

It's been a while since I studied/worked with this stuff, so I'll try to avoid going in over my head. < :speech: > The biggest advantage to aluminum is weight reduction to reduce fuel consumption while maintaining/improving performance and handling. Some major engine components like intake manifolds, cylinder heads and pistons, and some engine blocks and oil pans have been cast aluminum on some models for a while, and they reduce weight by quite a lot. The manufacturing process is less costly and possibly more energy-efficient than cast iron, too. Aluminum also can be used in other large castings like transmission cases. Parts that operate at high temperatures like exhaust manifolds or that are subject to high stress and wear like crankshafts, camshafts and valves, probably will continue to be made from iron & steel alloys for quite a while, yet. Likewise nuts and bolts and other structural fasteners. One of the obstacles to the use of more aluminum in engines has been that an engine changes temperature as it starts and warms up and operates at highway speeds, and aluminum and iron/steel expand and contract at different rates and to different extents with temperature changes. It's difficult to maintain the critical relationships in dimensions between the two materials where they interface with each other. I don't expect to see much aluminum in frames and body panels in the near future. Aluminum is even more vulnerable than steel to the corrosive effects of road salt, and it's difficult to get finishes and anti-corrosion coatings to adhere to aluminum, especially when it's exposed to harsh environmental conditions. Composite materials are less costly than aluminum and easier to form into complex shapes, and highly resistant to corrosion. Steel is still the most cost-effective material for frames and major load-bearing components, even though there are composites like carbon-fiber that have a better strength-to-weight ratio. The technology exists to built a unibody structure entirely from molded composites that would be strong, light and corrosion-resistant, but because of possible buyer misgivings about crash safety, I doubt if we'll see it mass-produced in the US so long as there's such an outrageous disparity in size and weight among personal vehicles. </ :speech: >

That place is remarkably clean, as foundries go. It's eerie to see it with no activity; I've been in foundries, most recently the JI Case facility at Racine (now shut down), and they're awesome places, especially the ones that pour large castings. Noisy, hot, dangerous, often dusty, and very exciting to an industry geek.

So ... we're waiting for you to post the photos from your tour of that Dayton ...