Robert Pence

I seem to recall reading several years ago that the legislation that created the interstate highway system specifically provided for future inclusion of rail in the medians in some cases. Although I'm often shouted down on this issue by advocates of both highways and passenger rail, I still think it's a viable concept for passenger rail. The curves and gradients are often relatively mild and could be handled by lightweight equipment on a dedicated passenger right-of-way. The interstate medians are already grade-separated from cross traffic, and the layout of the system both follows the existing pattern of point-to-point travel and influences ongoing and future development; it goes where the people are. Modifications to grades and curves and reconstruction of bridges and overpasses where needed are not major obstacles, considering what it would cost in both money and time to acquire and prepare new dedicated, grade-separated, protected high-speed rail right of way spanning the considerable distances involved in U.S. travel. Providing access to intercity rail from the urban core certainly should not pose greater difficulty than that now posed by providing access to airports that are often quite far away.

Darn! Look at all those place names just in one small part of Wisconsin! It's like a condensed version of the U.S.! Why would anyone want to live anywhere else? :-o

Fascinating photos! Thanks for posting them.

Nice work! Philadelphia has to be one of America's most visually interesting and photogenic cities. A lot of people have posted photo sets on UO and SSP, and every one gives an interesting new take on the city. I thought this looked familiar: 1991

Lobsters! Wow! Swanky place, indeed! :roll: :lol:

I remain an ardent fan of Kunstler's writing. He's a master of the eloquent tirade, and his writing conveys passion. Sometimes I think he's on the verge of being swept away by the surging tide of his own vitriol, but that's a large part of what draws me to him. Ever read Philip Wylie's Generation of Vipers or Mark Twain's Pen Warmed Up In Hell? Good stuff, and as relevant now as it was sixty or a hundred years ago.

Wow!

Dang nice stuff!

I don't expect he'll be on one of those "sexy firefighters" calendars any time soon. :-o

It's nice that the GAO as come around. I remember reading some years ago - probably much longer than I'd care to realize - about a GAO statement that Americans don't use high-speed trains, and for the US to invest in them would be a bad idea. I reread the article carefully to make sure I hadn't misunderstood it, and I hadn't. Of course Americans weren't using high-speed trains. We didn't have them.

Drunk driving is a no-no, and maybe public intoxication, but as to the rest of it, I don't know of any laws against public weirdness. Where would you draw the line? For that matter, I've seen women in public who looked worse than he does, and nobody arrested them.

Get a grip, you sissies! Sixty-eight comin' up, and it's like the roar of a powerful locomotive. Outta' my way, you young whippersnappers! :whip:

It's quite possible that telecommuting won't be as viable an option as some folks are predicting. A lot of those jobs are in or related to the financial and information services sector, and the post-peak-oil economy will be much more dependent on physical activity that produces tangible goods that satisfy basic needs like food, shelter and clothing. The financial and information services businesses have a relationship that, in the best of cases, is symbiotic with the production of real value, and they have become downright parasitic as they facilitate the takeover of productive businesses in order to liquidate assets that can be exploited in the short term in financial market manipulations. They will provide far fewer career opportunities as a result of their confrontation with physical reality. It's pretty hard to telecommute to a job mining coal or building and repairing machinery or pulling weeds from soybean rows.

Excellent tour, great photos! It looks like an interesting place; the big, old stone industrial buildings give it an interesting character.

Seicer, don't frustrate yourself with fantasies! Direct your desires more realistically. :laugh:

Not too shabby, fer a young whippersnapper! :wink:

Beautiful old city!

Looks unfinished. I think it needs a bay, with a palladian window in it. Maybe in the upper left corner. And maybe some pilasters around that door. :roll:

It's wasted on me, but I thought I'd throw it in for the nearly two-thirds of the forumers who are hetero men -- and the one lesbian, too, maybe. I suppose now on the next warm weekend there'll be a bunch of urbanohio geeks hanging around beside the river at Allegan, hoping for a glimpse. :roll:

^ :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :clap:

Holy Smoke! Will the last person to leave please turn out the lights? For being shut down and vacant, the place is surviving amazingly intact.

Michigan's security is very lax along the border with Indiana. A week ago (March 25), I made a deliberate incursion fairly deep into the state without first seeking permission of any of the Michigan forumers. I refuse to apologize, and further, I'll probably do it again, unless somebody gets their butt over to Constantine and gets some photos of those stunning Italianate Victorians with the belvederes, right along the main drag. Here's one of the places I saw that I liked very much. Allegan is the county seat of Allegan County. The city dates to the 1830s and has a population of about 5,000. It has a fair-sized and reasonably active downtown that looks like it once was substantially larger. These photos were taken on a Sunday afternoon, and a few business, mostly bars, were open. I pretty much expected this after I saw an 1889 cornerstone in the front yard of the historical museum. Wishful thinking may be embellishing my memory of this view, but I used to drive through Allegan from time to time in the 1960s, and it seems to me that I recall buildings long this stretch coming right down to the water's edge so that their back sides almost made a wall along the river. :weird: Vagueness, anyone? Contrary to what one might think, these devices are not similar to bicycles. They're ten thousand times louder, and there were quite a few of them. On the other hand, here's an example of outright blatant disregard for plainly-defined law and order. Where are the cops when you need them?

Here's a short follow-up to my trip to the NARP/MHSRA joint meeting in Chicago on March 24. It's mostly the same thing I posted in the Transportation Forum on SSP in the Midwest Transit Thread: I attended the meeting in Chicago, and thought it was well worth the time and effort to get there. I drove from Fort Wayne to South Bend and took the South Shore from there, and then walked the short distance from Van Buren Station to the meeting venue at the Union League Club. Travel-wise, it would have been more convenient to take Amtrak from Waterloo, but the unreliability of that service time-wise ruled it out for me. After a near-steady diet of hearing people lament what we've lost, it was refreshing and encouraging to hear people there talking of possibilities and positive changes in the political environment and in public perception of passenger rail. Alfred Runte's address was inspiring; he has an almost-evangelical passion for progressive ideals, and he's an eloquent speaker. I bought his book, and I'm about halfway through it. I'm already familiar with much of what he wrote in it, but I hope more people with less familiarity read it; it should help open their eyes. The comment by Milwaukee's Alderman Bauman caught my attention: “Suffice it to say that guided buses are not a cheap form of light rail but a very expensive version of a bus service.” I wish more people would wake up to that, although if BRT can be used to stake out future light rail ROW and build ridership toward eventual rail implementation, I'm not totally opposed to it. Sometimes baby steps are necessary. Regarding long-distance trains, the perception that they're counterproductive to effective passenger rail service in the US, and not an important, integral, productive part of a national system is, to a large degree, the result of statistical and accounting manipulations that distort the facts. Runte covers that quite effectively in his book. Critics of long-distance passenger trains tend to compare traveling from New York to Chicago or Chicago to Los Angeles by train with making the same trip by air, from the perspective of the business traveler. What they neglect is that unlike airplanes, passenger trains connect intermediate cities and towns that sometimes are not well-served by airlines, and they provide a valued service to non-business travelers who make up more than half the long- and intermediate-distance travelers in the United States.

Handsome campus, impeccably maintained in true Lutheran fashion!

I haven't yet visited Madison, and that's an oversight I need to remedy. I've done a few tours of Southern Indiana, but there's a lot to see in that area, and I like to spend some time in the various places and absorb them. I have been to New Harmony, and it took me two days to soak that all in; in addition to showcasing a rich heritage, it's a functioning town with a lot of charm and good cultural amenities.