Robert Pence

Darned nice!

Beautiful day, beautiful photos!

Two friends of mine are dedicated rail travelers, and have used the Lake Shore Limited often for business travel to New York. The latest schedule change has made the Waterloo, IN, departure at 1:40 a.m. unusable for them. They've cancelled their sleeper reservations for an upcoming trip and made airline reservations. Without multiple trips throughout the day on long-distance trains it's impossible to provide attractive service at both endpoints and midpoints, no matter when the trains run. If there were two trains running opposite each other, I think a good place to start would be with an overnight train between NY and Chicago emphasizing sleepers with some coach availability, and a train that passes through Indiana and Ohio during the day with mostly coaches and one or two sleepers based on an updated version of the PRR Slumbercoach. I liked the Slumbercoach. With its compact, nested compartment design, it seemed to me to be an efficient way to maximize sleeper capacity and provide privacy for those passengers desiring it, with minimum overhead. I'm not a big guy, and the smaller bed was completely adquate for me.

Spectacular landscape, and I love the geometric shapes & designs.

Maybe Zack was stalking the guy in the orange shirt. :wink:

Excellent quick tour!

Only KOOW...only KOOW! Somebody lead a prayer for this child! More like an exorcism, I think. :wink:

I would recommend used before buying a "department store" bicycle. Those Wal*Mart-price bicycles get out of tune quickly. I'll second that! Department-store and discount-store bikes are often made with inferior materials that won't hold up, and sometimes they come right out of the box with mismatched components that will never fit right or work right. Shop the name-brand bikes in reputable bike shops to get some idea what you would really like to have, and then see how close you can come to it in a used bike from the classifieds or from a bike shop that takes trade-ins. Once in a while you can get lucky and score something really nice from a thrift store for a cheap price if you know what you're looking for and your timing is right. With spring coming, you might even find someone who is graduating or leaving school and wants to sell a bike.

Looks like the same buildings, now missing their tall, fancy parapets

I'd like to see those in more cities, especially in the U.S. I seem to recall that Madison, Wisconsin had a free white bike program in the 1970s. Does the program still exist?

Looks pretty sweet!

Wonderful photos. Every time I see the Michigan Central Station in its present condition, I'm very sad. Even though it was visibly in decline when I boarded a train for Toledo there in the early eighties, it still had a lot of grandeur. Then, I would never have expected what has happened to it.

Great shots. It's easy to see how someone would like living there if they were fabulously wealthy.

Jeff, a very captivating post. It resurrected a lot of my memories of Fort Wayne through the same time span that included the demise of four out of the five movie theatres, three large department stores, at least two large hotels and a few smaller ones and a YMCA residence facility, many specialty retailers, lunchrooms and restaurants, local industries like cigar factories, shoe- and bootmakers and even a corset factory, pawn shops, dive bars and a few sleaze joints. I used to walk through the middle of it all on my way between my rented room and my first job and it all seemed so much a part of the city that I could never have imagined what the city has become.

Amtrak's rolling-stock technology has come a long way from the largely-pre WWII fleet that it inherited (although some of those cars were wonderfully comfortable and long-lived when properly maintained). Stations are another story. With the exception of a few major cities, a lot of Amtrak passenger stations served by long-distance trains are pretty third-world and others are, although nicely preserved, badly outdated. The closest-to-home example is Waterloo, Indiana, which serves Fort Wayne (pop. 200K) with an asphalt platform and an open-sided plexiglas bus shelter and sickly-yellow gas-discharge lighting on tall poles. Bad weather? Sit in your car on the steeply-sloping crushed-stone parking strip. You may have a long wait, but there's a gas station about four blocks away where you can get marginally-drinkable coffee and use the restroom.

I went. I'm glad I did. More later.

Actually, I don't. All my computer tasks - web site maintenance, email, forum browsing, etc. are among the duties of the young slave in my basement. :evil: "Young Whippersnapper" is an ol' geezer's term for anyone under 30, or maybe a little older than that. It all depends on the level of respect shown for ol' geezers.. :-D

I came through there in the early 70s, when the new bridge was in early stages of construction; just concrete piers being poured with mixers and cranes on a barge in the river. I crossed the river from West Virginia on a temporary ferry that was in service there until the new bridge was completed. One of these days I'll find the slides.

A little more on HEP vs the old way. < :type: > In the steam era, passenger cars were heated by steam piped back from the boiler. With the need of flexible connections between cars, plus all the controls and valves, maintaining the system was labor intensive, but if well-maintained it worked well. Then, each car had its own electrical system, typically 30 volts DC although some of the later ones were 60V DC. A generator under the car drove from the axle, usually with a belt or a geared shaft, and a set of big, heavy, expensive lead-acid batteries stored enough power to keep the lights and air conditioning going during station stops or when the train slowed to speeds below 27 mph (because the generator cut out at low speeds). For long layovers, cars had motor-driven generators mounted underneath that could be plugged into 408 volt 3-phase power in the station to keep the electric system up and running. Most cars had train-line connections so that they could be connected to an adjacent car with a jumper cable in case a generator failed. Air conditioning was usually run from the generator-battery system, but some roads used ammonia-absorption refrigeration that works on the same principle as the propane-fueled refrigerators in campers and RVs. They used steam instead of a gas flame to provide the heat that drives the cycle. In the diesel era up through early Amtrak, passenger cars still used the steam-heat and axle-generator system, and both diesel and electric locomotives in passenger service carried huge, oil-fired, complicated and temperamental steam generators that most firemen despised. When Amtrak created the specifications for new locomotives and cars, they designed an integrated system using HEP generators and all-electric cars. As they rebuilt older ("Heritage Fleet") cars, they retrofitted them for HEP. The new system is much easier to maintain, and improves reliability. On the downside, when the HEP fails, every car in the train loses lights, heat and AC. On trains with two locomotives, the HEP generator in either one can sustain the cars at some level. If there's only one locomotive, without HEP you're SOL. </ :type:>

Sweet stuff! Basement garages make me nervous. I know they're common in a lot of densely-developed places, but I think they're a fire hazard. Some cities prohibit parking cars in them when they're below grade level. Gasoline fumes are heavier than air. A leak can cause fumes to accumulate at floor level in a basement until they find an ignition source like a water-heater pilot light. I've read of cars, even late models, spontaneously catching fire too, even while parked and turned off. Seems an unnecessary risk to put one under the place where you'll be sleeping.

Some of those make me want to cry, but it's gratifying to see that some folks are beginning to recognize the value in the neighborhood. < commie-pinko-fag rant > The difference between the old and new school buildings is a metaphor for the shift in the philosophy behind education. The old building honors permanence and tradition and symbolizes keeping what is good about the past and learning from human experience through history. The new one looks like a factory designed to turn out willing worker-consumers who will follow orders, forget about the history and boldy forge ahead to repeat humanity's blunders. :whip: </ commie-pinko-fag rant. >

I was raised on an all-work-and-no-play farm and chafed at the isolation. After I graduated from high school and got a factory job in the city, I soon moved there and found out it was a lot more interesting. That was in the fifties, when cities, even the smaller ones, were, in fact, much more interesting. At some point I realized that that's where the available men were, too. Now that I'm older and realize that just because men are available doesn't mean they're worth the trouble, I'm ready to go back to the farm and get away from the traffic noise.

None of the above. I found a really nice wood packing crate complete with a lid, and dragged it under a bridge. There's room inside for both me and my shopping cart. Actually: It's paid for, and I don't eat much, so I spend all my money on riotous living. :drunk:

People who commit unspeakable acts of cruelty, whether against people or animals, should be given a thorough workup to determine whether they carry any infectious diseases. If they don't, they should be shipped off to a colony where they're fed and kept healthy for use as organ donors. The ones who aren't fit for use as organ donors should be sold to pharmaceutical companies or donated to medical schools for use as lab animals. The guy who boiled and skinned the dog should be used in vivisection experiments. Without anaesthetic. :whip:

When I posted that photo of the F40PH-turned-cabbage-car on my web site, I referred to it as "neutered". One of the big pluses to control cabs on the Union-Station end of push-pull trains is at there's no locomotive roaring in notch 8 to maintain head-end power, up next to the head house as detraining passengers walk past. After many years of traveling to Chicago on the Broadway, it's nice to be able to walk from a coach to the station without having to cover my ears against the deafening racket. Steam locomotives weren't nearly so obnoxious.