Robert Pence

Pittsburgh isn't exactly a slouch when it comes to being bike-friendly. I may have related this story about San Francisco before; we old folks are allowed to repeat ourselves, though, so cut me some slack. In the late seventies in San Francisco, I rode my bike to the parking lot at the top of Twin Peaks and then coasted all the way to the Ferry Terminal without pedaling. I had to time my approach to some stoplights to avoid stopping, but made the whole distance without turning the pedals or putting my feet on the ground. I'm not sure of the distance any more, but I think it was a few miles.

I remember when the detergent makers protested that eliminating phosphates from their products would bankrupt the industry and turn American into a nation of dirty people wearing dirty clothes.

Riverviewer, I offer my condolences on the loss of your grandfather. It sounds like he had a good, robust and active life, and left some wonderful memories for his family.

Combined Region 6 - Region 7 (IN, MI, OH, IL, MN, ND, WI) NARP & Midwest High Speed Rail Association Meeting - March 24, 2007 Chicago, 8:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m. Union League Club 65 West Jackson Blvd $55, lunch included. Heads Up - The venue does not permit jeans or sneakers. The price and the dress requirements probably discourage the babbling foamers who would otherwise show up in hickory-stripe engineer overalls and caps and railroad patches, toting scanners and trying to engage everyone they can buttonhole in a contest of "Can You Top This?".

Looks like 10-12 inches of accumulation at my house, with some bigger drifts around the garage. I just came in for a warm-up and coffee after 2 1/2 hours of shoveling walks, and I think I'm a little less than halfway through. Most businesses and all the schools are closed, and the rural areas are under a level-2 snow emergency; you can get ticketed for driving except for emergencies, although it's not likely to happen unless you get in a wreck or get stuck and block the road. In town the arterials seem to be pretty fair but the side streets are still mostly impassable. Even on the arterials the intersections sometimes are bad because of hard-packed berms of salt/snow mix shoved up by plows. Right now we have crystal blue skies and piercingly bright sun with a light breeze. The forecast calls for another light dusting of snow, with winds to 30mph later today. After I get the walks dug out, I'll try to get out and take some photos.

Think Summer! :-D

There's a pair of Cardinals that comes around; the female shows up most often, and sometimes both, but that was one of the male's less-common appearances. Pretty significant snow, but I don't think it's anywhere close to what we got in '78. I made a last-minute trip to the hardware store to replenish my birdseed supply, and the fire/emergency routes weren't too awful, but the side streets and intersections were approaching impassable. I didn't realize until later that the city and county were under a level-2 snow emergency, and if I had gotten stuck and blocked traffic I could have been ticketed. All the schools, many businesses and the city and county offices are closed this morning. Snow has stopped, but forecasts call for winds to 30mph with severe drifting. The rural areas to the south apparently really got clobbered; the terrain is flat and open and broken only by occasional woodlots, and the drifting gets really bad. Even though my neighbor dug out quite a lot of sidewalk yesterday, it's mostly buried deep this morning. As soon as it gets light, I'll go out with my camera. Meanwhile, I'll finish my coffee and then bundle up and start shoveling. When the schools are closed for a snow day, there's a group of 4 or 5 high-school kids who show up with snow shovels looking to make a few bucks, and they're cheerful and energetic and do a good job. I've paid them well in the past in order to stay high on the list, so maybe they'll turn up and spare me some work.

There's a problem with using price, via gas tax or market pricing, to moderate fuel consumption. Land use policies and public policy founded on cheap oil and the assumption that everyone will drive have put many jobs and services in suburban or rural areas far from the working poor who need employment. At the same time that we've moved the jobs and services far from the urban core, we've let public transportation options diminish or disappear for many mid-sized and small cities. Consequently, the working poor spend disproportionate amounts of their limited income maintaining and feeding old cars considered beyond usefulness by two or three generations of previous owners. Hybrid cars, or even efficient, dependable late-model used cars aren't anywhere close to being an option for them. Rising fuel prices, whether brought about by market forces or increased taxes, only exacerbate their hardship. Investors, marketers, developers, politicians and even some self-proclaimed environmentalists still put most of their efforts into trying to maintain a car-dependent economy and lifestyle whose eventual demise is inevitable, while further disenfranchising a large segment of the population and abandoning them in decaying neighborhoods with inadequate public and private services and law enforcement. Whether you look at it from the position of morality and social justice, or from the position of economic pragmatism, it's just plain wrong to let this situation continue. If we do not proactively work to correct the inequities, social pressures ultimately will bring about a painful, destructive self-correction. </rant>

Gorgeous work!

A professor of mine in college told me of how when he was in college that building was considered to be one of the best, and he made pilgrimage from Cornell via Union Terminal to see it! Now arch students are making the same trip for the Zaha building half a block away (though not many take the train, I'm sure). The Terrace Hotel has gone to hell in a handbasket. I had the misfortune of staying there when I attended the Cincinnati forum meet early last summer; the physical property had been let go, my room was shabby, and the service was crap. It was over $100/night with tax, and I've stayed in $40 motels that were much better in all respects.

Excellent! In my opinion, Lafayette has one of the best downtowns in Indiana, better in some respects than South Bend's and Fort Wayne's. It has a dense collection of intact, preserved, functioning buildings from the nineteenth century, and a large number of well-maintained historic homes and churches from the 1870s - 1880s near downtown. It's a clean, attractive downtown, and for a city its size it has a good transit system with digital reader boards giving next-bus information at major boarding locations both downtown and on campus. The relocated and restored Big Four Station is a transportation center serving Greyhound, Amtrak, and local transit services.

Nice! I never realized Delphi had so many great old commercial buildings. In that respect, it sort of ties in with nearby Lafayette, where a lot of the buildings have been restored and are in use.

Fascinating walk! It must be wonderful as the seasons change!

I've seen a few photos of the inclines that I thought showed them carrying streetcars, but I couldn't be sure. That first photo is by far the best I've seen of that. It's pretty amazing! Is praise enough, or should we try to find a virgin to sacrifice? Notice I said try.

Hocking Hills looks beautiful. I've been thinking about making a pilgrimage to Hocking County; my dad's ancestors came to Indiana from there. Pomeroy looks somewhat healthier than Shawnee, but Shawnee has lots of ... character, I guess.

In the area where Wisconsin Avenue crosses the river, I definitely felt something that made me think of Chicago. I've heard others express the same thing. Go when you get a chance; Milwaukee is easy to like, and there's a lot of interesting stuff to see in a walkable distance.

Yes, indeed! I did enjoy!

From the age of fabulousness - America's first production front-wheel-drive automobile, the L-29 Cord. Photographed at the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Museum, Auburn, Indiana

Cass Scenic Railroad, June 1999 I was looking up some photos for someone and ended up scanning this set of 35mm negatives from a trip taken in 1999. Cass Scenic Railroad State Park is located near the Snowshoe ski area in West Virginia. It includes the lumber mill town of Cass and eleven miles of standard- gauge railroad used until 1960 by Cass & Mower Lumber Company to bring logs down from the mountain to their mill at Cass. Red spruce logging started on Cheat Mountain shortly after 1900 and continued through old-growth and second-growth trees until 1960, although the operation was in severe decline after 1950. The railroad was sold to a scrapper after it ceased operation, and a last-ditch effort by dedicated preservationists saved it and eventually got the state involved in restoring the town and railroad as a tourist attraction. In an unrelenting climb of eleven miles up grades as steep as 11 percent (two percent is considered steep on most common-carrier railroads) and through two switchbacks, geared Shay locomotives pushing passenger cars rebuilt from logging flat cars take visitors to the top of Bald Knob, at an elevation of 4,842 feet. Many of the houses in Cass have been restored and may be rented as tourist accomodations. Presbyterian Church converted to community center Remaining half of the hotel; originally this building was double the width and had porches/balconies on both the first and second floors. Masonic Hall The men who worked in the mill were mostly skilled workers who lived a fairly settled life in the town. The men who worked on the mountain cutting timber, mostly young bucks full of adventure, were called "wood hicks." They lived in camps on the mountain and only came down to the town on Saturday night. The enterprises that accomodated them were across the river in East Cass, and few traces of that remain. Drunken and rowdy wood hicks who found their way into the respectable part of Cass were likely to sober up in the windowless brick jail beneath the mayor's office and council chamber. The boiler house and brick engine room are the only structures that remain amid the burned-out ruins of the mill. In its heyday the lumbering operation employed more than 3,000 men and shipped both finished wood products and wood pulp for paper production. Every week the C&O Railroad picked up a 44-car train loaded with the mill's output. A toppled band saw rusts in the rubble. Rail passenger station in the foreground. The big building in the background was the company-run store, and now houses a gift shop and a very pleasant rustic restaurant. Workers preparing Shay geared locomotives for the day's work. Most of the Shays at Cass are 90-ton locomotives that burn bituminous (soft) coal. Big 6 was the last Shay locomotive built, in 1945, and worked for four years on the Western Maryland Railroad taking coal trains up a nine percent grade. It is oil- fired, and at 162 tons it's the largest one still in existence. Before coming to Cass, it was on display at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore. I believe there were once two Shays at Cass, built or modified in their shops, that topped 200 tons. I can't imagine what beasts those must have been. A new boiler for Heisler 6, a 100-ton geared locomotive that was then being rebuilt at Cass. It is now in regular service. Heislers differ from Shays in that they have two cylinders in a V configuration sticking up one on each side of the boiler, with a drive shaft that ran beneath the center of the locomotive. Whereas Shays are usually limited to speeds up to about 15 miles per hour, a Heisler can run somewhat faster. Shay Number 2 ready to take a train to the summit of Bald Knob. The fireman is standing in the cab door, fueling himself with a sandwich. If I remember the numbers correctly, these locomotives consume about 4 1/2 tons of coal on the round trip, and most of it goes in the firebox in about two hours, on the way up. It's all done with a shovel, and the work doesn't let up. The firemen I saw on the coal-burners were wiry-looking guys; I imagine you'd have to be pretty tough to maintain the pace. A conventional locomotive has a cylinder mounted horizontally at the front on each side, driving the wheels directly through rods. A Shay has a three-cylinder engine mounted vertically on the right side of the boiler, driving the wheels via a drive shaft and gears on the axles. The drive wheels are mounted on paired axles in articulated trucks, like the trucks under a boxcar, to let the locomotive maintain adhesion (traction) on uneven, quickly laid temporary track. Square sliding couplings and universal joints in the drive shaft allow the trucks to pivot, enabling the locomotive to negotiate tighter curves than would be possible with rod-driven engines. The combination of articulation and low gear ratios makes geared locomotives able to move very heavy loads on steep grades, albeit slowly. The funnel-shaped smokestack and screen keep burning embers from escaping and starting fires. Whittaker Station is a rest stop en route to Bald Knob, with restrooms, concessions, equipment displays and a recreated logging camp. A Lidgerwood Skidder was used to drag logs to the railroad loading site. The massive steam-powered hoisting machine was placed next to the rail line on a specially-laid siding and set up with a tall mast. Cables were strung from the mast to a sheave block anchored to a large tree at the logging site, and logs could be carried in the fashion of an aerial tram for distances up to 3,000 feet. After logs were brought to the rail location by the skidder, a rail-mounted crane loaded them onto flatcars for transport down the mountain to the mill. A spring-fed stream flowing down the mountain keeps the tanks beside the track full to overflowing, and the fireman uses a steam jet fed by the locomotive's boiler to transfer water from the tanks to the locomotive's tender. Bald Knob, elevation 4,842 feet. Even on a hazy day, the view is impressive. It's chilly up there, even in summer; the climate and vegetation are similar to parts of Canada.

More fabulousness. I appreciation your attention to details.

Lately urbanohio.com forum has been very slow to load, open a thread, move to another page or post a reply. I've noticed this off and on for a few days, now. I have a fast connection (5mpbs down/2mbps up), and at the time that I'm experiencing this problem I don't have any difficulty with other sites. It occurs even during off hours, when SSP responds very quickly. At around 8:30 this morning the forum was responding about the way SSP does in mid-afternoon, when people are bored at work. This is a recent change; urbanohio.com forums previously have loaded almost instantly for me.

Not as massively awe-inspiring as the old Penn Station, perhaps, but certainly no dump. Shawn, your photos are captivating. Though I've seen New York in many photos and in person, I still see it differently in your pics. They're superb!

Way cool! Notwithstanding hazy overcast, the aerials are great! Several years ago when I saw that view on approach to Laguardia, I was too stunned to think of reaching for my camera. I just sat there with my nose pressed to the window and my jaw in my lap.

Intriguing stuff. Ever been to Cass, WV? The site is now a state park featuring standard-gauge logging railroad with Shay locomotives that climb to the top of Bald Knob. Some of the company town has been preserved and restored, but the ruins of the burned lumber mill still stand pretty much unmolested on the property. I've only visited in summer and was afraid to go tromp through the weeds and brush to explore, for fear of rattlesnakes. I don't know if they're common there, but it looked like the place to find them if the area is in their habitat range. There are a couple of lumber-mill town sites in that area where nothing remains but a few foundations.

Excellent thread about some tragic losses. Noozer, I agree with you about rail-trails, I think. I thoroughly enjoy riding them, and at least their construction has preserved ROW from encroachment by subdivisions and strip malls. In most cases, I'd gladly relinquish them in favor of reinstalling track and restoring rail service that would provide alternatives to car and truck traffic. I think restoration of rail service over some of those corrirdors could be executed in a way that would include recreational trails, too. Some of rail-trail creation (maybe a lot) has taken place under a rail-banking provision that specifically designates the recreational facility as preserving the right-of-way until the time when it may again be needed for rail service. I'm pretty sure this particular Nickel Plate Berkshire locomotive has been preserved and is on display. It ran in excursion service for some time after the end of steam on the Nickel Plate; the cars in the background indicate that this photo was taken during that era. I think it's in Lima? I believe it served as an organ donor for some components like air pumps used in the restoration and rebuilding of NKP 765.