Robert Pence

Nice job; I can fully appreciate what you've undertaken. Old houses are not for the faint of heart.

I'd gladly make the hour drive to Bryan, Ohio to catch the train for trips to Cleveland, especially in winter, if the times were reasonable (and predictable). A dream come true would be the restoration of service through Fort Wayne between Cleveland and Chicago over NS's former Nickel Plate route; the station is just a few blocks from my house. I think a lot of people would like to have some of the shorter-haul trains back, too. About 1978 I had the great pleasure of riding the now-deceased Hilltopper between Kenova, WV and Washington, D.C.. Departure was about 5 a.m., a bit of a stretch, but the train (2 Amfleet coaches and an F40) ran precisely on time and carried a lot of people. It was a Sunday, and on the western end of the line many of the riders were families going to the next town to attend church or join relatives for dinner. NS (N&W, then) is up-front about its preference to not host passenger trains, but on that train they still did it right. I was carrying a scanner (with earpiece, thank you), but I didn't have much to listen to except for dispatchers & freight trains in the vicinity of yards. The train simply ran on time and about the only thing I heard between conductor and engineer was a "That'll do" as they spotted the train at station platforms, and a "Highball" when the passengers were all detrained/boarded.

IE 7. I haven't had any problems with it. OS is Windows XP pro.

At last, a plausible explanation for the existence of neocons; they're a failed experiment with alien DNA.

Beautiful twilight shots, and that building looks like a magnificent space with lots of natural light and great views.

Rather large contrast with the photo before it!

Good photos; the light and shadows work. DeKalb's downtown looks like it has some character; the Egyptian Theatre is a beauty. I think GE once had a factory there; it seems to me that Dad used to go there on business trips in the 1940s. If I remember the story correctly, my widowed great-great grandfather was returning to Indiana to get his three children and take them back to Iowa or Kansas where he had bought a farm. Changing trains in DeKalb, he walked in front of a moving train.

Interesting tour. The violin shop and Odd Fellows photo is beautiful. The steamboat house looks like a modification that was applied to an older structure. The house behind that two-storey veranda doesn't have the symmetry that was an essential part of steamboat gothic. It also looks like the renovation is recent and ongoing; the temporary porch posts aren't weathered.

I know I'm a tough act to follow, but I'm trying to inspire, not discourage. :-D

With Christmas so near, you'd think folks would be paying closer attention to their behavior! :roll:

A little rough around the edges, perhaps, but certainly looks like it has a future. It doesn't look like a high-crime area, just not affluent. As I scrolled through the pics, when I came to the one with the monstrous outside stairs I involuntarily screamed, "Aaack!" :-o

This one wasn't lost to progress, but maybe to lack thereof. In 1977 on a bike ride without a camera, I spotted a nice old depot in Hicksville, Ohio. The next weekend I drove over with my camera to find this: The photo was late in the day, so the light is pretty hard.

That aloe vera plant will come in handy as the ozone layer breaks down.

Now I am gonna go off topic, but I need to bring up this tidbit that I just remembered when reading your comment about common-carrier buses hauling mail. In addition to RPO cars, the USPS used to operate HPO (Highway Post Office) service through some of the small towns. When I was in my late teens (1950s), and my cousin and I were out running around at all hours up to no good, we used to see the one that stopped in front of the post office in Bluffton every night about 1 a.m.. I think it probably ran between Fort Wayne (or maybe Detroit or Toledo) and Indianapolis. It was an articulated GM (I think) coach painted mostly white and trimmed in red and blue, with USPS markings on it.

There's definitely a need for restoration of intercity bus service, too. The small independent carriers went under a long time ago, and the biggies, almost exclusively Greyhound, have scaled back service so that people in many small towns and cities are completely without outside connections other than by private car. It's largely conjecture on my part, but I suspect that subsidies to commercial aviation were a factor in the loss of much of America's intercity bus service. The most conspicuous part of that is the ability of low-cost airlines using taxpayer funded services and facilities to grab off the long-distance haulage that used to underwrite the intercity carriers' service to smaller cities. I think most people are unaware that package and freight express used to make up a significant part of the revenue on the bus routes that served the smaller cities. Trailways' Detroit - Fort Wayne - Indianapolis route once served a half-dozen smaller Indiana cities with five daily round trips that only carried light passenger loads. They were profitable, though, because of the express business that they did; they made more money on freight than they did on passengers. Bus package express was the quickest way to ship to destinations that didn't have a commercial airport or Railway Express agency, and it was affordable. Greyhound did a lively express business on routes like their Ohio College Locals, too. Outfits like UPS, FedEx and DHL have sucked up all that business now, and it was inevitable that with the loss of freight traffic the bus lines would go broke. I suspect that part of the reason the dedicated package express companies are able to function as efficiently as they do, and offer the rates they do, is because they benefit greatly on a national/international scale from the subsidies to commercial aviation. Crap! Sorry! I just re-read this, and realized how far off-topic I went.

Yep. I think everyone at that show was burning coal, from the looks of the smoke. Nowadays most shows provide coal but because of the cost they request that engineers burn wood unless they're involved in a demonstration that requires maximum power. Sawmills are a major activity at virtually every show in areas where trees grow, so there's always an abundance of good hardwood slabs and scrap. In most cases you can get just about as much power out of wood as out of coal on those engines, but if you're working hard, it takes a lot of it, requiring a lot of firing and generating a lot of embers in the air. Another reason for burning wood is that if the atmospheric conditions aren't right at a big show with a lot of engines, coal smoke can get really bad. I spent four days at a show where there were about thirty engines all burning coal, and I thought I'd die from black lung before it was over. The scene looked like old photos of Pittsburgh in the 1940s. With a couple of small exceptions, most makers quit building steam engines for farm use in the 1920s, and a few survived on the job into or through WWII, after which wear and tear and manpower requirements sent most of them to the scrappers. When steam was popular, though, most builders could configure an engine to burn straw, for threshing outfits on the great plains. Coal was expensive there because it had to be hauled long distances, and wood was scarce, but wheat straw was abundant during threshing and the labor required to use it was cheap. They'd fit a big funnel-shaped hopper onto the firebox door, and set up the threshing machine so the straw came out near the engine. They'd have three or four boys whose job it was to constantly deliver huge bunches of straw to the engine where one person did nothing but stuff it into the firebox as fast as the firebox would accomodate it.

Transport for the Long Emergency - runs on plant cellulose, provides transportation and dairy foods, and the by-product can be fermented for methane and then recycled to grow more plant cellulose. It can reproduce itself, and when it wears out or breaks down, you can eat it.

Pretty remarkable resurrections. It's amazing that anyone would even try to save the second one.

Shut off all the general fund subsidy to commercial aviation and make the airlines pay all their costs, the way he apparently thinks passenger rail should, and see how many people can afford to fly, or for that matter how many airlines and airports continue to operate. The last figure I saw, several years ago, said that the subsidy from the general fund (not from airline ticket taxes) to operate just the air traffic control system was in excess of $2 billion annually. I doubt if that has gotten smaller. Most airports are municipal entities, hence exempt from property taxes, and the airlines generally do not have capital investment in passenger terminals; they pay rent or lease fees that usually do not cover the cost of operations for the facilities. Taxpayers make up the difference at one level or another (local, state or federal). And the bus lines are generally not getting shafted by Amtrak; the rail and bus combined share of traffic is small. Cars have the lion's share, and airlines get most of what's left after cars.

You're on your own, buddy. You should know better than to mess with the ColDayMan, 'cause once you've provoked his wrath there is no hiding place! ( :lol: :lol: :lol: )

OhMiGosh! Next thing you know, there'll be Gila monsters in German Village! :-o

Some of those instill a little hope, and some of them are hard to look at.

The image presentation technology is intriquing. The combination of ersatz city and motion sickness made me queasy, though. All Easton needs is a fleet of faux trolleys crusing around clanging their bells. The most appalling thing is that what is fabulous when it's new is always eventually overshadowed by something even bigger and more excessive, and then falls into disuse and disrepair. Someday all this will be a ruin of broken glass, boarded-up stores and graffiti. And I will go there and stand in the middle of the desolation and look around and laugh. :evil:

Beautiful shots! It's wonderful to see a bunch of people having fun downtown.

:roll: :lol: