Robert Pence

Beautiful pics! Downtown Indianapolis is an enjoyable place to walk. I love that fountain! This building: is the Eiteljorg Museum, featuring American Indian and Southwestern U.S. history. It's exceptionally well done. The garden in the foreground sits between it and the Indiana State Museum, also an excellent attraction.

Uuhhhhh ... :|

I don't know if anyone is still building steam turbines for electric power or marine applications. Probably they are, because steam is still the medium used for nuclear power; reactors provide heat to boil water to generate high-pressure steam, which spins a turbine. Piston-engine production pretty much ended after World War II, and most large ships built as steamers but still in service have been refitted with diesel engines. I think Norfolk & Western still built steam locomotives at Roanoke, VA., until 1950 because of their stake in the coal business; their J-class streamlined passenger engines were quite sleek and elegant, and could crank out 110mph on a straightaway with a fairly heavy train. The last big industrial piston-engine installation I know of was in a gas pipeline compressor station in West Virginia around 1947, a massive project involving 16 2000-horsepower Corliss tandem compound engines with 60-inch-diameter low-pressure cylinders, plus all the supporting equipment. I saw that station in operation in the 1960s, when it wasn't expected to run much longer because of escalating water-treatment costs due to mine runoff in the river that it drew from. Skinner Engine Works, in Erie, Pennsylvania, built very large piston engines for steamships, and I think they completed their last order around 1961. My parents and I made a night crossing on one of the Chesapeake Bay car ferries shortly before the bridge opened, and Dad and I found our way to the engine room where two 900-horsepower Skinner engines were working. If you can find a copy of End of an Era - The Last of the Great Lakes Steamers, by David Plowden, you'll see some beautiful black-and-white photos of steam freighters, their machinery, and the men who ran them. Any surviving steam pile drivers would probably be barge-mounted for maritime applications, building bridges, docks, etc., where weight and transportation wouldn't be a problem and there's a need for a lot of power. Most of the ones used on land-based construction are powered by compressed air or by a direct-acting diesel cylinder, but the big steam rigs are still unexcelled in their ability to deliver massive blows in rapid succession. In 1960 I saw one in Wisconsin, built in 1901, that could strike 100 blows per minute with a seven-ton hammer. A steam pile driver houses its boiler in a barn-like structure with a short smokestack projecting from the roof maybe 3 to 6 feet. At one end of the structure there's a tower that could be up to 100 feet tall (it folds down for transport). Two rails run vertically up the tower, and the hammer assembly slides up and down between them, raised and lowered by a steam hoist located in the boiler house. The hammer assembly consists of a vertical, double-acting (can exert force alternately in either direction) steam cylinder. Beneath the steam cylinder is an iron weight, or hammer, of several tons, suspended from the steam cylinder's piston rod. A steel or iron cap, or saddle, is placed over the top of the steel or wood pile to protect it from fraying or splitting, and the pile is hoisted vertically between the tower rails, beneath the hammer. The steam cylinder lifts the hammer a few feet and then slams it down on top of the pile, repeating the action rapidly and following the top of the pile down as it sinks into the ground. You can feel the vibration in the ground for quite a ways around when a large pile driver is working. A diesel pile driver usually is used in conjunction with a conventional construction crane, and the cylinder blows copious amounts of foul black smoke. A steam pile driver emits puffs of steam from the cylinder with each stroke. Compressed-air pile drivers don't emit anything visible.

Pretty nice buildings.

The Maumee Valley show is rather small compared to some, but there's a good variety of equipment and constant activity. The best-known shows mostly take place Labor Day weekend at Pontiac, Illinois; Mount Pleasant, Iowa; and Rollag, Minnesota. The last two of those are absolutely mind-boggling for the amount, variety, and scale of some of the exhibits. Rollag has more operating gigantic industrial gas engines and steam engines than anyplace else in North America, in addition to a commercial-size steam sawmill, a standard-gauge steam railroad, construction equipment, and a village of nineteenth-century homes and businesses. Mount Pleasant features, in addition to the agricultural exhibits, a pioneer log village, a working streetcar line with historic trolleys, a narrow-gauge steam railroad and operating large industrial steam engines. It's the second largest-attendance event in Iowa, next to the state fair (although RAGBRAI is gaining ground!). Another wonderful show takes place in late summer at Irricana, Alberta, just a few miles east of Calgary. The horse-powered farming demonstrations are probably my favorite part of that show; they harvest a field of wheat with a binder pulled by horses, thresh the wheat with a steam engine, and then plow the harvested field with horses. There's big steam, early gas tractors, and a lot of beautiful, huge draft horses -- Belgians, Percherons, etc. Like most American manufacturers, Huber suspended production of civilian goods during World War II in order to produce military hardware. After the war, they never resumed tractor production. So far as I know, they still produce construction machinery. Huber steam engines and tractors always had a reputation for quality. Even the early tractors, with their tall, spindly-looking front wheels, were very good, reliable machines. They were assembled from purchased components; many farm equipment makers of the era did that as gas tractor technology reached the point where it was affordable and usable for farmers who had never been able to afford or use large, expensive, heavy steam engines. The Huber Light Four, sold around 1918, was built from a chassis and transmission purchased from Foote Brothers Gear Company, an engine purchased from Waukesha, and a Perfex brass cellular-core radiator. At least three other companies that I can think of, Massey-Harris, Parret and Frick, all used the Foote Brothers chassis, and some even used the Waukesha engine. Waukesha engines in varying sizes were popular choices for builders of many kinds of machines, from farm tractors to motor trucks to construction equipment. </babble> :roll:

On Friday, August 18, I went to the Maumee Valley Antique Steam & Gas show east of New Haven, Indiana. Among the things I saw were some made in Ohio. If you're so inclined, click here to see more.

Very impressive downtown, with a brick street, to boot! Also, thanks for the excellent history notes. The courthouse sounds pretty grand.

. ^... True. Even farmers often didn't own buggies; they hitched a team of draft horses to the same wagon they used to haul hay and grain, and when they went to town it was a major effort that was made once a week at most and covered all the in-town business needs in one trip. My great-grandfather lived into the 1930s and never owned a car. He didn't even get a buggy until he retired from farming. Most working-class city dwellers lived within a short walk of their jobs, and for that matter, so did business owners until streetcars came along. The invention of the safety bicycle, the bike as we know it today with relatively small wheels and chain drive, made a big difference in the lives of city folk of modest means

That rant about abiotic oil is from a blog, isn't it? I followed the thread far enough to realize that it was mostly a bunch of people who probably believe in "creation science," too, who gang up to shout down anyone who tries to offer an intelligent, informed comment. On another topic: Whoa, Casey! :wink: What I implied with the photo was mostly tongue-in-cheek. I completely agree that we could never replace all the cars with horses. What we need to do is reduce the person-miles traveled. That's both easy and difficult. It's easy to show that urban density and walkable, mixed-use, transit-oriented development can reduce the demand for oil and the negative environmental consequences of burning it. It's difficult to get across to people who equate 4,000 square feet and a three-car garage on two and a half acres, fifteen miles from any jobs or services, with the fulfillment of the American Dream, that those things aren't the inalienable right of every red-blooded American Patriot, or even desirable compared to more realistic, far-sighted alternatives. I keep coming back to responsible land-use policy. There's still a place for animal power in agriculture, but that's a horse of a different color. :-D

Also, The Nickel Plate Story, by John A. Rehor. It's 400+ pages and went through five printings from 1965 through 1994. It's now out of print, and good used first editions are somewhat collectible, going for as much as $50 - $75. It covers the history of the Nickel Plate Railroad from end to end, and for just about the entire life of the company, and Cleveland and the Terminal Tower project are a significant part of that history. The book has photos of the stations and other facilities that were replaced by the project.

Enjoyable tour!

Possibly (zinc-coated steel). It's more likely terne metal, steel coated with an alloy of lead and zinc. Terne roofs need to be painted, but with proper maintenance they can last a hundred years. Terne roofing is still available for historic preservation work.

I read once that Fort Wayne rail passenger traffic peaked in the years shortly after World War One with 110 daily scheduled passenger trains, not including five interurban lines that radiated out from the city. The major steam roads were Pennsylvania, Wabash and Nickel Plate, and the same article said that about 40 of those 110 trains were on the Pennsylvania. One of the interurbans ran frequent service to Indianapolis and Louisville, and the other ran multiple daily trips to Lafayette through Huntington, Wabash, Peru and Logansport. The interurbans stole passenger traffic from the steam roads with convenience, cleanliness and short-haul speed, and by the late 1930s the interurbans were dropping like flies before the onslaught of automobiles and paved highways.

Nikon just introduced the D80. Same 10.2 megapixel resolution as the D200. MSRP is $999 body-only, $1,299 with 18-135mm Nikkor lens . It's makin' me all fidgety.

I like! You see Chicago pretty much the same way I do.

As much as the painting is lampooned and misappropriated, I've always liked it. I've had a long-time love for those Carpenter Gothic houses, too, with their steeply-pitched roof lines and vertical board-and-batten siding. Most often they're timber-framed like a barn or farm shed; that's the reason for the vertical siding. There's one across the road from the place where I grew up, although the casual passer-by would never notice. It's been added onto and was covered over with stucco in the 1920s, with fake framing hiding the arch of the gothic window in the front gable. I never knew until I saw it from the inside.

I have seen the future. Here's a parking lot.

Excellent set of photos! Chicago is the best visual experience in this part of the country.

Long-haul trucking consumes three to five times more oil per ton-mile than moving freight by rail. That's in addition to the costs incurred by highway congestion.

Anything from a skeet range would be shotgun pellets, probably pretty small. There could be a lot of lead scattered around, though, depending on how long the place has been there.

That illustrates one of the problems with US transportation policy. Railroads pay property tax on their infrastructure, including right-of-way, track and signaling systems. The business-school graduates who have taken over much of railroad management have no comprehension of the realities of railroad operations, including seasonal and cyclical traffic patterns, and a major component of their cost-control activity has been the removal of infrastructure they see as redundant, especially double track. A notable casualty was the former Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago Railroad that was a major link in the PRR, later Conrail, New York - Chicago mainline. It once carried a lot of traffic, and prior to 1990 it carried two Amtrak trains each way, each day (Broadway Limited and Capitol Limited). It also served as a backup for the former NY Central route through South Bend in the event of major track work or accident-caused interruptions. One night when the Lake Shore Limited was detoured through Fort Wayne, I saw three Amtrak trains at Fort Wayne's Baker Street station at one time! CSX got that route as part of the partition of Conrail, and removed the second track and the signaling system, and turned it over for operation to Chicago, Fort Wayne & Eastern, a RailAmerica operation. In its current state it can only handle local feeder traffic instead of supplementing the Water Level Route farther north.

For some folks, "ignore" might be OK. There are a few in my life outside the forums, though, for whom I'd like to have a "delete" button.

The pilot did an excellent job, considering the circumstances. You both walked away from it, and the plane doesn't look like it was too badly messed up. How common is a broken crankshaft on an aircraft engine? I don't think it happens often on automotive or industrial engines unless lubrication or a bearing fails first.

In the late fifties, regular gasoline was steady for a long time at around $0.299, and occasional price wars dropped it to $0.249. At that price I could fill up my $65, 20-year-old Chevy for $3, and that would get me to and from work for the better part of a week. Take into consideration that I had a decent job for a 19-year-old, making $110/week before taxes.

Wow! I want to do that!