Robert Pence

Most cities and towns have or had those ordinances. They date to a time when public uncouth behavior was perhaps even more common than it is now. The ordinances were directed at people who used chewing tobacco and snuff. While ordinary spitting is nasty, the mess left by a spitter who chews tobacco is very noticeably disgusting and unsanitary. Some people who came to town from surrounding farms and woods had never been taught how to act in public (just like an increasing number of kids and some adults now :roll:), hence the ordinances. When I was a teenager. the county courthouse still had brass spittoons in the corridors, beneath old, faded signs admonishing visitors of severe penalties for spitting on floors and in stairwells.

There are probably some engineers, chemists or biochemists on the forum who can explain it pretty precisely, but let me take a shot at it from a layman's point of view. < :speech: >Hydrogen is chemically active, which means it isn't often found in a free state in nature. It is most commonly found in stable compounds with oxygen and with carbon; for example, water, carbohydrates in food (fat, starch, sugar, alcohol), hydrocarbon fuels (natural gas, crude oil, refined petroleum products like gasoline, kerosene and diesel fuel). Water can be separated into its two component elements, hydrogen and oxygen, by passing an electrical current through it (electrolysis). Chemical reactive processes can extract hydrogen from petroleum or natural gas. Both of these techniques now require more energy input than the energy contained in the hydrogen produced. Scientists are studying biological processes by which microbes can use sunlight and photosynthesis to break down water into hydrogen and oxygen. If that process can be developed on a commercial scale, it might make hydrogen affordable as a fuel. For the time being, though, it's not a realistic solution for large-scale application.< / :speech: >

Dang! So that's how it's done! :-o I visited NY a couple times; it was so different from everything I was used to, I never did figure out how to photograph it. Great shots! :clap:

Wonderful!

Definitely not a typical Chicago tourist thread! Most interesting tour!

:-D :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :roll:

Wow! More! Those have me all fidgety with anticipation! :clap:

Is there no escape? Is there no place a person can find refuge from the boxes that show pictures while spewing inane, endless babbling? :shoot: They'd best put bars in the vehicles, too, or at least do away with the prohibition against drinking on board. That's the only thing that could get me to put up with the TVs :drunk:

Maybe they can adopt an even more innovative fare structure; cheap on-line fares, but if the bus runs out of fuel, the passengers have to pony up to buy more. Or have each passenger bring his own fuel, and then pay the driver by taking up a collection.

I know of more than one or two native-born Americans who fit that description, and not all of them are poor or uneducated. I haven't seen much evidence of a strong movement to apply to them the same sanctions and punishments that some folks are advocating for "illegal" immigrants and people who help them.

Some strange-looking hybrids in Verlyn Place! Nice tour.

Classy, especially the black-and-white.

There were connecting buses to both Waterloo and Garrett, and I used each one. They were clean and comfortable and met the trains at trackside. At first they departed from a local transit facility downtown that had an enclosed, heated waiting room on the street level of a parking garage, still walkable from my house. Later, they moved the shuttles to a strip mall in North Suburban Hell and successfully drove away enough business that they were able to eliminate them. The location was marginally reachable by public transit, with an unsheltered bus stop across a busy arterial road that had no sidewalk. Ride the shuttle from Waterloo to Fort Wayne, and then wait in the gravel, weeds and mud along a highway with cars streaming past at 50mph plus, for a bus that ran every half hour. Amtrak passenger parking was in a minimally-lighted area behind the strip mall. Local bus service to the strip mall started after the shuttle left for the westbound trains, quit before the shuttle from the eastbound trains got there, and didn't run on Sundays. It was almost as if the whole thing had been orchestrated by someone trained the waning days of the Pennsylvania Railroad to drive away customers.

I just had a "Duh!" moment. Amtrak states that Waterloo has the second-highest passenger count in Indiana, 19,000 last year versus Indianapolis' 26,000. That volume appears to justify station improvements. Here's where the "uh-oh" comes in: Both Midwest High Speed Rail Association and the Ohio Hub plan propose routes that would restore service through Fort Wayne to Chicago. A large part of Waterloo's ridership probably results from the fact that since November 1990 it has been the Amtrak stop nearest Fort Wayne, and I think a large part of local Amtrak ridership is for day or weekend trips to Chicago. If service were restored through Fort Wayne, Waterloo would likely lose a big chunk of that 19,000. I'll start doing license plate counts in the parking lot when I visit Waterloo, and see how many are from Allen County (Fort Wayne), compared with DeKalb County (Waterloo) and nearby.

Looks pretty lively to me; I don' see no tumbleweeds!

Sad. Do you suppose the answers to pollution and traffic congestion might be found somewhere other than in expanding and tweaking highways and building different cars? :?

It does seem unreasonable to require major investment by communities without giving any assurance that those places will continue to have passenger service long enough to justify the cost. It's not a new phenomenon, sadly.

I think it's inspiring. I can visualize signs at the city limits of my town, saying: Welcome to Fort Wayne Unwavering commitment to mediocrity Or signs at the various county lines, with illuminated digital clocks: Welcome to _______ County The time here is xx:xx [am/pm] [central/eastern][daylight/standard]

I visited the depot shortly after it was moved and reopened, during a summer event at the park. I'm not sure I remember everything one of the locals told me, but I think it was originally a freight house, and there was a separate depot located a little farther west, where the two lines crossed. There are crossovers between the two tracks, so that both eastbound and westbound Amtrak trains use the north track adjacent to the current passenger platform. Maybe the old depot is farther east than the track served by the crossovers; judging by the signals in the second photo, I'd guess that's the case, and the reason for NS insisting on a grade-separated pedestrian crossing if the station is moved. It seems to me that it would be less costly both in intial investment and long-term upkeep to pay the railroad to move the east crossover. There are a few more photos of the Baker Street PRR station on the Fort Wayne page of my web site; scroll to the bottom of the thumbnail page to find them.

Welcome! Those are some beautiful shots, and most of them are views I haven't seen before.

Good stuff! That little building -- looks like it may have been a firehouse from the horse-drawn steam-pump days, updated in the 50s or 60s with a stone veneer facade.

Yes, indeed! Beautiful day, beautiful pics.

Waterloo train depot closer to renovation By Angela Mapes The Journal Gazette [April 8, 2006] Waterloo – Throughout the years, the Waterloo depot has been dismantled piece-by-piece, rebuilt in a new location, and once, long before, smashed into by a wayward locomotive. Now, restoration of the DeKalb County town’s historic landmark is one step closer to completion. Town council members, in a special meeting Friday, selected Fort Wayne firm Martin-Riley to oversee the restoration of the structure, built in the late 1800s. A project proposal by Martin-Riley said the building between West Van Vleek Street and the Norfolk Souther Railroad tracks in downtown Waterloo will be renovated inside and out. The firm plans to rehabilitate the passenger waiting area. Other additions include men’s and women’s restrooms, and an area to display historic railroad memorabilia and an office/conference room to be used by the Waterloo Chamber of Commerce. More at http://www.journalgazette.net/ Amtrak’s current spare-no-expense, luxurious passenger station Fort Wayne's former PRR Baker Street Station, home of Martin-Riley Architects

I'm thinking wishfully far into the future, or maybe fantasizing is a better word for it -- imagine people forsaking sprawling suburbs and exasperating, expensive car commuting and moving into dense planned communities with walkable services and convenient transit, and the sprawling suburbs beset by plummeting property values and falling into disuse and decay and then being bulldozed to restore the wetlands and farmland that were destroyed to build them. Imagine a whole new industrial sector, for a few years, anyway, based on recycling vinyl siding, SUVs, and $5,000 lawnmowers.

Neat thread! I love those boulevards and parks. A couple times a year I get to the U of Chicago/Washington Park area (where they're restoring Lorado Taft's Fountain of Time. I remember those green and white subway/elevated cars made from surplus PCC trolleys; I think they ran well into the seventies. They were rough and noisy compared with the later cars, but an acquaintance who worked for CTA then said they were the fastest, most reliable cars on the system. I remember that you could hear the gears howl on some of them as they took off from a stop. With no air conditioning, they ran with the windows open most of the time in summer. If the windows were open when they made the transition from elevated to subway at Fullerton, the noise inside was deafening, even painful to me unless I plugged my ears.