Robert Pence

Excellent thread; some classic views and some new ones, too. It looks like the County Engineer's building is getting the masonry cleaned and repointed and windows replaced.

Good photos! The image size works about right for me.

Good to see these, again.

Gorgeous sunsets, too!

Beautiful!

The flat lighting works well on a lot of these scenes, bringing out the details in what would normally be shadow areas. I like the way you composed a lot of these -- nice, big, frame-filling images.

Good views of downtown density.

Unique shots! The L&N bridge is one massive, imposing structure.

The NS former Nickel Plate Chicago-Cleveland mainline has one of its few grade-level crossings in town just a few blocks from my house. The street is busy, and there's a stoplight just a half-block south of the crossing. Traffic backs up from the stoplight, and at almost every light cycle a couple of idiots manages to get themselves stuck in a line of traffic and stopped on the tracks. A curve in the tracks about a block to the west makes it impossible to see trains coming from that direction until the last minute, and they're often moving about 40 mph, sometimes faster, and coming off a grade and trying to maintain speed to head up onto the elevation. Surprisingly, accidents have been few, but about thirty years ago an acquaintance of mine and two of his friends died there, probably a consequence of impaired driving, since it happened late on a Saturday night. Last year, the city lost a big, new snowplow truck when the driver stopped on the tracks. He couldn't get the truck out of the way in time, but he was able to bail and get clear. Sure tore up that truck; the locomotive pushed it about a hundred feet from the crossing, where it then rolled down an embankment.

Radical concept! Most of Fort Wayne's drivers are pretty friendly, but recently I was snapped at by a personification of road-rage-driving-a-bus for standing up from my seat before the bus came to a complete stop. I've never had the misfortune of riding with that driver before, so I don't know if he was just having a bad day, or if he's a bad-ass control freak.

It's frustrating to see urban real estate going to waste while builders create more rural sprawl.

< :speech: >Technically, the trolley is the device at the end of the pole, that follows the overhead wire to pick up power. The vehicle may be a streetcar (rails) or a bus (rubber tires), but the overhead catenary power pickup is mandatory.</ :speech: > That said, I'll go along with X. Anything that gets people moving around downtown without their cars is a step in the right direction.

Considering the number of drivers who ignore stop signs at intersections, and the idiots who drive around crossing gates, I wonder how much good it'll do. One of the most delightful things I've seen involved a big macho jock in a convertible, who passed up a long line of cars waiting at a crossing for a freight train to pass. He pulled up in the left lane right next to the gate, ready to make a dash between the gates and get the jump on everyone as soon as the train passed. As he sat there, he turned around and grinned at all the other drivers, as if to say, "Ain't I some shit!" As the last train car cleared the crossing, the first vehicle on the other side turned out to be a police car, and the flashers on top went on immediately. All up and down the line, people were tooting their horns and cheering.

Separating some crossings and closing others yields multiple benefits; fewer crossing accidents, higher running speeds for railroads, and eliminating the need for engineers to sound air horns for crossings, improving quality of life for nearby residents. I'm all for it.

In Skybar, in the Post Your Photo V3.0.1 thread. The metamorphosis starts with post #562, on page 23.

Wonderful. The Union Terminal is an art deco feast!

dat's where it come from!

That's an excellent article, both informed and informative. It's far above the quality of what gets published in a lot of media. For some time to come, most of North America's passenger rail service will be tied to the freight railroads; the acquisition and construction costs associated with dedicated high-speed rail rights-of-way are just too great for the public to accept because of the distances involved, compared with many other parts of the world that have denser development and more advanced passenger rail systems. The same technical innovations that increase safety, speeds and capacity of freight trains can make it possible to integrate passenger rail into existing rail networks with fewer delays and more reliable on-time operation.

Wonderful tour! I love bridges, and those are great shots. Hell Gate is one of America's most impressive.

looks flavorful!

Hoping not to belabor the subject to death, but I asked a friend who's very familiar with Oliver history about this. He said that Oliver bought American Seeding Machine Co. in Springfield in 1929 or 1930, after the merger of Oliver, Hart-Parr and Nichols & Sheppard. They continued to operate the plant until the 1950s, and manufactured their manure spreaders and all their seeding/planting machinery there. I'd guess the date of the grain drill is pretty close to the 1929-1930 purchase by Oliver, because this machine had a then-outdated design with wood wheels. It appears to be early production for Oliver, because all they did was put their name on the American machine. Later versions had all-steel wheels, and by the 1950s they had standard-sized rubber tires and steel boxes for seed and fertilizer. For an excellent, concise overview of Oliver and the companies they acquired, click here.

Wonderful thread. I've never visited that neighborhood.

The Norfolk Southern facility east of Fort Wayne is pretty tight, I think. They always have been, from a liability standpoint; the railroad bulls are old-school and remind me of Pinkerton thugs from the 1920s, and they're armed. They've never been railfan-friendly and would pounce on you in a minute for trespassing, although in the past I didn't have any problems when taking photos from the public road that runs past the edge of the yard. I've heard recently of people being pulled over for taking photos from their cars, or even being stopped and checked out for driving by too slowly. I used to trespass regularly on the overpass through downtown, but haven't tried it in quite a while. I suppose I should start listening to my scanner and see if train crews are reporting trespassers and photographers. I had one run-in with the RR cops quite some time ago, and don't care to repeat it. They're very rude and intimidating and make the Union Station security look like pussycats.

Better cut mine in six slices; I don't think I can eat eight. :-D In most parts of the country this may sound like blasphemy because in most places they really suck, but in Indiana, the Pizza Huts are generally very good. The Fort Wayne family that owns most of the Indiana franchises (even though they be very conservative Republicans) knows how to do it. Their restaurants are comfortable and busy, food is excellent, portions are generous, and service is prompt and friendly. I got used to Indiana Pizza Huts, and one day while I was visiting my parents in Florida, Mom and I stopped at a pizza hut expecting something good. Godawful is the only word I can think of to describe it. The place was drab, plasticky and sterile, the service was indifferent, and the pizza was dry, cardboardy and not even hot. No wonder the restaurant was damn near empty.

tcjoe, here's a picture of an intact machine very similar to what you discovered. This one is by a different manufacturer, but probably almost identical in appearance: The long wood box held seed grain, and a mechanism driven by one wheel metered it out into evenly spaced-rows, where the machine covered it. Often, the box was divided lengthwise into two compartments; one dispensed seed, and the other dispensed fertilizer. The small box below and in front of the larger one was used to dispense seed for hay & pasture crops; often they were planted along with wheat, so that after the wheat was harvested, the pasture crop grew up to take its place. The more I look at your pictures of your find, the more I think it probably perished in a fire. Otherwise, at least some fragments of the wood likely would have remained, especially in the wheels which were often made of ash or hickory. All that remains of the wheels is the iron tire, or band, that provided a wearing surface around the outer perimeter. The whole structure seems to be bent in the middle, too, which could have happened when part of a barn or shed fell on it while it was red hot. It might be fun to poke around with a metal detector and look for building hardware. Perhaps it was in a building that burned on the very spot where it now rests.