Robert Pence

Fun thread, beautiful dog.

I think your timing was perfect; the weather adds to the atmosphere of those photos, and they're better than they would have been on a sunny, blue-sky day. Strong images. By the way, I'm not very familiar with Cincinnati except from pictures and don't know the context of that structure, but the acronym, "CUT" is often used to refer to Cincinnati Union Terminal.

Nice! I like the larger images; your photos have a lot of excellent detail, and the larger pics make it easier for me to see.

I said it before, and I'll said it again. I needs me some Philadelphia!

It's surprising the unused platforms, canopies and concourse weren't ripped out. Toledo could still be a pretty classy station if it were fixed up. About 1980 I rode Amtrak from Detroit to Toledo, departing from the old Michigan Central Station in Detroit when it was still intact and the passenger concourse was still open. Upon detraining at Toledo I was pleasantly taken aback to discover an Amtrak station with a working escalator.

At least in Fort Wayne, commercial realtors leave their signs up until a buyer takes possession. The signs keep their name in front of people shopping for commercial properties, and generate inquiries and opportunities to show potential buyers other properties. The same thing is true in most cases with residential properties. Yep! It's a block south and a block west. Washington (westbound) and Jefferson (eastbound) are the major east-west streets through downtown, and that makes them attractive to fast-food enterpreneurs. The recent expansions of the library and the convention center displaced some of those franchises (McDonald's, Arby's, etc.), and they have relocated near that intersection. Incidentally, the library has long been recognized as one of Fort Wayne's premier assets; its genealogy department ranks close to the Mormon repository in Salt Lake City, and people come from all over the country to research family histories. The building is being updated and doubled in size, and the library is temporarily housed in an office building a few blocks east of its permanent home. The new facility looks impressive in scale and design, and I'm eager to see it when it opens, supposedly late this year.

Nice work! Do they openly allow photography in the Metro, or did you take those shots clandestinely?

I've been pleasantly surprised that Fort Wayne's PRR station survived the Conrail demolition crews. After Amtrak left in 1990, the benches were removed, an antiques dealer stole the platform lights, and the building was boarded up. Even though there was talk about adaptive reuse, it stood vacant and vandalized for several years. The also-unused adjacent Railway Express building burned in a suspicious fire that I always thought was set or hired by the railroad to reduce demolition costs, and I fully expected the station to meet the same fate. Fortunately, an architectural firm finally bought it and did a beautiful renovation. It now houses their offices, and the main concourse is available for special events and parties. I took Amtrak to Canton around 1979. As I recall, they had a tunnel and stairway between the station and platform. I thought that was rather unusual for such a small station.

Yeah. We got rules about spray-painting stupid crap on buildings, too. A lot of good it does. :roll:

The former Firestone store at the corner of Fairfield and Jefferson in Fort Wayne has been on the endangered list ever since McMahon Tire moved their truck tire business out of it in 1999. Recently a Starbucks franchisee announced plans to spend $1 million to renovate it and put in a coffee shop with a drive thru. The building has been deteriorating, and parts of it weren't all that great even before McMahon moved out. Over the weekend, a weak section of roof over a garage area in the rear suffered a partial collapse as a result of heavy rains. It pulled the top of an end wall inward and shoved a side wall outward causing it to shed masonry into the driveway. According to the Redevelopment Director for the city, the part of the building that failed was destined for demolition as part of the renovation, so apparently the mishap won't have an adverse effect on the Starbucks plans. Older deterioration

Burnham initiated the designs for Union Station in Chicago, too, but died before the project was far along. It was completed by successor firm Graham Anderson Probst & White. I'm thinking they also created Cleveland's Union Terminal.

I had almost forgotten about this great thread. It was fun to browse it again. :-D

That is nice. I remember the trainshed in Munich, too, as being very open and inviting. The old trainsheds on the American railroads in the steam era were often anything but airy, though. I remember detraining at Dearborn Station in Chicago with my dad when I was about six years old. I think there were skylights, but they may have been sooted over, or possibly painted for blackout purposes during WWII. The only daylight that penetrated the inner recesses came through the smoke slots, and the air inside was sulfurous with coal smoke and in winter, clammy and humid from steam from locomotives and the heating systems for the cars. Not that it was all bad; I still feel a thrill when I smell the mixture of coal smoke and steam and hot cylinder oil. Top it off with the smell of brakes from a long train decelerating and stopping at the platform and ... :-)

This one was part of the Burnham plan, wasn't it? I think I remember reading that the Van Sweringens were instrumental in scuttling that idea, and did a lot of political maneuvering to get their terminal built on their chosen site. I'll have to look that up again. The Nickel Plate Story by John Rehor has a lot of history on Terminal Tower and Cleveland's early railroad scene. Here's the old B&O station. It lost its mansard roof and clock tower (center of opposite side of building) in a fire long ago.

I guess I need to amend that; I got my start here with photos of Cleveland, and I've been visiting there every so often for more than 25 years. The character of the city resonated with me the first time I experienced it, and it's still one of my special places. I like Chicago a bunch, too, and I have photos going back about the same amount of time, that I haven't yet had time to scan and post.

There's some blight, for sure, but some interesting character, too. All it needs is millions of dollars of investment, and it could be a delightful place.

Wonderful collection, KJP. I've seen some construction photos, but nothing as extensive as that.

Wow, Jeff! Another exquisitely detailed research and documentation project! In some ways, Dayton sounds a lot like Fort Wayne on a larger scale. Here, over the years probably millions have been spent on consultants, whose plans were ultimately thrown out because they didn't suit the movers and shakers (Well, that's a misrepresentation. There haven't been any movers and shakers, just wealthy, influential people who sit on their money and hoard it.), or watered down to something cheap and uninspired/uninspiring. I've seen grand visionary proposals going back as far as 1915 for turning a drab, dwindling, dying downtown into something dynamic and exciting, and if the people who thought it was in bad shape in 1915 could see it now, pretty in spots but without signs of intelligent life...

Cincinnati's station is very impressive and its architectural style is striking. It's one of the last great union stations to be built in the U.S. <:type:>If you look at Cleveland Terminal Tower's original design and the supporting infrastructure that went along with it, it overshadows everything in the Midwest except for Chicago and New York. In terms of earth moved, excavation for the track alignments was the biggest such project in the Western Hemisphere except for possibly the Panama Canal. To support the tower and terminal above the unstable river-delta soil, concrete caissons up to ten feet in diameter were sunk to bedrock. I'm pulling the numbers from memory now, but I think there were some two hundred caissons going about 200 feet deep. The track platforms were forty feet below street level, and there were multiple levels to the station to provide passenger services and all the support functions. The cost of the structure, not including track work, was $88 million in 1928 dollars. Much of the original passenger terminal structure was removed to build the central atrium of Tower City. The original concourse bore some resemblance to the old Union Station concourse in Chicago, and in fact both facilities were designed by Graham Anderson Probst & White, successor firm to D.H. Burnham & Co. </ :type:>

Fort Wayne, Indiana

I just found a link to a site for Ohio's railroad stations. It includes both current and historic photos, and information on stations that no longer exist

That's an amazing place. It's wonderful that it has been lovingly restored and preserved.

I stumbled across a reference to this link while looking for something entirely unrelated. It's about a year old, and I don't know what the follow-up has been, but I thought it was interesting to read how tough Illinois was planning to get over speeding in work zones, and how they were implementing speed cameras to assist in their efforts. Where a lot of places are imposing what amount to token fines and treating violations as civil infractions that don't affect people's driving records, Illinois was proposing something a lot more severe. http://www.dot.state.il.us/press/r033005.html

<<GRUMBLE!>> :-(

It looks like ODOT is trying to fix the problems. That's better than Indiana's solution impemented over a period of a few years. They simply closed all theirs except for the ones on interstate highways. I think Indiana's only remaining rest area not on an interstate is on US 30 west of Fort Wayne, probably an accomodation for the large amount of long-distance truck traffic on that road.