Robert Pence

Nice & crisp! Great photos! I think above-ground power lines, phone lines, cable TV, etc. are a blight on the landscape, both urban and rural, and should be run through buried conduit both for scenic improvement and to reduce disruption from weather events. Trolley catenary, whether it's bus or streetcar, is a different story. To me, it belongs and indicates the presence of clean, efficient public transportation. Because of an ordinance prohibiting overhead wires in the District of Columbia, streetcars there drew power from a conduit or third rail beneath a slot between the tracks. I don't know if that would work in places where the winters are more severe, but it worked there for many years. Trying to run trolley buses that way would present a special problem because they don't follow a precise, repeatable path in the street. </ramble>

Excellent tour, great light! I love the Oregon District. One of the wonderful things is that there are some newer houses that are just about indistinguishable from the originals unless you read the dates on the bronze plaques.

Interesting. I haven't seen that part of the city yet. Fort Wayne had its grand plans in the time just before World War I, too. There was to be a civic center at the confluence of the St. Joseph and St. Marys Rivers, headwaters of the Maumee, including government buildings, an arts complex and a union railroad station. None of it ever happened. There have been subsequent grand visions for downtown, but all the vast plans get watered down to half-assed realities as toned-down single pieces of proposed complexes get planted here and there in a disjoint mishmash. The Grand Wayne Center, though not quite a match for Dayton's Schuster Center, is a very respectable convention center connected with the Hilton Hotel. It should have been built overlooking the three rivers, but it's between the two busiest downtown one-way thoroughfares, with its grand panoramic view encompassing a liquor store and three blocks of un-landscaped parking lots.

Interesting. I've worked in factories where they overlaid the concrete floors with a wear layer of brick-sized wood blocks treated in an asphalt-like material, but I never realized that they used them on streets, too. In factory floors they were protected from weather and didn't need expansion room, so they were laid fairly tightly. If they got soaked for a prolonged period, though, they'd pop up like a wood-plank floor. Another seldom-heard-of street paving material is bituminous brick or block. I think it was made from the tarry byproducts of coal burning, especially in power plants and the plants that produced city gas from coal before pipelines supplied natural gas. Several years ago a sewer excavation in a downtown Fort Wayne street unearthed a layer of them. They were a little smaller than paving bricks, black and very dense and heavy.

...or cutting her hair short, wearing sweatshirts and hanging with a lesbian softball team. :-D

Maybe they named it after a city in Spain. :-D Oh, and I wouldn't necessarily want to run Windows over OS X; I was just curious as to whether there was a way that I could make the switch and salvage my investment in Office Pro and Photoshop CS2. It's not really an issue right now; I've gone ahead with construction of a new system with AMD Athlon 64 3700+, 2GB RAM and SATA RAID 0. I didn't want to spring for the extra bucks for dual-core architecture just yet, but this system should hold me for 2 or 3 years, and that's about how often I replace systems.

Having to run barge tows through locks that are too short is an arduous process. I've watched them on the Ohio and on the Mississipi, and they have to break the tow into two or more segments. The left-behind barges have to be tied off while the towboat locks through with one segment at a time and then ties off that segment on the other side of the locks. After everything is locked through, they have to reassemble the tow before going on. The process jams up everything, and nobody else gets through until they're finished. I've seen four barge tows queued up down the river waiting while one tow takes nearly an hour to get through. It looked to me like taking apart and reassembling tows could be the most dangerous part of the workers' jobs, too.

Oops! Looks like the pilot missed the swing bridge opening by just a tad. The shipyard photos are remarkable. Jacksonville Concrete Shipyards is just what the name implies; because of steel shortages during World War I, ship builders experimented with hulls of poured, reinforced concrete. These 1919 photos must have been pretty near the end of that enterprise, because steel became available with the end of the war, and the concrete ship business foundered. Only about a dozen were completed and commissioned.

I'd love to be able to escape the evil clutches of Microsoft and their piracy paranoia on my AMD-based machines. I like to tweak around with hardware, swapping hard drives and changing memory, etc., and XP doesn't let me do very much without demanding to be re-activated. After a few times it says I'm out of chances, and makes me call an 800 number where i get somebody in India who treats me like King of the Software Pirates before giving me a huge activation key that I have to type in and enter on the spot, without time to write it down. Problem is, I have a ton of Windows-based software and even if OS-X will eventually run on my system, I'd be faced with the same dilemma that Mac users face; replacing all the application software. So far, I don't have the knowledge or time to experiment with Linux, so I don't know if I could make my stuff run on a Linux system.

Nope, but the guy had just bought it and had stopped by his apartment to change clothes before taking it to show his parents. That was just a few blocks from my house. That is my bicycle parked in the street, though. I still ride it, but it's no longer shiny.

Gorgeous!

Such grandeur! I got chills just looking at the photos.

That's frightening; had it hit her differently, it possibly could have decapitated her. In the early 70's, when the Fort Wayne National Bank (now National City Bank) 26-story tower was new, seven large plate-glass windows blew out of the upper stories during a storm along with objects like lamps that were near the windows. Fortunately no one was hit; the weather probably had driven everyone inside. The street and sidewalk below were littered with shattered glass, and the window-mounting systems for the entire tower had to be re-engineered and replaced. I think the event was attributed to the mounting systems not incorporating sufficient allowance for the flexing of the building in high winds. It might have been the same storm that did this:

"root" The concept of "highway" defined by limited access is new to me. To me, almost any state route is a highway in that it's a step above a county road. Limited access defines an expressway. Maybe part of the difference in interpretation is that I started driving in 1955, before there were interstates, at least in the midwest. The only limited-access roads I knew then were toll roads, or "turnpikes."

The lightrailnow article is excellent. It's visionary, yet solidly realistic and fact-based. A sidelight that may be interesting and known only to arcana-obsessed railfans (redundancy?) involves the electrification of Swiss railways. What brought it to mind was the article's mention of the long lifespan of capital equipment on the railroads. The Swiss railway system is quite old, and prior to the buildup of German militarism leading to WWII, the Swiss were heavily dependent upon coal-fired steam locomotives for the brute power needed to muscle freight through the mountains. The coal came from Germany's Ruhr Valley, and when the Germans cut off coal exports and hoarded their supplies to fuel their war machine, the Swiss had a problem. They already had significant hydropower resources, with potential sites for a lot more. They expanded their railway electrification and installed pantographs atop the steam locomotives and put huge electric resistance heating elements inside the boilers, effectively turning them into giant electric water heaters. It was terribly inefficient, but the power was comparatively cheap. Additional benefits were the elimination of the logistics and costs of handling the coal, the elimination of smoke, soot, and hazardous embers discharged along the track, and longer life of flues and other boiler components. This tactic is irrelevant now, but I think the Swiss certainly demonstrated "thinking outside the box."

Holy smoke! Most likely Kodachrome, possibly shot with a Leica. A lot of the pictures have the warmth and richness of old Kodachrome, except for a couple that turned red, which is what Anscochrome slides did after a few years. Kodachrome is the only film I know of that was available at that time that would have held its color that well, and it was pretty much the journalistic standard. At that, the scanning and reproduction work was skilfuly done. The black-and-white FSA photos that I've seen have a wonderful, stark artistic quality; color gives these an amazing presence. They really prove that photography isn't about ISO or pixels or f/1.2 lenses or fantastic zoom; Kodachrome then was ASA (ISO) 10, a fast lens was f/4.5, a really fancy camera had a shutter speed range from 1 second to 1/500 and no autofocus or built-in meter. A 35mm lens was about as wide as it got in 35mm film, and so far as I know, zoom lenses weren't even thought of. Get a life, Rob! </ramble-babble>

60% General American English 20% Yankee 10% Dixie 5% Midwestern 5% Upper Midwestern Y'all forgot that after you warsh your clothes, you gotta' wrench 'em. And it ain't a bag or a sack; it's a poke! In the morning I have breakfast, at noon I have lunch if it's fast food or a snack on the run / dinner if it's sit down with tableware and food prepared in the kitchen, and in the evening I have supper.

Beautiful treasures -- the second photo, with the plane and ships, is so iconic it almost looks like a poster design.

I've lost track of Philip. I think he graduated college and went off to medical school. Matthew has settled down quite a bit, working as a diesel mechanic and driving trucks and providing for a family, with a little boy who is just as impulsive and accident-prone as he was. The kid keeps him on his toes.

Ohio Railway Museum's web site looks current and maintained, and it appears they still sponsor excursions and give short rides in an interurban car. What noozer said is pretty much on the mark, about acquisitions exceeding capability to restore and maintain them. I haven't been there in twenty or twenty-five years, but then they were trying to raise money to fence the property because of terrible problems with vandalism. They had, indeed, spent so much money and effort trying to save every piece of junk they heard about from the scrapper, that they didn't have much left to even take care of their property. When I was there, the steam locomotive was still operable and occasionally ran excursions. On their web site, I see that they've at least covered a lot of their equipment with tarps to protect it. They own some of rreally nice equipment, especially electric traction, and when I was there they also had a fair amount of junk that should have gone to somebody else. They once had aspirations to run their trolley line all the way downtown, but I suppose the right-of-way has been developed by now. The Indiana Transportation Museum, in Forest Park at Noblesville, was in a similar situation, but I think they've cleaned up their act (and their junk). They have a large, capable shop and do some work on rolling stock for other tourist lines and private owners, and have built up a sizable fleet of restored locomotives, cabooses and coaches. The place used to be a junkyard, fascinating to walk through but challenging because of the weeds and brush. It was depressing when I really thought about it. I think the park department gave them an ultimatum to clean up or scram. They have a short stretch of electrified track where they give rides on vintage North Shore cars, and in the fall they operate shuttle trains between Fishers and the Indiana State Fair. They run occasional excursions in summer behind former Nickel Plate Light Mikado 587, a very handsome engine, and in the past they have run trips to Tall Stacks at Cincinnati.

Reminds me of an incident several years ago that was, in a way, kind of humorous to observe and recall but probably somewhat harrowing for the participants. During a winter flood, my nephew and his buddy, then about 18 and both pretty accomplished outdoorsmen and canoeists, decided to see if they could travel Sixmile Creek from my parents' farm to the Wabash River. The distance is about five miles, and normally the creek is too shallow and has too much debris to travel very far in canoe. Sixmile Creek is a tributary to the Wabash, but during high water it's definitely not a backwater. The current moves pretty fast. About halfway, they hit a submerged fence and got dumped. They both made it ashore safely with only a few abrasions and bruises, and even managed to recover the canoe. They soon realized they were in serious trouble, though, because they were completely soaked in the cold water, and the air temp was about 20 degrees F with a good breeze. They were near a road, but about a mile from the nearest house. Luckily I was driving from town to the farm via that road, an alternate route but not my usual one, when I saw two kids in the road ahead, jumping up and down and waving their arms -- Matthew and Philip, the two wilderness adventurers. I picked them up and cranked up the heater full blast and headed for the house. They were at the edge of hypothermia, shaking so hard they could hardly tell me what had happened. Back at the house, they thawed out with a hot showers and got into dry clothes, and then we took the truck back to the scene and retrieved the canoe. I think they gained new respect for fast-moving water that day.

I like KJP's idea. That area needs a boost, and it's near enough to some already-decent places to make it viable. I used to use that station 25 years ago when I was dating someone who lived in Lakewood, and it was a filthy, run-down dump, then. I can't image that it has improved on its own in the intervening years.

Wonderful off-the-beaten-path tour; some of those places are loaded with historic charm. Thanks for the history lesson!

Some of those houses are elegant!

Bright & colorful. Thanks for the delightful tour!