Robert Pence

:-D

Both towns look like they have some good buldings. Bowling Green appears to have fewer boarded-up second stories than Findlay. Thanks for the mini-tours.

Maybe a forum meet will show the city's leaders the tremendous revenue potential in tourism! While we're there, we can use our power and influence to sway public opinion in favor of light rail.

National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP) (www.narprail.org), ardent supporters of David Gunn during his tenure, are softpedaling their response and trying to sound as conciliatory as they can. They seem to acknowledge that they aren't in a position of power, and have to be able to work with whoever runs Amtrak.

Making Detroit look good!

Beautiful! Showing Dayton in the best light, literally!

Wonderful photo set -- everything from treasures to travesties! I think the black-and-white rendering, along with the hazy light, makes that opening shot possibly the most dramatic Cincinnati skyline photo I've seen.

Neat idea!

Interesting photo coverage. Isn't Hoover the dam that's in the PBS documentary that airs occasionally, with vintage film of the construction? The documentary shows what in amazing construction feat it was, especially given the technology available at the time.

It seems to me the midwest auto train actually loaded farther south, maybe in the Louisville area. It's been a while, and I'm not up to digging out old timetables right now to check it out. I think it was doomed by the same thing that kept the Chicago - Florida train (Floridian?) from succeeding, abysmal track maintenance on L&N tracks, almost eternal slow-orders, consistently very late trains and a bad ride. There may have even been a horrendously-expensive derailment that hastened the end of the midwest auto train. The loading point was too far from major northern population centers and comparatively too near to its destination to attract customers, too. If I were going to drive from Chicago to Louisville to catch an auto train, I'd likely say "To hell with it," and keep driving. I always thought an auto train might have done better if they had originated it in Fort Wayne, nearly equidistant between Detroit, Chicago and Indianapolis, and run it south via Cincinnati, using the N-S Newcastle District between Fort Wayne and Cincinnati. They might have picked up additional business in Cincinnati.

Actually, it was a common practice, especially for small farmers. The railroads had procedures and tarrifs for the service. In the early 1900's one of my maternal grandfather's brothers moved his household from Indiana to Missouri. The railroad provided a boxcar for the farmer, his family, his livestock and his household goods and farm tools. He loaded the boxcar at a siding in a town near his farm, and the railroad delivered the car to a siding or railyard near his destination. He was responsible for providing all necessities en route including food for his family and feed for his livestock and water for both. They spent a few days in a railroad yard at Danville, Illinois, and he had to carry water from almost a half-mile away. It certainly wasn't luxury travel, but it was the only option other than selling all his animals and equipment and starting over in a new location. By that time, farmers had too much invested in tools and implements, even horse-drawn, to try to transport it long distances by wagon or the trucks that existed then. In the era of steam-powered farming, up through the 1920s, steam traction engines and threshing machines cost thousands of dollars, too costly for individual farmers, and custom harvesters filled the need. They often started the wheat harvest in Indiana or Illinois and travel westward by road in relatively short increments, following the harvest season to the plains states and sometimes ending up as far away as Kansas, Oklahoma and Montana. At the end of the harvest, they paid off their workers and turned them loose, and hired a flatcar or two from the railroad to transport their equipment home. Before the advent of paved government-run highway systems that facilitated the growth of the trucking industry, the rail system was much more widespread and more oriented toward small shippers, express service and less-than-carload freight. Sears Roebuck even delivered the building-material packages for their houses by rail to individual buyers. Dad told of the building of a Sears house near where we farmed. The entire package arrived at a siding in Bluffton, about five miles from the building site. The load was divided into bundles for each day's work, and the car was loaded last-in, first-out, so that the first materials needed were on top. Early each morning the builder went to the siding and loaded the day's work onto a wagon and took it to the building site. I'll shut up now, so someone can re-rail this thread. Sorry about the derailment.

Have you checked the nearest Cheesecake Factory? :wink:

Disclaimer: Sometimes I'm full of crap, and I don't always admit it. :wink: I do appreciate being shown the error of my ways, so long as it's done kindly. Although I have good intentions :-), I haven't worked very hard at mastering the intricacies of Photoshop. I've picked up some things from magazine articles, experimenting and word-of-mouth. This seems to work for me, so far. The same workflow applies to scanned negatives and slides. Nominally, I go for 800 x 600 @ 150 ppi for web posting, but I don't really adhere to a specific aspect ratio. I generally work toward a long dimension of 800 whether horizontal or vertical, and may crop out extraneous sky or foreground if I think it helps the overall picture. Here's what I do: First I adjust the tonal values of the camera RAW image (shadow, highlight, contrast, color balance). Next, resize to 800 x 600 @ 150 ppi. Actually, this comes out more like 800 x 532 for D70 RAW files. Open a new RGB window at 150 ppi and drag the photo onto it. Use CTRL + ' to overlay a grid on the image. Use Edit > Transform > Rotate to rotate the image and correct the horizontal/vertical orientation. Use CTRL + ' again to turn off the grid. Use Layer > Flatten Image Use the crop tool to square up the image. If sharpening is needed (this method purports to avoid the shifts in color and contrast that Unsharp Mask can introduce): Use Image > Mode > LAB and select the "lightness" layer Use Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask as needed to sharpen the image. Use Image > Mode > RGB to return the image to RGB mode. Use the Text tool to apply caption & copyright notice, and then flatten image Save as JPG. You can use the grid to crop a photo to a specific size. Set the grid for 1-inch divisions, with 4 subidivisions, and each line will be 1/4 inch. When you overlay a photo, the origin of the grid will be in the upper left corner. If you go into View and turn on Snap, the crop tool margins will snap to the nearest grid lines. It's highly accurate.

This train appears to have already gone on the ground, so let me pile a little more rubble on the wreckage. :roll: Transportation disasters with high body counts, whether they involve trains, planes or ships and whether the cirucmstances are accidental or terror-caused, attract a lot of national attention and sometimes spur multi-billion-dollar responses. Approximately 45,000 Americans die in car crashes each year, many more are maimed and disabled, and millions of dollars worth of property is damaged or destroyed, and yet serious local efforts to curb drunk and aggressive driving are met with legislative resistance and public outcry against intrusion against individual privacy and freedom. :? Perhaps national news should include weekly reporting of the previous week's auto carnage statistics, delivered with the same strident tone used for plane crashes, terror attacks and natural disasters.

The check cashing places are loan sharks, and they don't even take trouble to disguise themselves very well. They entice people to go into debt, and structure their fees and services so that it's very easy for someone to get in over his head and end up paying outrageous amounts for a short-term loan. Some people have a real need for occasional short-term credit, and not all urban areas have programs like Key Bank's. The check cashers target their appeal toward people who don't understand loans and interest rates and make themselves sound like an easy solution to an immediate problem. The places should be burned to the ground and their owners should be ground into dog food. :whip: I guess I feel strongly about that.

Death wish? :-D

It's not uncommon for a serious derailment on a bridge to take down the bridge; errant rail cars damage a major structural element of the bridge, and down it goes. Most major bridges, especially truss bridges, have "guard rails," additional rails spiked down between the running rails, to try to keep derailed cars from going off to the side and tearing out trusses. Of course, even the guard rails can't contain a major pile-up.

A T-intersection in my neighborhood averaged 6 - 8 crashes per month caused by people running a stoplight. Traffic engineering decided it would be safer without the light, and they removed the light and put a stop sign on the intersecting street. The next month, there were 27 crashes caused by people ignoring the stop sign. They finally figured out that the best solution was to reinstall the light and start ticketing people who ran it. Now, the intersection is down to 1 or 2 crashes per month.

Beautiful, well-thought-out proposal. I suggest we give Norman Mineta the boot, and give the job to KJP. It'd be nice to have a Secretary of Transportation who knows something about transportation.

The Audubon Islands sound/look pretty interesting. Nice photos!

Some of them offer tax preparation, too, with "Instant Refund."

The setting becomes near-perfect when there's a pawn shop in the same block.

I didn't read all the previous posts in fine detail, so forgive me if this has already been covered. I think the BPL implementation is part of the infrastructure for eventual remote reading of electric meters. I've read that some utilities are working on this. Not only will it eliminate the cost of going door-to-door to read meters, but it will give them real-time tracking of usage patterns and help to predict demand levels on various circuits. Some utilities already give preferred rates to customers who allow them to install timers on high-demand appliances like electric water heaters to regulate periodic demand. Having a broadband connection into each household could enable more sophisticated methods of leveling demand. For example, a utility could control the operating cycles of residential and commercial air-conditioning systems in hot weather to avoid rolling blackouts or equipment-damaging brownouts. Everyone might not be able to stay as cool as they wanted, but no one would be shut down completely for an extended period and special provisions could be programmed in for people with medical conditions.

I'd be surprised if any city homes, even in poor neighborhoods, still depended upon outhouses as late as 1935, but those do look like outhouses. Outhouses usually wouldn't have been in front of the house, or so far away. Some are obviously in very bad repair and about to fall over. My grandmother had a structure like that beside her house into the late 1950's, but it was a coal shed where she kept hard coal (anthracite) for her big parlor stove. After she replaced the parlor stove with a gas heater, she had the shed torn down. In 1989 while renovating my 1860's house and digging for foundation repairs, I uncovered the former location of a coal shed -- about a six-inch layer of hard coal about four feet across, a little less than a foot below the surface. Next to that and somewhat deeper I found pieces of broken dishes and other discarded items, probably the pit of the outhouse. I suppose the two were side-by-side in the same shed. As near as I can tell, my house got plumbing and an indoor bathroom (in the basement) and central heat about 1905.