Robert Pence

I'm excited to see that this is progressing. It could really help change the character of the area.

As redevelopment projects go, $300,000 in city money seems like a heck of a bargain to me (if they can actually make it succeed with the proposed budget), but optimistic enthusiasm often completely overwhelms realistic analysis.

I don't know how that cat could have slept through all that! It certainly was a whirlwind tour.

It's interesting to see how many knowledgeable people are coming on board and speaking up on oil supplies. It's reflective of our culture, I guess, that virtually all of them talk about more efficient cars while no one challenges the basic premise of private cars as the foundation of America's transportation system. :wtf:

The mural in the public library gives a glimpse of Public Square in the early years, as MayDay described it:

Thanks for bumping this thread, grasscat. What a gorgeous historic town!

Well, it's better that you fell asleep before going to Cincinnati, than to have gone to sleep while driving there!

That's a good example of synergy that could exist between tourist train/rail museum operators and regional commuter rail to enhance the opportunities for both. It ties in nicely with the idea of using vintage trolleys from the Trolleyville collection on the waterfront line. Since the apparently successful trial runs in 2003, I haven't heard anything more about the relocation of Trolleyville, though.

Fort Wayne's ordinance exempts private clubs, so there were a few places that declared themselves private clubs and sold lifetime memberships for a dollar. The only one of those I was ever in was a neighborhood cafe on Wells Street where the grease would have killed you with coronary artery disease long before cigarettes could have done it.

Last Saturday (February 5) I chose to avoid the weekend frenzy on I-69 and made the drive from Indianapolis to Fort Wayne via US 37 through Noblesville. I stopped there to take some photos. Indianapolis was under an air quality alert most of the week, and the alert is to remain in effect until some rain comes to break the inversion. Smog is no respecter of county lines, and there was a lot of haze in the air at Noblesville, too, although my polarizing filter compensated for most of it in the pictures. The polarizing filter couldn't help my lungs though, and after an hour or so of walking around I was starting to feel the effects. Noblesville, Indiana (population 28,590), county seat of Hamilton County, is located just north of Indianapolis. The downtown looks like it has been the beneficiary of considerable investment since I was last there. It's very clean and attractive. The Hamilton County Courthouse was designed in the Second Empire style with a mansard roof and a square center tower by Edwin May, who later designed the Indiana State House. It was built 1877 – 1879 at a cost of $107,143 and was provided with steam heat, an innovation at that time. Eight pieces of ornamental statuary were removed from the plan to pay for the heating system; I'd guess they probably would have adorned the tops of the chimney-like structures between the dormers on the front and rear of the building. The courthouse was the site of a trial in 1925 of Ku Klux Klan Knights of the Invisible Empire Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, a prominent political figure who kidnapped and raped a State House secretary. He was convicted and received the maximum prison sentence. When his political allies failed to come to his aid, he started naming names. His expose' brought about the indictment of many Indiana politicians, including governor Ed Jackson. The courthouse sits in the center of a traditional town square Odd Fellows Building Masonic Temple Former church in its new life as a nicely-done office building Probably as gritty as it gets in Noblesville

For a few years after Amtrak pulled out of Fort Wayne, they provided a bus connection to Waterloo and Garrett using a chartered bus from Summit Coach. For a short time it left from downtown, but soon it moved to a shopping center in the north 'burbs. I did use it once; I took transit, requiring a transfer, to the shopping center to catch the shuttle to Garrett. It could have been OK, but it wasn't pleasant; the driver was a surly old bastard who probably pulled that run because he was at the bottom of the pecking order on the roster, and he smelled faintly of alcohol. He made no attempt to conceal the fact that he resented handling passengers' baggage, and he was an angry, aggressive driver.

Take a look-see here for photos taken this morning: http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php?topic=2221.0

Oaks?!? On a main thoroughfare??!? With all that soil-compaction?!? No, just no. Get a palm tree ;). How about some ailanthus? I can ship you all the starts you want, fresh from the riverbank and railroad near my house. They're fast-growing and thrive in an urban environment and if you plant two per block, in a few years you'll have thousands!

I'd ride it, even with the slower speeds and a bus transfer Port Stanley - London. Compared with driving, it would be a lot more relaxing and interesting. Now, if we could just get a passenger train on the old NKP route (now NS) between downtown Fort Wayne and Cleveland. I could walk to the depot from my house in about 20 minutes, and make a car-free, enjoyable trip to delightful Toronto.

Forumers should get together and buy it, and open a Dayton Bureau of Urbanohio.com there. It could become the center of an urban geek tourism industry!

I have difficulty sleeping on the train, too, but it's mostly because I'm such a "foamer" that every time the train stops during the night, I wake up and raise the blind to see what's going on. I've even been known to sleep in my clothes, so that I can step off the sleeping car onto the platform at those late-night stops. So long as the train keeps rolling, though, I usually sleep like a baby. Ever since I was a little kid, I've always felt something soothing in the motion of wheels on rails. The performance and productivity of the freight railroads are indeed impressive, especially considering that they have to compete against the generous subsidies that the trucking industry enjoys in the form of federal, state, and local infrastructure funding. Imagine what a dynamic rail industry we could have if the playing field were leveled by privatizing the Interstate Highway System!

^That's heartening news. I hope something comes of it; perhaps the combined efforts of the freight railroads and passenger railroad advocates can prevail against the Bush administration's anti-Amtrak leanings. The mess that the railroads now find themselves in only demonstrates the short-sightedness of railroad management. Granted, in that respect they're really no different from corporate management in general; investors come first, customers second, and employees might get a piece of whatever's left. Whenever there's a merger, acquisition or turnover in the executive suite, the new regime is driven to show dynamism to attract investment. The mantra is "Do something quickly, even if it's wrong." Instead of committing time and resources to evolving a new business combining the strenghts of two or more entities that went into the merger or acquisition, the MBAs with little or no operations experience go in with an axe and eliminate "redundant" operations jobs, and the first people who bail when they see it coming are often the best ones, because they stand the best chance of getting a job with a competitor. Management abandons much of the "redundant" track and single-tracks what's left and takes out the signaling rather than maintain it, and then is taken by suprise when it find that its business in the agrarian regions is seasonal, and it doesn't have enough capacity to handle the business at harvest time. We've seen the breakdowns and bottlenecks at least going back to the creation of Penn Central in 1967, and the debacle has been repeated with Union Pacific's acquisition of other western carriers, in the formation of BNSF, and in the partition of Conrail by CSX and NS. I hope that we have finally reached a point where the people who run railroads understand that they can't survive just by manipulating investment value; they have to provide a service that people are willing to pay for.

I remember reading several years ago that the legislation that created the Interstate Highway System specifically provided for the eventual creation of rail corridors in the right-of-way, possibly in the medians. The gradients on most interstates wouldn't be an obstacle for modern high-speed passenger equipment, but they would present a barrier to freight, especially long, heavy trains carrying bulk commodities like coal. It's been my position for a long time that in order to have a truly successful rail passenger network competitive with auto and air travel, we must completely divorce passenger operations from freight operations. The f***-passengers attitudes that the major railroads have fostered over the past forty-plus years seem to have become embedded in the DNA of railroad management, and the best efforts of Amtrak managment and on-board employees to provide a good experience are often thwarted by the indifference and sometimes apparent outright gratuitous obstructionism of various levels of management on the host railroads. If a symbiotic relationship can be developed between a national passenger system and host railroad freight operations, it might be to the benefit of both. I don't trust the current crop of railroad management to enter into an agreement in good faith, though; their approach to strategic planning is often short-term-based, and I think that once they get the infrastructure improvements, they'll revert to business-as-usual.

Mine's a photo of me, taken when I was probably about three years old. I'm older now, but still just as sweet and innocent.

I live about 15-20 minutes walk west of downtown Fort Wayne in a 1600-square-foot two-storey frame house that, as near as I can tell, was built about 1860 and then expanded several times between then and 1937. I've owned it since 1977 and lived in it since 1989. The neighborhood has a historic designation, but my house is on Washington Boulevard, an arterial that used to carry US 24 across town, amd traffic is pretty horrendous as a result of sprawl to the west, built in the last 20 years. I overlook the St. Marys River, and part of the city's rivergreenway system runs by my house on the cross street. There's almost no retail downtown, but I can walk to church, the library, any number of fast-food places and a neighborhood tavern. A city bus stops at the end of my block.

Nice! Downtown Dayton has such a big-city look.

That sounds like a good idea. It might reduce thread proliferation and the creation of redundant and duplicated threads.

On the structural end, my web site was getting to be a cluttered, unstructured, hard-to-maintain out-of-control mess, so I tore it all apart and rebuilt it. That involved changing some of the directory structures, and I'm sure it broke most of my old links. I built the new site off-line and then did a marathon session overnight to upload all of it. This morning I fixed everything (I think) that I broke in my sleep-deprived upload session, and opened it up again. I'd rather not go through the labor of finding and fixing all of the broken links in my previous posts, but all that content and more is now up on my site: http://robertpence.com Stop by and have a look-see. I still have a lot more stuff that I'm going to put up there as I get time, and the new organization will make it a lot easier for me to make changes and additions. It should make it more friendly to navigate, too. Hope you enjoy it! If there's anything you were looking for and you can't find it, give me a shout. Edit 1/18/2004: Now matter how I try to be a hardass, I just can't pull it off. I relented and fixed a bunch of those links today. You're still invited to visit my site; often what I post on a forum thread is a subset of the web site collection on a topic. :wink:

The city has installed a couple of roundabouts to curb fast traffic in some affluent residential neighborhoods, and gotten a storm of protest from the offenders that are targeted by the change. There was a furious letter to the editor by a woman who demanded that a roundabout be removed "because it impedes traffic." Duh! :?

Neat! Some handsome buildings there.