Robert Pence

That all depends. I started out with a geocities site on Yahoo, not the cheapest one, and then upgraded to a Yahoo small business site, and both let me hotlink as much as I wanted.

That's a landing space for the ships that will carry away the 144,000 saved before the great final battle of Armageddon.

I'm glad you're here, and I'm sure a lot of other people are too. You provide substantive information on passenger rail and transit, topics that a lot of us can only speculate about.

Over the years, I've read a few accounts of people who set out to walk across Lake Erie to Canada and met with an unknown fate. Some have made it, I think, and found it much more challenging than they expected.

I haven't spent any significant time in Lakewood in quite a few years, although I did experience the delight of riding the N-S line through the neighborhood in an open-window 1920's coach behind a steam locomotive (NKP 765) around 1985. I don't know what technology might exist on the line now, but I wonder if a compromise might be reached through a trade-off; say, install four-sector crossing gates and whatever other safety provisions are needed to make it a quiet zone (no diesel air horns) in exchange for neighborhood acceptance of more train traffic. Except for the air horns, trains move pretty quietly on welded rail so long as they're not working up a grade. Fully-developed commuter rail can be pretty non-intrusive; contemporary equipment is lighter and less noisy than conventional long-distance passenger equipment, and the trains are short and fast and complete their transit of a neighborhood quickly. Commuter trains could be almost unnoticeable. A big potential benefit of properly designed and implemented commuter rail is the reduction of fast, noisy auto traffic on neighborhood thoroughfares as commuters switch from driving to riding.

^I think a landscaped streetcar median, like the St. Charles line in New Orleans, would be great on Clifton.

Just the first three letters of my first name, and my street address. Nothin' inventive or mysterious.

OOoooH! I Like it. Beautiful night shots

That's why I spend less time at SSP and more time at urbanohio. Listening to egotistical clowns trying to out-troll one another :roll: is somewhat less appealing to me than watching professional wrestling (and that falls somewhere below root canal as preferred entertainment). I prefer the mostly intelligent, informed, friendly exchanges that take place here.

Impressive thread. In the early 1960s I drove from Wheeling through some of the Ohio River towns (Steubenville, East Liverpool ...) and past Youngstown on a meandering trip to Delaware. Everywhere I went, trains of ore jennies and coal hoppers were moving. The air was rank and everthing seemed to be tinged with red-brown dust, but there was energy and activity and there were jobs. I was near East Liverpool on a Friday night, and there was a high school football game. From the traffic and commotion, you'd have thought it was a bowl game.

Have you visited Youngstown's History Center for Industry and Labor? A truck breakdown stranded me in Youngstown for three days about four years ago, and I went there one day to kill time. I'd never known Youngstown in its heyday, and the exhibits there gave me a better understanding of what once was and is gone. The building by Michael Graves is impressive in its own right.

Oh, I wouldn't worry about those things. Given the trends in American manufacturing industries, Ford will probably move the plant to Mexico, or maybe India, in a few years, and without industries as destinations for raw materials and sources for finished products, the railroad will become a recreational trail. Problem is, the erosion of our economy will leave even more of us unable to afford to live anyplace decent. Don't mind me; sometimes a wave of cynicism sweeps over me, and I emit unpleasant sounds. The occurrence has become more frequent since the election.

I read someplace that at that time there had been only one excavation project in the world that was larger, and that was the Panama Canal.

Super thread! You've done a wonderful job of documenting the county seats, and done it amazingly quickly. I'm still fascinated by the Chilicothe courthouse. It's so elaborate.

I think I read once that Terminal Tower cost $88 million, and that was in 1928 dollars. It didn't include the cost of the new viaduct across the Cuyahoga River, or the miles of excavation and relocation of railroad approach tracks, or the electrification of the tracks and purchase of the electric locomotives to move passenger trains in and out of the terminal.

Lots of character, especially the school buildings. If in fact the neighborhood is on the verge of a renaissance, it might be a challenge for people with money who aren't afraid of risky speculative investment. I'll bet some of those properties could be bought cheap, and might be worth a bundle in a few years.

Another once-prosperous steel town fallen to rust and decay. It looks even more depressing than the first time I visited there, about 1993. They've done one of those Ohio courthouse bastardizations, too, where they knock off the cornices and add a completely incongruous "modern" story on top of a formerly respectable period building.

Judging from the masonry style that courthouse looks pretty old, even as old courthouses go. It's pretty imposing.

Good grief! The London picture shows lane markings for buses and bikes only. If their bus drivers are anything like the ones here, I wouldn't go anywhere near that lane on a bike. I stay as far from Fort Wayne's Citilink buses as I can when I'm biking; twice I've nearly been run down, and it seemed like it was intentional. :x

I had a neighbor who used to do that, literally. He had a heart attack and died at age 47.

It took me about 20 - 25 minutes to walk to work downtown at the insurance company, and about ten to bike. Biking was convenient because the company provided a free bike rack inside a secure parking garage across the street. I seldom drove unless I knew I'd need my truck to transport computer equipment to another site, and some of the people at work thought I was weird for not driving. I think they were just envious because they had to wait for somebody to retire or die if they wanted a garage spot for their car, and then pay $60 a month for it. Before that I worked for General Electric at two different plant locations, both within a mile of my house. One of my suburbanite redneck bosses chastised me for walking to work "in this neighborhood" because he thought I risked getting shot and robbed. I don't think we was concerned for my well-being so much as he dreaded the thought of having to hire and train someone new to do my job. Hehe! I was there the day he got hired, and the day he got shipped off to a flunky job in a plant in the boondocks. :evil:

Heartening news. I get really discouraged over the local resistance to change. Driving is a ritual here, a sacred rite. If a Fort Wayne resident lived in the same building where he worked, he'd still get into his car each morning and drive it around the block and park again before entering his office. If transit were free and came to the door on demand, these bozos wouldn't ride it because they think of it as something for people who don't have cars because they never made anything of their lives. They equate riding transit with eating at the rescue mission. Where I used to work downtown, a lot of people drove somewhere for lunch, often to the food court at the mall or some other distant destination. The ones who didn't leave at lunch scurried out to the parking lot before going to the cafeteria, in hopes of finding vacated parking spots closer to the door and moving their cars into them. Many employees filled up all the metered on-street parking next to the buildings every day and went out every two hours to feed two quarters to the meters, rather than park free one or two blocks away. A parking violation cost $10, and one of my co-workers was picked up by police at his home in the wee hours because of $600 in unpaid parking tickets that he got at work.

When it comes to building transportation facilities, $1 million doesn't buy much. I don't think that's out of line for renovating the station as a regional transit hub; it preserves part of the city's heritage for future use, and probably saves money in the long run.

I posted this a while ago on another thread, but here it is again. On the way back to Fort Wayne after the Cleveland meet on Labor Day weekend, I stopped to check out the wind turbines near Bowling Green. Here's a photo of one of them:

Most of the discussion in this thread has revolved around the desire of some patrons to smoke versus the desire of other patrons not to be exposed to second-hand smoke. In most communities where a smoking ban is discussed, workplace health and safety are major factors in the controversy. While patrons of a smoke-filled establishment are exposed to second-hand smoke for the duration of their visit, employees are exposed for the duration of their shifts. Where smoking affects the health of employees, it affects the cost of group health insurance plans. Insurance premiums are among the costs that ultimately get passed along to customers, as well as to the health plan participants either as increased contributions or as less money available for the wages and benefits pool. Failure to protect employees from second-hand smoke can be construed as creating a hostile and/or unsafe work environment.