Robert Pence

The former Masonic Hall is a gorgeous old firetrap! I'm surprised (and glad) it has survived this long, especially considering that Omer had a major downtown fire.

It looks like an area where I'd enjoy an afternoon stroll or spending a little time at a coffee house or cafe, but way above my budget or comfort zone for day-to-day living. The elevator entrance is a visual slap in the face compared with much of the surroundings, but I think the rather whimsical nature of the leaf-inspired canopy and railing fits.

Spectacular photo! Those cloud layers in West Virginia's mountains and valleys are an interesting experience for anyone who's never encountered them before. In 1965, driving in the vicinity of Blackwater Falls, I found myself moving through them; as the road rose and fell, sometimes they were below me, sometimes they were above, and sometimes I was in the midst of one of the densest fog layers I've ever driven in.

I think I have more photos of the Transbay Terminal somewhere, but this one from 1973 of a commuter bus boarding area is the only one I've found, so far. During off-peak commuter periods, Gray Line Tours boarded their buses there. I knew I had this one somewhere. I found it; a K Ingleside streetcar waits in front of Transbay Terminal in November, 1978.

They contribute a lot less visual clutter. I remember the vertical ones mounted on posts about the height of traditional street-light posts on the corners. I'm pretty sure Indianapolis and Chicago still had those when I started driving. To top it off, the posts and signal heads often were painted dark green, not yellow. Kept you on your toes. In 1963 when I visited a friend in Erie, PA, on some residential streets they still had two-color signals - red over green in one direction and green over red in the other. They only required two light bulbs to handle all possible signal aspects.

You'll be in my thoughts and prayers.

This photo is a little old (1979?) but it shows that it would be possible to site a Red Line station with stair/escalator/elevator access from a rehabbed and re-utilized B&O station:

National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP) is the national organization. The NARP newsletter is informative on issues involving both Amtrak and urban rail transit systems, and as StrapHanger noted, NARP members receive ten percent discounts on Amtrak travel. NARP collaborates with state organizations to share information and hold annual regional meetings. A useful and enjoyable source of information is Trains Magazine. It's an attractively laid out publication that provides a good balance of information on historic and contemporary railroading and projections for the future of the industry, along with entertaining anecdotes by railroaders and their families. There's a section where subscribers' questions about railroading terminology and practice are answered by the professionals, and regular commentators present their views on the implications of the changing economic and poltical environments.

Apparently Kirtland is a suburb of Calcutta. Peeve du jour: Why in the name of Betty Ford doesn't Great Lakes Brew Company make more Christmas Ale? I understand the whole scarcity thing but when it sells out at stores BEFORE THANKSGIVING, you clearly aren't making enough. MayDay hoards specialty products from Great Lakes, and it's impossible for them to anticipate how much he will stash away. :wink:

Congrats on your inaugural photo thread. You've given some thorough, detailed coverage to an area where a lot of change is happening, and yes, photo threads done properly are a lot of work!

I'm sorry to hear of your mom's passing, Melanie. Cancer is a hard way to go, and the fight to keep living is difficult for the patient and stressful for loved ones. A small child can bring so much joy to life, and it's fascinating and inspiring to see how fast they learn. I'm happy that yours is doing well.

Stopped in Arcanum for lunch one day, but it must have been at least 25 years ago. Arcanum was a little more lively, then, but it still looks well kept.

Wonderful photos! How many pairs of shoes have you worn out, collecting all these? Walker and Weeks collaborated with Fort Wayne architect AM Strauss in the design of the 1929 Lincoln Tower, at 312 feet Indiana's first skyscraper.

The 3C is more than a rail corridor. It is literally and figuratively the transportation "spine" of the state....parts of 3 Interstate highways (71, 70 and 75) as well as parts of rail corridors for two major railroads (NS and CSX). That's what makes the 3C project and "important goal." Reallocating the $$$ will ne entirely upto the USDOT. States will likely have to make new or amended applications to get all or a share of the $400-million (Ohio) or the $810-million (Wisconsin). It's doubtful those $$$ could be used for either the Lake Shore Ltd or Capitol Ltd, as they are both Amtrak national system trains and ARRA funds meant for state-support corridors would not be eligible for use on such routes. Other than the work around Portage to improve performance of long-distance trains approaching/departing Chicago, Indiana got zip in the first go-around. That much money could go a long way toward preparing the Indiana segment of the future Cleveland-Toledo-Fort Wayne-Chicago route and reestablishing Fort Wayne-Chicago service. Fort Wayne is Indiana's second-largest city and has been without a direct rail connection to Chicago since 1990.

But that would mean giving up mashed potatoes with noodles, and that's a midwestern farm-country staple!

The Farm Drainage manual sounds interesting; the technology was a lot different from what we have now. Did they even have clay tile then? I've read a little bit about draining the Black Swamp that is now a vast expanse of incredibly flat land in northwest Ohio. That involved a huge amount of hand labor and crude but effective improvised technology. Books that have languished on my shelves include some bought for a modern American lit course about 1960. I never followed through with the course, and the books went unread. I recently finished John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, Nineteen Nineteen, and The Big Money). I should go back an annotate some of the references that give the stories setting and context before I pass the book on, because a lot of younger readers probably wouldn't recognize Sacco and Vanzetti, Samuel Insull, the Paterson Silk Strike, Ludlow, Colorado, and several others unless they had an interest in the histories of labor, technology, and transportation. Currently I'm reading short stories by Eudora Welty.

Long before 9/11 I had determined to avoid air travel whenever possible, simply because it felt inhumane. Even then, screeners sometimes seemed deliberately arrogant and eager to enforce their authority. To avoid running my film through the x-ray scanner I'd open an empty camera for the screener and hand him/her the 35mm cassettes for visual examination, and they'd promptly dump them in a basket and send them through the scanner and give me a look that said "WTF are you gonna' do about it?" Airport lounges were uncomfortable, and in the big airports there were only about half as many seats as the reasonably-expected number of waiting passengers. Maybe the poor ventilation and stuffiness were meant to get passengers acclimated to what they'd experience on board the aircraft. The boarding process reminded me of herding livestock onto a truck. Once on the plane, I'd find my knees jammed against the back of the seat ahead, and had no choice but to brace myself and block any attempt by that passenger to recline. In most cases where food was served, the quality was an insult and it would have been better if they'd not served anything. Some passengers would stuff so much stuff into the overhead bins that it looked as if they were moving a household, and often it was difficult for the non-aggressive to find space even for a jacket or small bag. With one single-file doorway and a lot of passengers, waiting in a long queue to exit the plane was aggravating. Airports are by necessity far from the downtowns that usually were my destination, and in all but the biggest cities no useful public transit was available, ensuring good business for the rental car agencies. My answer to the current security phobia - Ship all luggage ahead by Fed Ex or UPS, strip search followed by naked x-ray scan followed by examination of body orifices by bomb dogs. Each passenger gets a hospital gown to wear in flight, and a mesh bag for clothing and valuables that will be returned to them when they turn in their gown upon exiting the plane at their destination. It may create consternation at the outset, but it will make a lot of the negative aspects of air travel self-rectifying. People will fly only when critically necessary. Lines will be short, airports won't be congested, planes will be smaller and not cramped, and air crews won't be stressed because they'll have fewer passengers to attend to. Passengers won't be intractible with the cabin crew, because only adaptable individuals will elect to fly.

I'm working on a downtown Toledo set, and I'll finish it and put it up as soon as I finish a hot project for money. It'll probably be in a week or so.

I trashed the post by bangde92. He's a spammer who also posted with a link to discount golf clubs in the Claritin-d Commercial and the Stop Animal Cruelty at the Cheyenne Rodeo topics.

Depends on the piece. To start the quality of the pieces foundation is probably outstanding! Very true. I have a sofa and a chair and ottoman that my grandfather bought for his new house in 1923. About 1950 Mom had them restyled - squared off as was the style then, instead of the original curvy arms and backs - and reupholstered in grained off-white naugahyde. They're still solid after 87 years and three generations, and it probably has a lot to do with the sturdy construction of their frames; they weigh a ton compared with the new stuff. They've become somewhat uncomfortable, though, because the upholstery has become stiff with age. Unless I can find some product that will rejuvenate it without discoloring, I'll have them redone again in good leather. It'll cost far more than the new stuff in the furniture outlets, but with decent care they'll last as long as I live and will be heirloom pieces for a niece or nephew.

A lot of railroad-museum folks only care about historic technology and statistics, and aren't very interested in modern railroading. The only way 3C could capture their attention would be to promise heavyweight full-service Pullmans behind double-headed PRR K4 Pacifics or NYC Hudsons. They still wouldn't buy a ticket but they'd jam every road and crossing, chasing and photographing the inaugural runs. Many of them are railfans, aka foamers, in the most pejorative sense.

My roommate said his mother grew up in a rural village in France and that she liked the smell of manure. Then he theorized that dead livestock was the smell that she would not have welcomed. Horses & cows, not so bad unless you're cleaning out a barn where a foot and a half of accumulated straw and steaming poop has fermented for half the winter. That's just a tad pungent. Pigs and large poultry farms are the rankest, though. Spend half an hour on a pig farm on a rainy day, and it'll take lots of soap and shampoo to get the aroma out of your skin and hair, and a week with the windows open before the inside of your car doesn't smell like what you thought you had left behind. When it comes to feedstocks for anaerobic methane generators, though, the rule of thumb is that the worse it smells, the more methane it will produce. I've heard some ethanol plants are co-located with large hog-feeding operations; distiller's grain from the fermentation process is a protein supplement in the animal feed without having to be dried and shipped, and the manure supplies a substantial portion of the plant's gas requirements. Who said I don't know sh!t? I've shoveled more of it than anyone except a brokerage CEO!

Yep. The early IBM PCs had Basic encoded in ROM. If you booted without the DOS boot disk, they'd start up with the Basic programming interface. Mine was the second version, I think, capable of accepting up to 256K RAM on the motherboard. Prior to that, they only accepted 64K, and you had to buy an additional ISA board to hold the additional chips. If I recall, there were nine chips to a 64K bank, eight bits data and one bit parity. I can't remember the price, but I do remember that they were damned expensive. The boards were expensive, and to build a machine out to the maximum 640K cost an arm and a leg. After I built my machine out with a hard drive and 640K RAM, I bought a Fortan Compiler. I was familiar with the language because I used Fortran 77, an extended version capable of handling character strings, at work. The compiler was fun to mess around with at home, making clocks and such with text screens (no graphics capability on my PC then), but I don't think I ever did anything serious with it.

Can any math majors out there calculate the maximum number of possible personality types that this test can identify? It's been too many years since my math classes, and I can't remember the equations for combinations and permutations. It should be a simple calculation of the number of possible combinations, based upon the number of either/or choices in the test. I'm curious as to whether the distribution of results is finely cut, or whether test-takers of varying types might be lumped together under general categories. This test might make an interesting poll topic to determine a profile of active UO forumers.

Nice, spacious, cozy packing crate under a county bridge in an undisclosed location.