Robert Pence

Me, too. I only begrudgingly bought a cell phone for two reasons; two be available to respond to family emergencies when I'm traveling, and so I could turn off the ringer on my land line that my psychopath brother who lives outside the state was using to harass me in the middle of the night. Nine out of ten phone calls that I get are demands on my time, talent, or money, offering nothing in return. I don't know why I should make it any easier than absolutely necessary for people to track me down and hound and annoy me. :x

If they'd just put some high-velocity blowers, like the ones that dry cars coming out of a car wash, over the track entrances to the train shed to clear snow off the tops of cars that have sat in the yard, that would be a big improvement. They wouldn't have to run continuously, just when trains are entering.

Saturday night was a full moon.

No clue from the description. You might take it to a Radio Shack store and ask one of the people there if they know what it is, or just look on their web site or another electronics web site for antennas, and see if there's something that looks like it.

In 1991 I went by train to visit my parents in Englewood, Florida. I boarded the train at Garrett, Indiana (no longer served now) and went via Washington, D.C. and returned via Philadelphia, timing both connections so I'd have time to walk around. My parents met me at the station in Tampa when I arrived, but on the return I had them drop me at the bus stop in Sarasota and took the Amtrak-contracted connecting bus. It was a good experience, a nice, clean bus with a comfortable ride, and an across-the-platform transfer at Tampa. The timetables look good but the reality of the performance isn't impressive, although I haven't tried it in two years. The last time I tried it, with the main purpose of avoiding the drive to Michigan City (South Shore) in northern Indiana's treacherous winter weather, the Lake Shore Limited was almost two hours late at Waterloo, and the snack bar attendant already had stowed everything in preparation for arrival in Chicago. He seemed put out when I asked for a cup of coffee, which was lukewarm and tasted like it was left over from the night before. We lost another hour sitting in the throat of Union Station waiting for a platform. The return trip, on the Capitol, was significantly late boarding and departing because they had problems getting the head-end power to come up. The cars still were dark and without heat (December), with big slabs of snow occasionally sliding off the roofs and splattering onto the platforms, when the car attendants began using flashlights to board their passengers one or two at a time. The Superliner cars had almost gotten warm enough for people to take off their coats and stop rubbing their hands together, by the time we got to Waterloo. And then I had a white-knuckle drive, the very thing I had hoped to avoid, on an ice-covered I-69 at 40mph while semis blasted by me without slowing down at all. Don't get me wrong; I'm not bashing Amtrak. I think they do an admirable job considering the funding constraints they've had to work under for years. It's just a little more than a half-hour drive to Waterloo for me, especially during the hours when local traffic is light, and if we get more reliable timekeeping and hopefully more frequent service before I get too old and frail to travel unassisted, I'll use it a lot.

I know. It's like when the mindless mannequin on the 11pm weather breathlessly forecasts the Blizzard of the Century and panicking hordes descend upon the grocery stores and strip the coolers of milk and the shelves of bread and toilet paper, and in the morning there's inches of fluffy snow that's all gone by 10am. :-(

Surprising that Toledo has many more riders than Cleveland. I suppose it has to do with the fact that even though Toledo's hours are extremely inconvenient, they're not nearly as absurd as Cleveland's. It's also interesting that Waterloo, Indiana's plexiglas bus hut, at 18,000 surpasses any of Ohio's stations except for Cleveland and Toledo.

What I don't understand is how they could suspend your license and assess points when you don't even need a license to ride a bicycle. The offense, guilty or not, had nothing to do with a driver's license.

It blew through here around 11am, and they said it was moving approximately 70mph. I haven't heard any damage reports yet, but as a lot of storms have lately, it seemed to split and bypass north and south of downtown Fort Wayne. I only experienced some brief noisy winds and heavy rain, with no lightning that I'm aware of. My internet connection went down very briefly, but that's all I experienced. Earlier, one report on radio said as many as 60,000 households were without power farther to the west, and after it passed through here there were a bunch of tornado warnings for northwest Ohio.

I hate to see the ORM go under, but I'm sure there are other museums and preservation societies that would love to have this equipment. If the museum is struggling so badly, they need to find homes for this stuff with organizations that have the ability to care for it before it becomes beyond repair. Some of the stuff looks like time is running awfully short. This museum seems better suited to be somewhere like Akron where they could develop partnerships with the Department of Interior/National Park Service and the City of Akron to develop a railroad historic site in the city that could house and care for, and display the equipment, and maybe rent the equipment (once restored) for special runs on the CVSR. I seem to remember reading that ORM fell victim to the sort of internal power struggles and fractiousness that have been the fate of many similar groups. I believe that in the sixties they had control of a significant piece of track leading toward downtown Columbus, with option and intent to acquire more. They had some very nice interurban cars and streetcars and they were giving short rides, although I think the day I visited, they were using an industrial locomotive to push/pull the interurban car. I visited there around 1968, and they had been hit with epic vandalism the night before. They had no fence then and a lot of equipment, then as now, was parked outside and unprotected. Rocks had shattered the windows in a number of passenger cars, including original curved plate glass in some of the interurban cars. A friend told me back then that some of the directors had such a mania for preserving every piece of iron that had ever been associated with rails, that they spent all their money retrieving hopeless junk from far-off places and had no funds left to fence the property. Many railroad museums and preservation groups fall apart because the "founding fathers" put all their energy into activities that boost their egos and protect their turf, and instead of encouraging, nurturing, and instructing newbies, they seek to keep them "in their places." They'll let them cut weeds, haul trash, sweep floors, and wipe grease with never a word of thanks and sometimes even an air of disdain for the menial laborers they've made of them. Never mind that the new volunteers will quit after a season or two; someone else is bound to come along to take their place. When the old farts move on to the nursing home, though, there's no one to take their place, and when their engine's boiler needs new flues or the crown sheet needs replaced there's no one to do it and the community support that might have been cultivated by some outreach isn't there to raise funds. Been there.</rant> N&W 1218, a 2-8-8-2 Class Y6b articulated locomotive, is at the Virginia Museum of Transportation at Norfolk. There's a Big Boy at Steamtown in Scranton, PA, along with a wealth of other fascinating stuff, and the Electric City Trolley Museum (real streetcars that go somewhere) that shares the rail yard. And while you're in Scranton, don't pass up the Lackawanna Mine Tour and the Anthracite Museum. There's a Mallet articulated compound locomotive at the Lake Superior Railroad Museum in Duluth. I believe the wheel configuration is 2-8-8-2, but I'm not certain of that. I'm pretty sure the drivers are eight each, though (four axles per set). I rode the Elroy - Sparta Trail, and then on marked county roads that are part of the Wisconsin Bikeway network into LaCrosse during October Tour 1973, a tour that used to be hosted by a local cycling club during Octoberfest. Much of the ride was damp and misty, and the wetness enhanced the beautiful fall color. Gorgeous ride, on a trail that's designed to accomodate both family day-trippers and long-distance tourists.

In the early nineties after Fort Wayne lost its Amtrak service, there were buses that ran to both Waterloo and Garrett (before the end of the Broadway, I think). Ridership was weak; Fort Wayne people - for that matter, Northeast Indiana people - who can afford to travel wouldn't be caught dead on a bus, for fear they might be seen by someone who knows them. When the bus stop moved from downtown to the back parking lot of a rinky-dink strip mall five miles from downtown, to be closer to I-69, ridership fell off even more and the service soon was discontinued. I used it once from the strip mall lot, and was able to travel back and forth between my home and the strip mall on a city bus only because my departure and arrival happened to be at times when the city buses were running, albeit hourly service and never on a Sunday. Bus travel carries a stigma, 'round these parts. It's thought to be a safety net for people who haven't made enough of their lives to afford a car. Folks regard it in the same way they regard eating at a soup kitchen. Charter buses provided by out-of-town casinos, and buses chartered by seniors groups for shopping excursions, of course, are not the same thing, you know. A leading local charter company that runs nice buses with respectable drivers even tried offering a $40 round-trip shuttle Fort Wayne - O'Hare when air fare from Fort Wayne averaged $110 and air service was infrequent. They'd handle your bagge for you and provide free parking in Fort Wayne. The six passengers the day I rode it were the heaviest load the driver had seen. They tried it for a year, eventually scaling back to vans instead of full-sized buses, before dropping it altogether.

Nice makeover! Last night was Fright Night in downtown Fort Wayne. It's an increasingly popular event, with thousands of people taking part and a huge zombie walk. I thought about going and taking photos, but opted for a movie at Cinema Center, the local art house cinema, where it was warm and comfy. Passing through downtown, I saw big crowds of people everywhere. The movie I saw was Cairo Time. Good film; great visuals and wonderful sound track.

Possible improvements to Amtrak stop in Waterloo, Indiana This holds promise, but there are a lot of ifs and maybes. Bad headline on this one, but the article isn't anti-Amtrak at all. The present situation is deplorable. There are no restrooms, and the plexiglas bus hut is open on one side and its side walls end about a foot off the ground. It provides shelter from rain, but no protection against wind and cold. It doesn't even have the infrared heaters that I've seen in some shelters, like on the South Shore at Carroll Avenue, and on Chicago's elevated stations. Parking is on a steeply-sloped area along the embankment. If I remember correctly, it's surfaced with ballast rock that provides a treacherous footing. Here are a couple of photos: Platform, shelter, and parking area: Plexiglas bus hut. The smaller shelter sided with particle board houses the portable wheelchair lift: Passengers detraining from the eastbound Capitol Limited onto snow-covered ballast because the engineer, with spotting assistance from a crew member, missed the asphalt walkway over the tracks: Winter nighttime, a careful slog along an uncleared, snow-covered platform to the parking area with snow over an already-treacherous surface. Historic depot before its recent complete restoration. I need to get some new photos of it; what I saw in progress a year ago looked to be first-class work managed by the architectural firm that restored Fort Wayne's Baker Street station and located its offices there.

Check out the one I cited above: NEC 2690WUXi2, if your budget will stand it. It's pricey, but not as much as some of the high-end strictly-pro large-format monitors, and from what I was able to learn, the performance is comparable. A close friend who's an avid photographer and artist with a very discerning eye bought one, and based on his recommendation I did some research. The positive reviews convinced me, and I shopped around for price. Amazon.com's price was at the time about $400 less than MSRP. My ex-sister in law is a professional illustrator and web designer with a high-end clientele, and she's a hard sell on anything that doesn't bear the Apple logo. She was impressed.

Mr. Parker was a remarkable man. As I noted above, he was ninety-three when we met him. He had sold his wooded, rolling riverfront land to a wealthy auto executive frorm then-thriving Detroit, and had a life estate in it; so long has he was able or willing, he could continue to live therr and have full use of the property. At ninety-three and with advanced skin cancer, I'm sure that neither he nor the buyer expected a long wait. Seven years later we received a letter from him. He was still living on the property, and the cancer had gone into spontaneous remission. He said he had outlived it. The last I heard, the site had become a county park. I suppose the buyer's fortunes ran out with the collapse of Detroit's automakers, before he ever had time to realize his dream home. I wouldn't mind living to a hundred if I could be like Mr. Parker.

I love Pittsburgh! About fifteen years ago when my employer needed to send a tech person to Pittsburgh for a couple of weeks, everyone else's reaction was something like, "Pittsburgh, eww!" I said, "I'll go! I'll go!" One of my favorite out-of-town assignments; the regional office was in the gloriously Art Deco Koppers building, and they put me up at the Sheraton at Station Square. I had a nice walk to and from work in a great building, and lunch breaks in a busy, thriving downtown with lots of people coming and going.

In 1958 my brother and I bought an engine out of a sawmill owned by a 93-year-old gentleman near Ypsilanti, Michigan. He had come to the area with his brothers when he was a teenager, and at one time had run a flour mill and a sawmill and made fine furniture. The flour mill had shut down years before, and at age 90 he had decided that sawmilling was too dangerous a trade for a fellow his age. He still made furniture, and some pieces he showed us in his house matched anything I've seen before or since in quality of material, construction, and finish. He told of watching a man go down the street in Ann Arbor at dusk, lighting the street lights one-by-one, and of seeing the first automobile in town. On his last trip to town, he said, he had a heck of a time finding a place to park. He was a small guy, wiry and agile still, and on the winter day when we moved that three-ton engine out of the mill and loaded it onto the truck, he was out there the whole afternoon working right along with us.

Recently I shelled out for a new NEC 25.5-inch 2690WUXi2 LCD monitor with NEC's SpectraVision II calibration software and the optional X-Rite colorimeter. I really like this setup; once I position the sensor and start the software, it goes through the entire calibration process and generates and uploads the profile without any intervention. I can start it and then go to the kitchen and make coffee, if I want. The software automatically posts a reminder at startup when the recommended time has run out for recalibration. Screen resolution on the monitor is 1920 X 1200 @ 95dpi, and the brilliance and sharpness took a couple of days to get used to. With scenes shot outdoors in normal daylight situations, I often can pull a respectable giveaway print from the Epson R2800 on the first try, using Epson's downloadable premium print profiles for their papers. I replaced a four-year-old ViewSonic G22fB 20" Graphic Arts CRT. That monitor had the highest user ratings of anything in the prosumer price range when I bought it, and when new and freshly-calibrated with Monaco EZ-Color it used to come very close to printer output. In the past year or so, though, I'd had to fuss more and more with trial-and-error proofing, and when the calibration software no longer could bring it within the desired contrast range, I knew it was time to switch. Only after replacing it did I realize how much its sharpness and clarity had degraded.

The upper tier of the falls looks like a man-made dam that would have provided hydraulic power for a mill. Is their any remnant of one, or is there any historic info about it posted at the site?

That makes sense. I first saw it in the late seventies or early eighties, at a grand opening of the then-recently restored Castro Theater, and it was billed at 1905. I noticed a couple of autos that appeared to be shadowing the car that was carrying the camera. One was what appeared to be a White steamer of a style that wouldn't have been more than a year old then, with four men in it. I first noticed it making a close pass from the opposite direction, and then shortly afterward it overtook the camera car. Finally it's seen turning around ahead of the camera car as it approaches the Ferry Terminal. Of course numerous boys were showing off at various places, and there's the guy on the bike who swings over the right-hand rail and rides on the slot for a short distance before peeling off to the right. Anyone who's inadvertently hit a railroad crossing or streetcar track at the wrong angle on a bicycle knows how carefully you have to pay attention. It's called learning by road rash.

Rental cars should be equipped with engine-disabling smoke detectors that can only be reset by a code sent from the rental agency, for a $100 charge. If the renter refuses the charge, he forfeits the car without any refund of rental charges.

Ah, but there were collisions, apparently just not in this film. I've seen numerous photos from the era showing autos mangled in collisions with streetcars, and injuries to both pedestrians and wagon or carriage drivers from runaway horses weren't uncommon. One of the reasons big-city street railways were elevated, even before this film was made, was the carnage from pedestrians crossing in the way of the trains, which were steam-powered prior to the mid-1890s. Considerable research went into the design of "cow-catcher" type devices on the fronts of streetcars that would scoop up errant pedestrians without serious injury. My dad's great-uncle, a doctor, was severely injured one night on the way to assist a woman in labor when his horse spooked and took his buggy off a bridge into the Wabash River. Even nowadays there are news stories of injuries and deaths on Amish farms from accidents involving horses and wagons and too often small children. And without live audio, you can't begin to comprehend the noise level in scenes like those, with iron-shod horses and iron-tired, wooden-wheeled wagons traveling on cobblestone streets. Most of the autos of that era had one- or two-cylinder air-cooled engines and no effective mufflers, and were god-awful noisy. Some sounded like a steady succession of gunshots. City horses became accustomed to them, but they were enough to send unaccustomed farm horses into total panic on country roads. Did you notice how some buggy drivers liked to drive in the cable car tracks? Buggy wheels were hard and the springs weren't all that effective. Driving in the tracks gave a much nicer ride than driving on the cobblestones.

I'd be leery of happening upon a solitary buck; locally, I've heard of them getting aggressive toward harvesting machinery and even attacking an occupied, moving pickup truck in a cornfield being harvested near a woods. A couple of years ago I was walking one of the trails in a wooded area of Indiana Dunes State Park on a foggydamp, chilly October morning, not paying much attention to anything ahead because I couldn't see very far in the fog. Mostly I was looking at the shrubs along the trail and the leaves underfoot, when movement registered in my peripheral vision. I looked up to discover I had almost walked into a large, healthy-looking doe. She was looking at me, and I was less than three feet away when she turned away and casually ambled off into the woods. Since then, I've seen deer often on or near the roads in that area, and I think most people in the beach communities have given up on trying to grow ornamental plants. Especially in the rural smaller towns, when the auto body shop guys talk about deer season, they're not necessarily talking about hunting. More likely, they're referring to the time of year when they accumulate a sizable waiting list of owners who need major repairs to their cars.

That genius! But evil as hell at the same time. We're like the dynamic duo. This is why ADD people shouldn't associate. I have an HD video cam with night vision; I just need to figure out how to access it remotely. Hallowe'en can be fun in a macabre way, but our culture has made it all cutesy and stupid. One year I bought an over-the-head mask that looked realistically like a wrinkled old man, and I outfitted myself with a raincoat, a rumpled old black fedora, and some old shoes with no socks. Under the raincoat I wore just denim shorts and a wife beater, so that when the outfit was all assembled, especially in low light, I looked like a very real grotesque old flasher. I accessorized with a bottle of cheap wine in a paper bag, with the bag peeled back around the neck. I had been invited to two parties, both in my neighborhood. Walking to the first one I came up to an intersection where a car was waiting at a stop sign for traffic to clear. The male driver and female passenger were outfitted in standard off-the-shelf hallowe'en getup, and completely preoccupied in conversation and watching traffic. I walked up to the passenger side and tapped on the window and held out the wine bottle as if offering a drink. The woman turned and saw me and shrieked, and the driver made a hard right into traffic and floored it. Probably suburbanites who already were nervous about being in an urban neighborhood. The first party was in a house on a dimly-lit street, and I could see through the shoulder-high front windows that guests were gathered in the living room and the party was getting under way. I simply stood at the window with my face near the glass, peering in and waiting. It took about thirty seconds before someone noticed me and froze. Reflexively the other dozen or so partiers looked to see what had him transfixed, and then a collective scream rang out. I ducked out of sight and waited a couple of minutes before going to the door and ringing the bell. The second party was nearby, hosted by a drama queen I knew from work. The door had a knocker, so I ignored the bell and gave three well-spaced, loud knocks. When the host answered, I held out the wine bottle. He yelled, slapped me hard, and slammed the door in my face. I had to wait a while to try again, and when he opened the door I quickly identified myself. I wouldn't try any of that nowadays. There are too many paranoid people with guns.