Robert Pence

Good tour! It looks like an interesting neighborhood with an abundance of positive energy, the kind of place I could live contentedly.

A substantial portion of the old PRR route through and Fort Wayne went to CSX in the breakup of Conrail, and CSX leased it to RailAmerica, whose wholly-owned subsidiary Chicago Fort Wayne & Eastern (CFE) operates it. Much (maybe all) of the line across Indiana, and into Ohio, has been single-tracked and de-signaled. It would take nearly as much time and investment to make it capable of handling the freight that currently runs Cleveland-Toledo-Elkhart-Chicago as it would take to make it capable of handling 79mph passenger trains. Further, there's the trackage rights issue involved in moving NS freight over CSX/RailAmerica/CFE. 1971: 2007:

I realize that expectations of getting money to actually lay track through Fort Wayne at this stage were unrealistic, and I just hope that the excitement that NIPRA successfully generated here doesn't give way to such severe disillusionment that people just walk away. At best it will be several years before a scheduled passenger train pulls up in downtown Fort Wayne. Meanwhile, I'd consider it a major benefit if the Lateshore and Capitol achieve respectable schedule reliability and perhaps additional frequencies are added on the line through Waterloo and South Bend. That would make Amtrak a viable option for me, and I'd be inclined to make the 20-mile drive to Waterloo sometimes instead of traveling 100-plus miles to Michigan City to ride the South Shore. I was pleasantly suprised to see how much lost time Indiana recovered in the application process, and much of that surge in interest was a result of the efforts of the very energetic and well-organized local activism led by Geoff Paddock and Dr. Tom Hayhurst and others in NIPRA. There's no denying, though, that Indiana came very late to the table compared with other states, and the only reason any money is being spent in Indiana is because of the benefit to passenger routes that primarily serve other states. Indiana has yet to commit any of its own money to the advancement of passenger rail. I think that's an important factor in any future allocation of federal funding. Where would that money come from ? ... It's seldom too late to stop misdirecting precious resources toward an ill-conceived boondoggle, although apparently Indiana has forgotten the lesson learned when it had a close encounter with fiscal disaster because it undertook construction of a costly canal after some eastern canal operations had already been forced into bankruptcy with the advent of railroads. I believe Indiana's commitment to the I-69 extension southward from Indianapolis, disregarding the clear future of rising fuel prices and the diversion of freight from trucks to rails, will one day be seen in the same context. It should be stopped now, and the money should be redirected toward a transport mode with a future.

Cute neighborhood. I love the Welcome sign.

I seem to recollect paying as little as $18 round-trip Fort Wayne to Chicago in the early years of Amtrak. An extra $8 one-way, I think, would buy a seat in a roomette if any were unoccupied. I often did that on the return from Chicago, because the bright overhead lights were left on in the coaches at least as far as Fort Wayne so that car attendants wouldn't have to waken dozing passengers to get them off the train. In a roomette I could turn off the lights and close the door and take in the nighttime scene outside the window. The seat-in-a-roomette deal was discontinued because of the invasion by philistines into what had been a genteel form of travel. They'd pull down the berth and do God-knows-what in it, and/or use the towels and washcloths to freshen up, requiring the car attendant to turn the room before it could be used by the paying passenger who had it reserved farther down the line. By 1990 I think the fare may have risen to as much as $25 one-way, although I'm not sure of that. I love two quotes from Rogers E.M. Whitaker, long time reporter for The New Yorker magazine, who wrote in All Aboard With E.M. Frimbo, "A gentleman always rides in the sleeping cars" and "In America there are two ways to travel; First Class, and with children."

Depots and Railroads in Fort Wayne, Indiana I took all these photos except the vintage aerial, a Journal-Gazette file photo that I found in the archives of First Presbyterian Church. It's a crop of about one quarter of an 8x10 image shot sometime before 1948. A couple of years ago I fell in with a bunch of railroad historians at a get-together at Hillsdale, Michigan. One of our recent on-line discussions concerned the Detroit Arrow, a Chicago-Detroit passenger train jointly operated by the Wabash and Pennsylvania Railroads. The two lines crossed in Fort Wayne, and the shared operation allowed the two roads to compete with the New York Central and Grand Trunk railroads for a lucrative piece of traffic. The Detroit Arrow once had one of the fastest schedules in North America, averaging 75mph from end to end with its only stop in Fort Wayne where it changed engines, crews and operating railroads. I started digging through anything I had on the two roads and their downtown depots and shared it with the group. I thought I might as well inflict it on the forumers, too. Some of these photos are hasty scans from old negatives and Ektachromes that haven't aged well. I still have more of this stuff unscanned in the archives. One of these days… First Amtrak Broadway Limited in Fort Wayne, May 1, 1971 Waiting to document the arrival of a train running 45 minutes late, I took a photo of the Wabash Depot that had seen its last day of passenger service the day before. The train gets a Penn Central freight engine to make up for a locomotive with engine problems.<br> 1971 1972 1973 Wabash Depot Pennsylvania Shops - Locomotive Erecting Hall (Current site of main post office) Old engine house 1979 The structure in the background is the former post office dock, on the north side of the tracks west of the depot Junction Tower The building in the background with the smokestacks is the powerhouse for the Taylor Street GE plant, built during WWII to produce aircraft turbosuperchargers. The black water tower is Essex Wire, originally Dudlo Manufacturing, built to produce wire for Model T Ford spark coils. Mom worked there for a few months right after high school, before she decided to become a nurse. The brick buildings at the far left are the west end of the Broadway GE complex, along College Street. 1980 In some of these photos you can see that the plaster at the lower edges of the vault is beginning to fail. As addicts stole more of the copper flashing off the roof, easily accessible from track level, the problem accelerated. By the time Amtrak service ended here, there were plywood partitions along the sides of the waiting room to keep people away from areas where it was dangerous. Tunnel leading from south end of depot to stairs up to track platforms. Looking north from the platforms along Harrison Street. Oops! I'd guess that if this trailer had fallen out where there was no canopy frame to bump it partway back onto the car, it probably would have fallen off and made a heck of a mess. By 1980 the canopy roofs were leaky and rotten, and they removed them to keep pieces from falling on waiting passengers. They replaced a short section near the stairwells with coated steel panels. It was a pretty sad and dreary place to wait for a train. 1982 1984 November, 1990 The last Amtrak train to serve Fort Wayne, Train # 40, the eastbound Broadway Limited, ran in November, 1990. These are photos taken at the station on Baker Street that night. The station, in somewhat unkempt condition at the inception of Amtrak in 1971, had received little in the way of improvement, and to a great degree had continued to deteriorate. The trash-strewn express/baggage elevator stands open to the elements and vandals. Thieves had stolen the copper flashing from the roof, easily accessible from trackside, allowing water to penetrate and destroy the decorative plaster work on the ceiling vault. The arched windows at trackside had been mostly covered with plywood to protect them from thrown rocks, and neighborhood vermin had tagged the exposed glass. Plywood barriers kept waiting passengers away from areas where they might be injured by falling/fallen plaster. Note the sign on the station bench in the foreground. You'll see it later. An overhead drainage system had been improvised to intercept and redirect the water leaking through into the tunnel from the platform above. Plywood blocks off one set of stairs leading to a no-longer-used platform. Plywood on the upper walls covers the remnants of glass-block windows pulverized by vandals, who also ripped down and destroyed the handrail on the right side of the steps. Stairwells originally were open at platform level, but in an effort to keep out vandals they were closed off with glass doors which were immediately shattered. The glass was replaced with plywood with plexiglas inserts, which got tagged and battered. In some publication or on-line blog I saw a photo of the train arriving at an eastern station, with the sign still attached. The caption said that the sign had been attached by Amtrak Chicago coach yard workers. Somebody must have just made that up; here's proof: 2004 The building was in deplorable shape by the time an architectural firm bought it and renovated it into office space. The spacious central hall is available with catering for private events. They did a first-class job, even restoring the windows that backlight the stained-glass panels in the vaulted ceiling. Those windows had been bricked up years ago, I'd speculate for WWII blackout purposes. 2007 The station backs up against an area that is seriously "the wrong side of the tracks." The razor wire was put up to keep thieves and vandals off the roof where they could try to break in through windows, spraypaint, and perform other acts of mischief.<br> Westbound traffic on the NS side. I worked on the top floor of this building until I quit GE in 1988. When the Broadway ran on time, I'd often see it pass as I walked to work from my home about a mile west. Even when the station was still in use, the platforms were vandal magnets. The handrails were broken out of the stairwells and the glass-block windows were smashed. After Amtrak installed locking doors at the tops of the stairwells, the plexiglass got broken out so they put plywood over them. I think it would have been more effective to hire one of those guys who advertises security services in Soldier of Fortune Magazine, and tell him, "I don't want to know how you do it. Just make it go away." Some time in the past couple of years, the railroad bulldozed the stairwell walls into the wells and collapsed the concrete roofs on top or them, sealing them off. Added August 15, 2007: Here's a crop from an aerial that I shared earlier. Looking at the automobiles that I can identify, it looks as though it may have been taken during WWII or even earlier. It shows three paths crossing between the PRR eastbound platform and the Wabash; one just west of the signal bridge, one a little west of that, and one just west of the water tanks. I went on site this morning to look it over, and mostly buried under ballast rock and overgrown vegetation there appears to be a remnant of what might have been a platform on the north side of the Wabash tracks. In today's litigious environment it seems unusual for railroads to permit passengers to cross active mains, but times were different then. Maybe that's how they did it. My earliest recollection of the PRR station goes back to about 1947 when at the age of seven or eight I went to Chicago with Dad. The station now looks pretty much as at did then, although by the time of that trip it had already been altered with fluorescent lights. The buzz of those lights echoing through the cavernous space was one of the things that always triggered that memory when I went there to catch a train in later years. The pedestrian underpass to the platforms intersected with two stairwells; the one nearest the depot went to the westward platform, and the one at the far end went to the eastward platform, from which passengers might have used the foot paths in the photo to cross over to/from the Wabash. Photos from this morning, August 15, 2007<p> Looking east on Grand Street toward Calhoun. The Wabash depot stood on the left, with waiting room and ticket offices on the second story at track level. Looking west from Calhoun Street. The stairway is the same one shown in the previous shot. The Wabash depot stood on the left. Looking west. The PRR depot and ruins of its platforms are obscured by the ailanthus and other overgrown trash vegetation on the right. This is where I think the path west of the water tanks might have come through. The water tank footings are hidden in the thicket on the right. The drive going off to the left goes down off the elevation to Fairfield Avenue across from the GE plant. This railing is on the south side of the Wabash tracks, across from where the path from the PRR station might have come through. Standing on the Wabash overpass above Harrison Street looking at the PRR overpass and beyond. Sidewalk on Wabash Harrison Street overpass, with part of the Wabash freight house visible at the far left. Wabash freight house. Where we've begun and ended our rail travels since 1990 The Amtrak stop at Waterloo, Indiana (pop. 2,040)serves Fort Wayne. It's at the intersection of Indiana 427 and US 6, 20 miles north: Shelter walls don't extend all the way to the floor, and there are neither doors nor infra-red heaters. If you want heat while you wait for your (probably late) train, sit in your car with the engine running. You can get a cup of coffee at the gas station two or three blocks north. Don't slip and fall on the crushed-stone surface of the steepy-banked parking strip while getting out of your car. That was the westbound platform. Eastbound trains try to line up with a relatively narrow track-level strip of asphalt that serves as a path to the platform. Sometimes they miss, and you step off into snow-covered ballast rock: Nice, huh? Rally for Rail 2010 in Fort Wayne Baker Street Station, January 16, 2010 All Photos Copyright © 2010 by Robert E Pence The station was designed by William Price, of Price McLanahan Architects, and built by the Pennsylvania Railroad. It was completed in 1914. The clock was on the Calhoun Street facade of a bank that stood on the present site of One Summit Square. Renderings of One Summit Square showed the clock mounted on the Calhoun Street facade of the building, but it didn't happen. The clock languished in a warehouse where it was rediscovered a few years ago. It was restored by local artisans and mounted on a structure just west of the Baker Street Station. Pre-program music was provided by Possum Trot Orchestra. A little bit of Who's Who: Former City Councilman Dr. Tom Hayhurst, one of the organizers and leaders of NIPRA and Democrat contender for the US Congress seat held by Mark Souder. State Senator Tom Wyss is Chair of the State Senate Committee on Transportation and Veterans' Affairs. Geoff Paddock, another NIPRA leader and Master of Ceremonies for the Rally For Rail. Fort Wayne City Councilman Tom Smith, a rail supporter and also an advocate for bicyclists. Win Moses, former mayor of Fort Wayne and now a State Representative. Walter "Skip" Sassmanshausen, retired educator and widely acknowledged as the area's most knowledgeable rail historian. Senator Wyss again. Justin Stalter of the Downtown Improvement District, a strong supporter of NIPRA and provider of technical support. Seats are filling up. Nice venue, eh? Geoff starts the program on schedule. Fred Lanahan, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Fort Wayne Public Transportation Corporation (Citilink) Standing room only, full to the doors! Dr. Tom Hayhurst tells how the return of passenger rail will bring jobs to Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana. Pam Holocher of the city's Planning and Policy Office, represented Mayor Tom Henry. Allen County Commissioner Bill Brown was caught off guard and hadn't expected to be called on to speak, but delivered an effective, concise statement on the benefits of passenger rail for the local economy. Fred Warner represented Steel Dynamics, now the only Fortune 500 company based in Fort Wayne. Steel Dynamics has invested heavily in rail production technology, and is developing a facility to manufacture composite crossties with a steel core and concrete body encased in a coating made from recycled rubber and plastic to protect from the elements and lengthen life. State Senator Tom Wyss makes it clear that he understands the importance of passenger rail to Fort Wayne. I didn't get this man's name, but he was here to communicate Senator Evan Bayh's support. Previously, a message from Senator Richard Lugar was read, so Fort Wayne passenger trains have strong bi-partisan support. Congressman Mark Souder spoke. The man everyone wanted to hear, INDOT Deputy Commissioner Leigh Morris. His statement that INDOT has recommended the Fort Wayne - Toledo route for Chicago - Cleveland service brought applause from the audience.

Looks like the Fort Wayne route got nothin' - not even a "Sorry, maybe next time."

Welcome, Karl.

Damn, that water is cold this time of year. It'll leave a thick layer of slimy mud over the paths. We get that almost every spring. The current administration puts a lot of emphasis on the Greenway, and they've done a pretty good job of cleaning it up. In the past, the most we could expect was that they'd make one pass with a skid loader, and a couple of inches would remain to harden into a treacherous, rutted trap for the unwary. I recall driving on roads that parallelled the Susquehanna in May, 1963 under blue skies with white, puffy clouds. Orchards on the hillsides were in bloom, and the river was at normal flow and nearly crystal clear. There was a place that I think wasn't too far from Williamsport where it looked as if I could have walked almost all the way across the river on big rocks.

Looking at the scale of the other objects in the poster, she's more like a few hundred feet tall. She'd squish you like a bug. If she weren't so angry, she could get a job washing windows on high-rise buildings.

The ones who simply stand on descending escalators may have coordination problems or a general uneasiness with them. Problem is, even on a fairly wide escalator they'll stand in a manner that blocks people who want to walk. They're the same ones who stand in the middle with luggage beside them and block the moving walkways in airports. The office building where I used to work had escalators, and some of the employees (it always seemed to be women; I never saw a male employee do it) would stand and sort of swing a foot several times trying to get in sync with the moving treads before stepping onto it. There were elevators, too; I don't know why they didn't just use those instead of backing up traffic at busy times like lunch and quitting time. Worst are the people, usually groups of two or three or four shoppers in department stores, who step off the escalator and then stop right there blocking blocking everyone else while they figure out where to go next. Often I forget to be polite; "Hey! Get out of the way!" In the office building I mentioned above, they shut down the escalators about a half hour after quitting time. When I worked late, I had to walk down. The first few steps when they were stopped were a little disorienting.

Delightful!

I've been near Tipton several times, but never visited the town. The courthouse was designed by Adoph Scherrer, who finished Edwin May's designs for the Indiana State Capitol after May died.

If you check out the picture postcard view farther down the page on Shorpy, you see a double-set of incline tracks. Some inclines were built like that (for example Pittsburgh's Mon Incline in the old days) with one pair of cars to carry passengers, and in Cincinnati's case, streetcars, and the other was for heavy freight that might be wagons loaded with lumber or stone/gravel or other building materials and heavy cargo. For that matter, even the old streetcars outweighed today's automobiles by quite a lot. Nowadays, there wouldn't be a need to carry cars; roads already exist, and most car commuters wouldn't be inclined ( :-D ) to wait and take a slow ride, when they could drive to their destination more quickly. The draw would be for pedestrians and cyclists, and tourists would be captivated by the great views from them; it's much more unobstructed than from a cable car or funicular. Check out the view from the Johnstown, PA incline:

My PX10 came with tubulars, and within a few months I restrung the wheels for clinchers. I liked the responsiveness that came with the very light tubular rim/tire combination, but Fort Wayne streets and bike paths were, and to some extent still are, excessively rich with broken glass and other sharp debris. I experienced punctures too often and repairing tubulars is along the road is a PITA; usually I'd walk home from any distance < 3 miles and fix it there. I saved the sweet Normandy Competition high-flange hubs and swapped the rims to to Super Champion Gentleman. Now the wheels are on my black Eisentraut-frame road bike, with Specialized Transition Armadillo 27 x 1 1/8 (115psi) clinchers. They roll nicely and I 've only had one puncture, a result of vandalism on the greenway. My unsatisfying experience with tubulars was 40 years ago. Now, there are Kevlar-lined versions more puncture resistant and better suited to road use, but I suspect that on-the-road repairs still are just as bothersome.

Great find! I wonder if any of the Cincinnati inclines ever crashed. It happened sometimes on other sytems; I'm pretty sure I read about at least one in Duluth, Minnesota that was the result of a powerhouse fire. It would be great if Cincinnati could bring back some of theirs; it would make the city more walkable/bikeable. Being realistic, I know it's cost-prohibitive and the idea would meet a lot of opposition.

Most enjoyable thread! The disposable cameras and rainy weather give the street scenes a dreamy, ethereal feel, like the Holga photography sometimes used for artistic effect. I love how the London stations and others throughout Europe have airy, spacious trainsheds with lots of natural light through skylights. America's big-city stations sure come up lacking in that respect; think of the poorly-lighted subterranean boarding platforms of Chicago's Union Station.

Everyone warned me about the drivers, but in driving to the factory from El Paso every day, and occasionally driving with co-workers to restaurants, I didn't find them much different from what I was used to in Fort Wayne -- completely random and erratic in their moves, clueless as to the presence of other drivers, and in utter contempt of what might, to the uninitiated, pass for traffic laws. The only things that scared me were those big white buses; their bumpers were liberally smeared with various colors of paint from encounters with automobiles. I stayed well away from those buses when driving. Maybe it's different now, but then, I found the drivers in El Paso to be much more aggressive than those in Juarez. I don't remember what the name of it was, but there was an expressway I drove regularly that was utter anarchy, with doses of mayhem thrown in from time to time. One evening I came by a place where a semi had cut off a car and shoved it clear up and over a concrete barrier between the opposing lanes of traffic. I wish I had taken more photos in downtown Juarez; the Mexicans appear to be master craftsmen and artists in concrete and stucco, probably because of the lack of timber. There were some Streamline/Deco facades that looked as if they might have been from the fifties or thereabouts, and the floor and walls of the lobby of the factory where I spent my days were tiled in rich, vibrant colors. At one time, El Paso streetcars crossed the bridge just into Juarez before turning around and heading back. One of my co-workers said that until border restrictions were tightened a few years before, many Mexicans rode the streetcars into El Paso to shop. Some people hoped that the service would return, and when I was there the streetcars were in storage and the tracks and catenary were still in place on the bridge and on one street that I saw in El Paso. A few years ago, I saw the streetcars advertised for sale. When I go through some of these old sets of negatives, I realize how much my photographic habits have changed since I switched to digital photography. With film, I always was conscious of the cost of every click of the shutter, and sometimes constrained by the amount of film I had left. With digital, the transformation for me was immediate; with no incremental costs to concern me, I felt free to blaze away at everything that might be of interest, often trying various compositions and angles on the same scene. Now, I would have covered the station from every angle I could think of, inside and out. It was interesting to see Burnham signature features with a soutwestern accent.

In my student days it was NoDoz (same 200mg/tablet). I lived on it for a while, and then it quit working for me and I slept like the dead for the better part of 24 hours. I don't know that anyone then ever thought of crushing it and snorting it, though.

Much of the long-haul freight now on I-75 (and other interstates) should be in trailers on flatcars or in road-railers. If the interstate highway system were required to recover its operating costs and generate a competitive return on investment via tolls, a lot less long-haul freight would be rolling across the country on rubber tires on asphalt.

I wonder how long AirTran could continue that fare if airports and the Air Traffic Control system received the same level of taxpayer support as intercity passenger rail.

I love this set. As ColDayMan said, downtown New Orleans doesn't often show up here, and it should. It's so good to see streetcar tracks down the center of Canal Street, and Lee Circle looks much better in your photos than when I saw it around 1990; then it was shabby, unkempt, and run-down.

This evening I came within less than a foot of running down a cyclist with my car. It was after dark and I was waiting for a traffic signal at a one-way cross street. When the light turned green I checked to make sure all cross traffic was stopped/stopping and checked for pedestrians before proceeding. Just as I entered the intersection, a cyclist appeared in front of me, riding the wrong way on the cross street and running the stoplight. He had a light, but it was no brighter than he was; it wasn't sufficient to attract my attention, especially considering that he was in an unexpected place and probably wasn't in my field of vision when I checked the intersection. I avoided hitting him, but I wish my reflexes had been quick enough to give him a blast of my horn to hopefully send him home for a change of underwear. Even though he clearly was in the wrong, it would have been a traumatic experience for me if I had injured him.

Excellent tour. Some rough spots, but overall a respectable-looking neighborhood.

Isn't eating and drinking on buses and trains prohibited? On most transit systems, it is.