Robert Pence

Thanks, everyone! I thought about buying a birthday cake and eating the whole thing all by myself, but I took a nap, instead. :-)

Pretty nice; looks like a great place to grow up.

Nice looking downtown. The state capitol is classic both in design and in its setting.

Great tour! Maybe it's a matter of height and density on both sides, plus pedestrian activity on the sidewalks and the amount of color and variety in facades and signage. I think there's so much visual attraction on both sides of the streets that it tends to draw attention away from all that pavement.

If anything would create the street-smarts and toughness to do that, growing up in Northwest Indiana would do it. Tough territory.

I remember a Metro Station - I'm thinking it was Foggy Bottom - where the down escalator was like a journey into the center of the earth; it seemed to fade out of sight in the distance. My then-bf, who always put up a Macho-Man front, was terrified of it. He had to shut his eyes and hold tightly to the moving handrail with one hand and my arm with the other.

That's a rather handsome bridge; nice, clean lines without being sterile. The housing projects look like they won't be any great loss to Williamsport's aesthetics. In almost every photo from Pennsylvania, the background has wooded hillsides. In Northeast Indiana, the background usually is miles of sky with a distant, flat horizon. I've always loved Pennsylvania's rolling-to-mountainous terrain, and an Air Force buddy of mine from Renovo who came home with me a couple of times thought our wide-open spaces were spectacularly beautiful.

Wow! I've never been there, and that's seeming more and more like a major oversight on my part. Excellent photos, and the area looks visually exciting. The older buildings look like they've been done really well, and I like the variety of designs in the infill.

OK. Qwios and GreenerPastures, both of you guys knock it off! It takes two to have a fight, and what you're engaged in is a fight over nothing. Please don't drag the thread off-topic; if you want to have a personal scuffle, take it to PM because the rest of us don't want to see and hear it.

Pretty nice!

A bit of transit trivia about the street with the streetcar tracks and center slot; while it may look like a cable-car track configuration, it isn't. Overhead wires, including streetcar catenary, were prohibited in Washington, D.C. Streetcars picked up power through a special shoe that went through the center slot to a wire or bar that ran beneath the street.

This is Mayberry:

The big windows make a big difference; I like the upper-level seats because they afford a view that I've never seen before, and the bigger windows give a much wider view forward and back. Note the similarity between the new South Shore gallery cars and the new Metra Electrics; both were built by Sumitomo, basically to the same specifications with a few relatively minor differences. The Metra Electric cars have digital displays on the lead cars to show the train number, whereas South Shore doesn't need those. Old Metra Electric gallery cars:

That's one of the things I find fascinating about Pennsylvania's towns. In the upper Midwest, a few houses survive from before the Civil War and almost all the urban commercial and public buildings and churches from that era are long gone. In Pennsylvania's small towns, residential and commercial buildings and churches from the 1840s and sometimes back into the 1700s seem to be all over the place. It really gives me pause to consider some of those homes that have served continuously as everyday private residences going on 250 years. I know that's not remarkable in Europe, but in North America settlers had just begun to carve farms and villages out of ancient forests when some of the homes in the area around Lancaster were built. Here's one from 1754 in Strasburg:

Excellent photos! The street-level shots really capture the density and energy.

Good collection; some of the older stone churches look like they were designed by the same architects who created some of Pennsylvania's Medieval-looking county prisons! Traffic lights aren't always a distraction; sometimes they work as foreground elements to give a photo depth. Those are fine.

I'm tapped out on construction and specification info, guys. There's been a lively, informed, and informative discussion on SSP, with input by some knowledgeable people.

Car floors are the same height as a high-level platform, comparable to the height of an Amtrak platform or car floor. The center doors are high-level, and the end doors have both traps and steps, like an Amtrak car, so that they can be used with either high-level or low-level platforms.

I never realized they had such a heavy-repair backshop operation. Wheel lathes were pretty common for street railways, but rebuilding wheel flanges and axles and hot-forging new parts was something that smaller systems usually contracted out. When you're running that many cars, though, and running them hard, I guess it makes sense. I wouldn't be surprised if they did that sort of work on a contract basis for systems in smaller nearby cities, too. I truly missed my era by about twenty or thirty years. Working in a shop like that would have been my dream job.

You can do that, but normally you hand the conductor your ticket when he asks for it. He tears off the stub and hands it back, and puts a small slip of paper in the clip to show that the fare has been collected. At some stations there's no ticket office or the ticket office isn't open when your train departs; then, you just pay your fare in cash on board and get a tear-off receipt showing the amount paid. I keep my stubs because my travel expense usually is deductible. It's not that much of a reach; the nearest people in that photo are short, and the man in the doorway ahead probably is around 6 feet tall; I'm about 5'10" and I wouldn't have any trouble reaching a ticket handed down by an upper-level passenger. The upper-level passengers have to lean down, of course, but that's not a problem because those seats are singles and the aisles are narrow. Most regular commuters use passes, and they only have to show them.

I can't make up my mind whether to just kill myself now, or wait until I hear the trumpet or see the first of the four horsemen. :| Seriously, the country's infrastructure is a mess, and no one wants to pay to fix it. Why pay taxes to avert long-term consequences when we can have a lot more fun spending our money on petty self-indulgences, frivolous crap, and instant gratification?

A fellow rail enthusiast from Michigan found these three segments on YouTube, that make up the entire 1935 Detroit Street Railways film, "Getting About." Pretty amazing!

Just as Mount Pleasant, Iowa, is hundreds of miles from any mountains. :lol:

The town hall needs a Liars' Bench. That's what they used to call the benches in front of every town hall and courthouse, where idle geezers would pass the time solving the world's, or at least local government's, problems and reinforcing each other's ignorant opinions with lies and exaggerations. I guess they don't need to do that any more, because Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh have taken on the responsibility for the whole country. :x

Gorgeous photos! They bring out the little kid in me; as far back as I can remember, I've always been especially delighted by bright-colored flowers.