Robert Pence

I'm as good as your uncle. Whippersnappers need someone to help them grow up with mature values and an understanding of personal responsibility. Sometimes it takes a firm hand, but it's for their own good. :police: :-)

Jack posts temporarily, and then I cut out two equally-spaced holes 16 x 16 x 1 foot deep in the basement floor (thin cement floor might not have supported the weight), poured concrete footers in them, and set 4 x 6 CCA-treated southern yellow pine posts on the footers to support the beam. I gutted and rehabbed that house wall-to-wall and basement-to-roof and now live in it. I had to air it out for most of a month before I could stand to work in it.

I was a landlord to college students for a while. I started out renting a four-bedroom house to a college student I knew, who got others to move in with her. It was a rotating situation with some leaving and others taking their place, and after a while it got to where I wasn't sure who was paying rent and who was a parasite. The house took a beating, too. Rooms got repainted in weird colors - rainbows on the ceiling in one bedroom - and somebody put up shelves in the kitchen by drilling holes in the previously-intact late-40s enameled metal wall tile. Someone opened a basement window for whatever reason in sub-zero weather and a pipe burst, and I had to come home from out of town to control damage. The pipe was still spraying water when I got there; nobody thought to turn off the valve. There was a minor fire that I think had something to do with cocaine, and the final straw was a party where everyone was "dancing." From what I could find out about thirty people were in the living room bouncing in rythm with music, and suddenly there was a sharp noise and part of the floor dropped sank. I found a crack running the length of an 8-foot-long, 8x8 oak beam in the basement. I thought I was going to have to burn the place down to get the last ones out of there, and after they were gone I learned that the utilities were about to be shut off. NIPSCO demanded that I pay the arrears to keep the heat on, and it was easier to shell out the few hundred bucks than to fight them over it. I've rented to college students since then, but only with references, a credit check, and a tight lease. I drop by unannounced on weekend nights and at other times, too, "just to see if everything's OK."

Golly! It's almost as nice as Antwerp! :wink:

Several years ago some of the fast-food franchises in my area tried that in order to spiff up the "dining" experience. Didn't work; the local fast-food clientele were accustomed to taking stuff out of a paper bag and eating it with their hands, and the concept of eating food from a plate using metal utensils was utterly baffling to them. They tried to play frisbee with the plates and used the forks to stick each other in the face. :roll:

After an hour or so someone would have to walk me out of this place because I'd be catatonic from astonishment: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e98_1237657552

Excellent photo set, and I can relate to your encounter with mall cops. I haven't tried to take photos in a mall, lately, but the plague of photo-phobia pervades our cities. I've heard that Fort Wayne's Glenbrook Mall, still pretty much alive by all outward appearances, strictly prohibits photography, and lifestyle center Jefferson Pointe (they ought to be bulldozed just for that ending "e") supposedly runs off people taking photos. To me it has the smell of death upon it, with quite a few vacant storefronts, but they're still trying to keep up appearances. I'd like to try to create a hidden camera setup using my DSLR, not just a pocket-sized digicam. I'm thinking maybe a fairly wide lens; I have a 28mm f/2.8 that probably would work, setting the ISO pretty high to capture most lighting situations, and putting it into a shopping bag with a busy pattern that would render the hole for the lens inconspicuous. I could set the bag on a bench or pedestal as I sat down to "rest," and point it in the general direction of what I want to capture, use a remote to trip the shutter, and let photoshop take care of the rest. Most fun would be to shoot photos of ever-vigilant mall cops on their Segways.

I always set a travel alarm when traveling by sleeper. That paid off when riding from Harrisburg to Fort Wayne on the Broadway, back in the day when we still had service. My alarm went off and I got up and got cleaned up and dressed. I had prepared my bag the night before. As I recognized the lights of a shopping center a little more than a mile from the station in Fort Wayne, there was a frantic knocking at my door. I opened it to see an attendant with a purely stricken look on his face. I thought he was going to melt with relief when I stepped into the aisle with my coat on and my bag in hand. He'd been taking good care of his passengers the evening before, so who knows what happened? I tipped him nicely anyway.

It's not. But the worth ethic of too many Amtrak's employees needs to be "upgraded" too. I've noticed that, too. I wonder how much of that problem is associated from low morale that results from working for an organization that is so widely disrespected in the mainstream press, and from having to do too much with too little in terms of resources to keep everything in a state of something less than good repair. Talking with on-board service people on long-distance trains, I get the impression that the hours and working conditions can be very tough, and I'd think that if one hasn't been promoted to something else by the time they turn 35, they'd probably bail and go into some less-demanding job like smoke-jumping. When long-distance trains run late or equipment breaks down, that adds significantly to the demands on them and can tax their ability to provide cheerful customer service.

Neat pics! It's good to know that we can have a naval presence in the Great Lakes when we annex Canada.

Twice, traveling from Oakland to Chicago in January I was on trains where they shut down most of the restrooms because of frozen toilets. That was in the 1980s; you'd expect them to have fixed freeze-up problems by now, since most of those cars probably have been shopped for rebuilding at least once. As I mentioned in another thread, I've never-ever been warm in a superliner, be it coach or sleeper, in winter. They're cold and drafty.

Striking compositions!

^That's almost as pretty as sunset on Grand Lake St. Marys, at Celina! :wink:

Great details; I've long admired the massive street-level masonry of PNC Tower. Carew Tower doesn't get a lot of attention outside Cincinnati but I think it's a great building, especially in the lobby and hotel areas with the lavish Art Deco designs and materials. I think limestone would have showed off the nice design of the tower, itself, better than the brick they used; the texture of the bricks obscures the lines of the building, in my opinion.

Good stuff. I'm fascinated by the massive intricacy of railroad bridges. I'd bet the CSX crew were on the radio reporting a trespasser. You probably moved on before the railroad cop(s) arrived. I have yet to have an encounter with CSX police, but some of the NS guys can be particularly nasty (and some are just professional). In July, 1979, Amtrak Catlettsburg was the origin/destination for Amtrak 66/67 The Hilltopper, which ran to/from Washington, DC. If I remember correctly, a bunch of trains were cancelled on October that year, and I think the Hilltopper was one of the casualties. Eastbound the train acquired a sleeper and food service and ran through to Boston as the Night Owl. I changed trains from the Cardinal to the Hilltopper in Catlettsburg, which involved a six-hour nighttime layover, and spent the night snoozing on a baggage cart on the platform with my duffle bag for a pillow, occasionally waking to the roar of a CSX coal train on the opposite side of the river. Great trip! Hilltopper boarding for departure at 5:15 a.m.; F40 locomotive and two Amfleet coaches:

Great set! I'm really impressed by the Stone Mad info; it's impressive to see that much effort going into creating a distinctive atmosphere in a locally-owned establishment.

Almost. Some years more than others. The track approaches to Union Station in Chicago should get some winter preparations in the form of brushes or high-velocity blowers to clear accumulated snow from the roofs of cars before the cars are backed into the train shed. In the photo below, the Lake Shore Limited consist on December 17, 2008, was backed into the train shed for boarding with several inches of snow piled on the roofs of the Superliners. Once inside the train shed, the cars began shedding big slabs of heavy, wet snow onto the platforms. The crew member in the distance had just been bombed with the pile of snow seen on the platform immediately behind him, and seconds before, a disabled woman on a scooter had passed that point.

Lovely photos, lovely place, lovely day!

I've posted a couple of photos from this set earlier in this topic, but there are many more. In the 1980s I volunteered with Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society Nickel Plate Railroad locomotive 765. Those were the days when there were mainline excursions with big power, at speed. All-day excursions with 500 or more seats often sold out both days of a weekend. NKP 765 is headed to Chicago in 1985 with one coach and a freight train to drop off at the EJ&E interchange. The engine will power a series of excursions on the Northwestern. Here 765 waits in a siding in 1985 as a Norfolk-Southern freight train passes. The photo below is a link to a large set of NKP 765 shop and excursion photos on my web site:

They were the modern thing in the sixties, when the people who lived in those houses had decent jobs in the steel mills. There's a function to some kind of cover over the stoop, too, when you don't have a porch. If you were standing on the top step fishing for your house keys while trying to balance a paper bag full of groceries in a hard rain, you'd really appreciate the shelter.

In this photo, on the far right by the low wall, is that where one of the streetcar ramps starts its descent into the subway for the lower deck of the Detroit-Superior Bridge?

Good shots! Some of the Columbus residential areas show off better without leaves on the trees; the foliage is so dense in summer that it's hard to get good views of some of the houses.

I can see where airports like Fort Wayne's might take a beating even from fast trains (110mph) that run on time and frequently. I haven't investigated the services lately, but I think a lot of the traffic is to larger hubs that are well within the range of passenger rail; Chicago and Indianapolis, for example. Currently the only "competition" Fort Wayne's air carriers have for service to Chicago is bus, and that's two trips per day, one via South Bend and taking an hour longer than driving, and the other via Toledo (!!! :wtf:) taking seven hours. In order for rail to be serious competition against air service from regional airports to major hubs, rail would have to have easy, direct connections with the hub airports, and service from Fort Wayne to Union Station doesn't cut it. Either you drop a hefty cab fare, $40 or so, to get to O'Hare, or if you're familiar enough with CTA, hike with your luggage to the nearest Blue Line station allowing at least an hour for the ride. We need to better integrate our various transportation modes and relax the rules that make it difficult for a carrier to operate multiple modes, so that a traveler can choose whichever combination best suits his/her needs.

If i'm not mistaken these were taken to document the structures. I assume the pictures were taken at off hours and/or purposely taken without people present. It could depend on the technology used by the photographer. These are pro work, and if they were shot with large view cameras with glass-plate negatives and small lens openings for depth of field, the exposures could have been sufficiently long that a person in motion might not have registered. It's still quite possible, though, as David stated, that the photographer might have waited for the scene to be free of distractions.

A rather handsome building on the outside, and fortunately it hasn't been broken into and vandalized and made useless for adaptation.