mobilene
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Posts posted by mobilene
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If we do it at 9 pm tonight I'll arrange my schedule to accommodate it.
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I can even see here in Indiana how some of the less-traveled state roads got their starts in old trails, many for farm-to-market access. Indiana just joined joined these roads together to make state highways. I remember driving SR 39 in SE Indiana and seeing how it was just a series of paved farm road segments (with some delightful twists along the way). 39 is a very minor route and has very little in the way of improvements (except for paving) from when they initially made it a state route. SR 42 in west-central Indiana is another one of those.
While I think I most appreciate the highway system of the 20th century and its old alignments, I do have a certain appreciation for the roads used to make them. I'm not sure I'd ever go anywhere near that road with a 10-degree slope toward a 500-foot drop, though. Even in my 20s, I was too much a scaredycat. I am interested in following the road, but not at the risk of losing a Land Cruiser!
jim
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<...>so you don't get complacent, why wouldn't a turn at about your third arrow from the right cross the river at an opportune place? The distance from town is about right.
I guess I'm gonna have to just go back out there and see! But as I study it some more, it would make sense to have a hard left there so the road would cross that creek just past where it narrows down. Why build a longer bridge when a shorter one will do?
jim
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Daggone it, KTSOTR, every time you read one of my pages you come up with at least one new bit of info that makes me want to go back and investigate further!! An old friend, the one who told me about the brick road in the first place, wants to do this trip with me in the late fall, so I'll definitely be looking at this spot more closely.
That spot at the pin looks to me, fwiw, as just an access road to the old National Rd. I put the blue arrows in to show where I thought the road went.
But what I'm writing here doesn't jibe at all with your ABB. So now I'm not sure. I want to go back to your pinpoint and see what kind of road is in there. If it's cement, esp. with the widening strips on either side, I'm sticking with my theory! If it's asphalt or dirt I won't be so sure anymore.
If you look on your screen shot, there's a spot on the tracks where the old road must have crossed. It shows up almost as blue. I'd like to go to that just to see. Wonder how much private property I'd have to traipse through to do that, though. After that one incident early this summer where I got chased off an abandoned alignment I didn't know was on private property, I'm skittish.
jim
Oh, and BTW. I have a bead on a 1914 and 1916 ABB, both Vol 4 to cover my part of the world. The 1914's cover is pretty torn up, and the 1916 looks well used but intact. Wish me luck on bidding.
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Wagon roads seem a little daunting to me -- such virginal and, for me anyway, uncharted territory. I think one of the things I like about the old but paved highways is that the history is more recent and I can get my hands around it. But by all means, make that wagon-road trip, and expand my horizons!
jim
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Thanks for posting this! The steel truss bridge is really something.
Are those two old pumps at the Texaco station actually functional?
jim
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I am amazed that the "All While Help" sign on the side of that building has not been removed under protest!
Howell's Restaurant looks remarkably clean and tidy. The chairs at the counter are really neat.
You are fortunate you have so much natural beauty to work with out there along your roads. It's mighty, mighty flat where I am. Out here, when a road jogs or curves, it's usually to go around a farmer's land! It does get more interesting in southern Indiana where the glaciers didn't flatten things out, but still without the scenic vistas.
jim
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My hometown was a typical city with grids of streets, making walking delivery feasible; a teenager still delivers my parents' paper and puts it just inside the screen porch.
Indianapolis has large areas like that in the older parts of the city. But I live out in the "old county" from before the city and county merged in 1970. It's full of small cul-de-sac neighborhoods off largish arterials. I don't know how you'd do a walking route out here. You'd have to do two or three of the neighborhoods for it to be worthwhile, and that would involve walking along a well-traveled street while loaded down with papers and thus not very agile, and that would be in the dark several months of the year.
I wish my kids could get a paper route. It's excellent work experience. But not where they live; it'd be too risky.
jim
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Sweeeeeet! Wish I could have been there to see the Kaiser Darrin up close and personal.
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I worked on two different paper routes over time, both for my town's afternoon paper -- did it right after school. I walked the first route because most customers wanted their paper in specific spots, like inside the screen door, on the back porch, or inside the milk door. (You know the passthrough that the milkman could set the milk inside? Usually the outer door was on the driveway side of the house, and the inner door was in the kitchen.) The second was in a tonier neighborhood with larger yards, so I rode my Roadmaster 3-speed on that one. I rode through the yards, which I wouldn't like done at my house today, but nobody complained then. Today, of course, my paper is delivered by an adult motor carrier and I have to walk out to the end of the driveway to get it. Well, before I canceled the paper, anyway, for their perpetual propensity to improperly protect the paper from precipitation. (Avoid affective alliteration. Always.)
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You really have to be a good risk to get one of those new Diner's Club cards!
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The coolest bridges on 40 that I've seen, however, are in IN somewhere between Terra Haute and Indy. (Pat and Denny, can you help with the location and some detail?)
I found one abandoned bridge and a couple-three bypassed bridges on US 40 last year when I explored between Indy and the IN/IL line. http://www.jimgrey.net/Roads/US40/index.htm and see esp. the White Lick Creek, Deer Creek, Big Walnut Creek, and Interurban pages.
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That corroborates with what the historical signage at the Greenup bridge said: the route was paved in brick and concrete in the early 1920s.
I'm pretty sure you did post the 1916 TIB strip maps; didn't I put a snapshot of one of them in the writeup?
jim
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If it's that contentious elsewhere, can we make sure we don't tell any of those guys about this place?
I've been doing online forums, BBSes, and e-mail groups for almost 20 years now, and 75% of those I've joined either turned into immature pissing matches or became overrun with spam and/or off-topic posts. It is unusual to find a discussion as civil, friendly, and fun as this one on the Net, and so I am especially grateful for this place.
Peace,
jim
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Alex,
Your photo of the NB lanes of 51 north of Covington is fabulous. The way you captured the rise of the road is compelling. And it does give the feel of a (more modern) country 2-lane.
I also really liked the photo of the Chevrolet staff car. Reminds me of the "blackout" cars, with trim painted instead of chromed, that were produced after the war started but before auto production was halted.
I love Tennessee to death. You keep posting these trips and it's going to make me want to come down for a road trip.
jim
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I guess my later-day equivalent was working at a Dairy Queen for $3.35/hr in 1985. I really liked that job. I got really good at making the little curly-Q on the ice cream. I got to eat anything I wanted at a 50% discount. I was very into blueberry shakes that summer, with about 3x the blueberry syrup. 1985 was the year the Blizzard was introduced. They didn't have all the kinks ironed out of it yet -- I went home every night with Blizzard spatters on my uniform, and they never washed out. Next time you order a Blizzard, notice the stainless-steel collar they stick into the cup -- a late-summer addition to the production of those things that prevented future uniforms from being stained.
I'm waiting to see how the next few months unfold for me before I commit to another road trip. I put an offer on a house today, and the place will need a little work. So moving and doing the necessary fixups will consume some weekends.
I'm still hopeful my friend and I can reschedule US 31 for before the leaves fall. I hope to visit my friend in Hoboken and drive US 40 back and take a couple days to do it, hitting the highlights (I could probably spend a week doing it to my usual level) -- if I have the vacation time. The friend who told me about the brick National Road in IL in the first place wants to make the trip with me after the leaves fall this year -- a pretty smart man, for so many things become visible, such as any leftover bridge abutments, when the greenery doesn't block the view. It's all probably more than I can do this year, but I'll watch for opportunities.
Next year I'd like to drive the Lincoln across IN, and maybe take a slow trip across part of Ohio on US 40 and the National Road. I'm thinking Wheeling to Columbus because I want to find the spot where they buried US 40 under I-70 -- I found it by mistake about 15 years ago, and it scared the bejabbers out of me because I didn't know it was coming.
jim
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What a fabulous writeup! I like the photo with the mystery wheel the best; the oranges are so vivid, and the bridge is such a surprise to find there. I've never been to Oregon (closest is a sheep ranch near Redding CA) and so have never seen the desert up there. It seems despairing. I can't imagine trying to scratch out a living out there. It reminds me a bit of the desert I saw when I was in Coahuila, Mexico last fall, with its rock-hard ground that still somehow managed to grow a sparse brushy ground cover. I felt the same kind of despair looking out over the miles and miles of that hard ground. Now, that abandoned cabin sure had a square roof. And is that a No Trespassing sign on it?
This makes me hungry to drive north to my hometown, get on US 20, turn left, and then keep going for about a week. Unfortunately, my kids like eating, and I have to go in to work tomorrow in order for that to happen.
jim
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My friend, if I ever come across a 402 control panel that needs wiring, why, now I know who to call!
When I was a kid in the 70s and early 80s, a five-and-dime store was still operating within a reasonable bike ride of my house, and it had a stainless steel soda fountain on it. It was a Bastian Blessing, I'll never forget. They could make you a Coke by squirting syrup into the glass and shooting carbonated water into it. My brother used to order double-strength root beers there. My favorite was their chocolate malt, and they did not skimp on the malt. The owner was ancient when he finally wanted to retire, but he couldn't find a buyer to continue the business. He closed the store and auctioned the whole thing off. This was probably in the early 90s.
Many thanks for the compliments on my trip writeup. It is gratifying when others read and enjoy them. Makes me want to do more of them.
Peace,
jim
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Wire?? You had wire!?!? When I got into computers we had to use wet string to build circuits and, before punched cards were perfected, we had to cut little holes in parchment scrolls with flint knives. We'd have killed for wire.
I'd love to have seen you debugging programs written on punched parchment! I'll bet you had to be mighty skilled to get the holes uniform so the reader could deal with them. jim
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I started with a 128 K Macintosh when they first came out, when my employer did not think we should have computers in our offices...it kept us from being on the road making sales.
I started on a Commodore PET and then taught myself BASIC on a...gulp... Sinclair ZX-81. I used my first serious computer, an original Mac, in 1984 and later used Macintosh IIs with 21 inch greyscale monitors in my first professional job 18 years ago. I was also the system administrator for our AppleTalk network of Macs and PCs. I've written assembly code on the 8-bit DEC PDP 11/70, got my first ever e-mail account on a DEC VAX, grudgingly used CICS on IBM mainframes running Z/OS, spent a summer working on a dedicated Wang word processing system, slogged UNIX commands, learned a little C, and used emacs as my editor, e-mail client, and newsreader (and through it got my first Internet access in 1990 or 1991), and have used a slew of Windows PCs starting with Windows 3.1. And I'm sure I've overlooked an old system or two in there.
I was wired before anybody ever heard the term!
jim
Greenup covered bridge, archetecture, and shoe factory flea market<...>
Pat and Denny, STL to Terre Haute or vice versa would make an excellent spring cruise, wouldn't it? Perhaps you guys could put something together like this year's Dixie Cruise....Bliss
The bridge west of Greenup is really something else, isn't it? It's built like a tank, and sure adds some character to the area. The concrete bridge that used to be there was just ugly.
I'd enjoy an Illinois US 40 jaunt, esp. if we kept to the old alignments. If Terre Haute is an endpoint, it's fun to drive the original alignment of US 41, too, and see downtown at the old crossroads as well as 12 Points, where three roads intersect creating 12 corners. It was kind of a downtown of its own in days gone by, and it has slowly been undergoing restoration over the past 10-15 years.
jim
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I've been hooked on the Web since I saw my first Web site in 1994. This is when there were hundreds of Web sites. Hundreds!
It's about as reliable now as it was then!
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I'll take Old Alignments for $500, Alex.
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My host appears to have been having intermittent problems over the past couple weeks. If you find the site not responding, just try again later. If this keeps up, I suppose I'll need to find a new host. jim
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My ex-brother-in-law is in the Secret Service and was assigned to Vice President Quayle back in the day. My ex-BIL doesn't talk much; he only rolled his eyes when asked about the days he was always ready to take a bullet for the man.
As for removing those wayward Es, I'm a recovering book editor.
Alex, I'm sure that the folks in Pemaquid were Mainers in 1820, even if they were voting in Massachusetts elections. KWIM?
Happy Birthday To Us
in General Discussion
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Oh, duh. They did teach me to read back in engineering school, I swear. I'll join in Thursday at 9 if the stars align right.