NKP guy Some think those imposing banks built before, say 1960, were intended to convey safety to depositors in the days before the FDIC & FSLIC were created. You'll notice the bars that were once common in those banks, even in small towns, that could intimidate an innocent customer.
Look at the bars on the windows of this Life Insurance company. Probably built with 1920s-30's era gangsters in mind?
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.0732946,-85.1394405,3a,17.4y,10.65h,80.41t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sgDaqQc-AyvS4fDv_w9ELcA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192
Anti-burglary measure, pure and simple. Some life insurance outfits could have some serious cash on hand years ago. Not like a bank of course, but enough to make a tempting target.
NKP guy ...and even high schools...,
I sat in on several meetings regarding school security for our local school district.
Suffice to say that the days of all the doors being wide open are gone...
Many of our schools date back some years and do look like bastions of learning (as opposed to office buildings).
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
In Eastern New York state where I travelled around as a boiler inspector, I would go to many schools to inspect. I noticed how similar they were, how they followed the same basic pattern which was a wide fairly ornate brick front with, depending on the amount of students might have one wing going straight back making it like a Tee, or there would be two wings on either side. The amount of trim would depend on the prosperity of the town, for example the school in Wappinger's Falls was ornate with wrought iron, stained glass windows and so forth. The school in Staatsburg which was nowhere near as prosperous was very austere. I found out at some point that they were built when FDR was the governor. They were all over the Hudson valley.
All of them had massive cast iron H.B. Smith steam boilers, some were as big as a house. We called them "pork chop" boilers as they were made of iron sections shaped like pork chops in pairs with a central header above and lower headers along each side.
54light15We called them "pork chop" boilers as they were made of iron sections shaped like pork chops in pairs with a central header above and lower headers along each side.
54light15 I would go to many schools to inspect. I noticed how similar they were
It still happens now in some places. Several years ago I had to help out with copier repairs in the Prince William County VA school system, the local techs were a bit overwhelmed. I was amazed to see most of the new elementary schools were built in "cookie cutter" fashion, that is, same design but repeated over and over in various locations. Made perfect sense when you think about it.
He was Daniel H. Burnham. An important dude, as it were. But he wasn't a railroader.
http://mysteriouschicago.com/finding-daniel-burnhams-no-little-plans-quote/
There you go, all lit up!
And what a grand quote it is, a wonderful 19th Century mans way of saying "Go big, or go home!"
The Burnham Plan, while a major part of Chicago history and lore, would have been incredibly expensive to have followed completely. While many portions of it were started, few were completed in toto.
The Burnham plan helped to preserve the lakefront for the public and constructed a network of parks linked by parkways.
The parks and boulevards are mostly on the West Side with some to the South and were the work of the West and South Park Commissions. Frederick Law Olmsted and William Lebaron Jenney were the architects of those parks.
It's important to consider the distiction between "quality" and "quantity." The construction quality of Pennsylvania Station was not superior to the constuction quality of Grand Central Terminal or Daniel Burnham's Union Station. The IRT's power house , which only functioned to generate electricity, was equal to the construction quality of Pennsylvania Station.
Suppose no tunnels, no station, no Sunnyside yard had been built and the PRR service would have ended at Jersey City and a ferry ride to Manhattan. The funds then available to straighten the meandering PRR mainline in Pennsylvania or relocate and striaighten altogether combined with electrification would have created a 110 mph capable railroad with the savings that electrified operations would have delivered. The proposed 1903 New York, Pittsburgh and Chicago was to be a less than 1% electrified railroad across Pennsylvania. It would have cut 100 miles from the New York - Chicago route. The time on the ferry would not have been a competitive problem. Maybe Penn Station was a bad decision altogether?
SAMUEL C WALKER Maybe Penn Station was a bad decision altogether?
A fair enough question!
I'll leave the numbers and dollars to others.
But...have you ever commuted via train? With a ferry ride, twice a day, every day...for the length of your career? How many hours of one's life does that cost? How many people are we talking about since 1910? Isn't this one way to measure efficiency or efficacy?
The men who planned and built Pennsylvania Station and its ancillary facilities believed in the future of this country and its future needs. They've been proved far-sighted and right for well over a century.
Americans such as they took Daniel H. Burnham at his word and indeed, made no little plans.
SAMUEL C WALKERSuppose no tunnels, no station, no Sunnyside yard had been built and the PRR service would have ended at Jersey City and a ferry ride to Manhattan. The funds then available to straighten the meandering PRR mainline in Pennsylvania or relocate and striaighten altogether combined with electrification would have created a 110 mph capable railroad with the savings that electrified operations would have delivered. The proposed 1903 New York, Pittsburgh and Chicago was to be a less than 1% electrified railroad across Pennsylvania. It would have cut 100 miles from the New York - Chicago route. The time on the ferry would not have been a competitive problem. Maybe Penn Station was a bad decision altogether?
Suppose no railroad - think of all the money saved! [/sarcasm]
Progress is not free.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
PATTBAAor "If you try to impress, you will end with excess , ( and may be left with a 'mess') " . Did those who approved of this massive edifice pause to consider the inordinate future expense of cleaning , maintaining, and heating this behemoth?; because the basic function of a train station is for a passenger to enter, purchase a ticket , and board the train, why massive Greek columns and pediments?.When the inevitable demolition arrived I presume some who were "present at the creation" reflected "I told you so!. Because much of Manhattan constuction is "verticle" , consider what could have been constructed over a far less spacious station.
I think railroads built most of the big city passenger depots with several items in mind........
1. Most were replacing stations that were not that old but had limited capacity. A lot of the UNION STATIONS were replacement for smaller stations built and owned by each railroad that lacked capacity for both passengers and trains. So emphasis was on future capacity of the station not just current. In most cases the railroads did well in that area as the big city stations did well handling WWII traffic surges.
2. At the time most of them were built the outlook for rail passenger traffic was pretty good and thought to be on a climbing trend line. However check out the current Milwaukee Amtrak Depot built in 1965 back then it was known passenger rail services were on the downward trend. In space it was less than half of the former Milwaukee Road Passenger Train station but was also a consolidation of both the Milwaukee Road and C&NW Train stations in Milwaukee that were huge. In comparison the Milwaukee terminal was tiny and utilitarian. It was built to also be self-sustaining and had lease offices above it along with more vendor space on the first floor, when it was built then it has now. Though now it has a bus station squeezed into it.
3. Railroads back then built their stations and office towers to a 100 year min standard of utility and most of the buildings were designed of low maint and high use materials at the time.
4. For originating and terminating traffic the big city station was a big part of marketing to use the specific passenger services of a specific railroad line. Much like airports are today when a city has multiple competing airports.
Wayne: You claimed to have been welcoming him, but PATTBAA, the OP, never posted again.
SAMUEL C WALKERSuppose no tunnels, no station, no Sunnyside yard had been built and the PRR service would have ended at Jersey City and a ferry ride to Manhattan.
The other great solution which I frankly can't believe was never exploited was the tunnel (originally the same sort of bridge as the Vanderbilts proposed at the Straits of Mackinac as I recall, but don't quote me) at the Narrows, from what would become the grade-separated line across Staten Island through to the New Haven at Bay Ridge. Not surprisingly the line south to Bay Ridge was the original 'main' route of the Hell Gate Bridge extension of the New Haven, getting NH out of stub-end poking down the Park Avenue viaduct. The problem, of course, was and is Manhattan...
The funds then available to straighten the meandering PRR mainline in Pennsylvania or relocate and striaighten altogether combined with electrification would have created a 110 mph capable railroad with the savings that electrified operations would have delivered.
The proposed 1903 New York, Pittsburgh and Chicago was to be a less than 1% electrified railroad across Pennsylvania.
The time on the ferry would not have been a competitive problem.
Wayne will be amused, though, if he researches the "Harriman Short Line" revival after April 30, 1925 -- hearings by 1930 involved some very high-profile military recounting of how valuable the new line would be to national defense. And by then the necessary high-speed electric locomotives were much better understood. Leonor Loree, who helped keep the Ramsey plan alive 20 years or more after Gould welshed and decided 'Baltimore was enough' had some very pithy things to say about it, particularly when the then-$85 million cost of the 'premier line' was stacked up against $100 million approved for the CUT project. He said (with apologies in advance to Becky) "if the one is justified the other is compulsory" and who am I to say he wasn't right?
A Harriman Short Line tied a little more carefully into railroads at the New Jersey end would have been a dramatic improvement for freight carriage, not so much in terms of competitive pricing but in both lower cost (20' to the mile grade and 400' lower summit of the Alleghenies) and higher speed (no more than 2-degree curvature as finally surveyed -- Ramsey's people revised it three times).
There is a docket 'feet thick' in the ICC records for this project, and I think it is more the collapse of the 'foreign interests' that were behind it, rather than any careful ICC attention to the various somewhat 'dog in the manger' railroad comments against it, that kept it from being an interesting public-works kind of project in the mid-to-latter 1930s together with the PRR electrifications. This was right in the middle of the 'fifth system' discussions and it is interesting, for example, to think what operation of a non-PRR high-speed railroad connecting with the same P&LE that destroyed the Liberty Limited three decades later might have involved...
I'm staying out of the argument, because it's beneath us, but I personally took both the original post here and the one about New Haven electrification to be at least bordering on trolling, and I wasn't surprised to see responses that picked up on the needlessly argumentative tone.
I don't think I commented at the time, in part not to discourage a new poster, and I hesitate to bring it up now except to indicate that Wayne might have been using broad humor rather than criticism, perhaps more than a little justified in the circumstance.
charlie hebdo Wayne: You claimed to have been welcoming him, but PATTBAA, the OP, never posted again.
So I noticed. He hasn't come back to "Thrill Of Discovery" either.
"Post and run" OP's aren't too unusual. It is a little annoying for some when one posts a question, gets an answer, and doesn't respond with so much as a "Thank you." Happens a lot on the "Classic Toy Trains" Forum and I suppose on the "Model Railroader" Forum as well. But what can you do? Can't make them come back.
Overmod I'm staying out of the argument, because it's beneath us, but I personally took both the original post here and the one about New Haven electrification to be at least bordering on trolling, and I wasn't surprised to see responses that picked up on the needlessly argumentative tone. I don't think I commented at the time, in part not to discourage a new poster, and I hesitate to bring it up now except to indicate that Wayne might have been using broad humor rather than criticism, perhaps more than a little justified in the circumstance.
A little sarcasm goes a long way, as the saying goes. This is especially risky with a total stranger.
Trolling? Maybe, or maybe just a convenient rationalization for dismissing comments one doesn't agree with.
SAMUEL C WALKER The time on the ferry would not have been a competitive problem. Maybe Penn Station was a bad decision altogether?
I think history shows that a ferry would have been a problem. How long after NYP was built did PRR's Jersey City terminal last? On the LIRR side there is still a small terminal at Long Island City, but it only gets a handful of trains compaired to NYP. NJT's Hoboken is the only big terminal that ends across the river from Manhattan, but the passengers still utilize a tunnel to get the rest of the way via PATH. Plus NYP enabled the Boston connection via NH.
Remember this as well, the tracks under Penn Station didn't stop there but continued under the East River into Long Island and Sunnyside Yard, handy for both the PRR and the LIRR.
Look at it this way, the PRR's leadership at the time weren't stupid. They knew full well the tunneling and station construction was going to be expensive but they also knew it was only a matter of time before the whole project woud pay for itself by cost savings elsewhere.
Besides, what a great slap in the face it was to the "hated" New York Central, invading the NYC's turf as they did!
The New York Centrals reaction?
charlie hebdo Overmod I'm staying out of the argument, because it's beneath us, but I personally took both the original post here and the one about New Haven electrification to be at least bordering on trolling, and I wasn't surprised to see responses that picked up on the needlessly argumentative tone. I don't think I commented at the time, in part not to discourage a new poster, and I hesitate to bring it up now except to indicate that Wayne might have been using broad humor rather than criticism, perhaps more than a little justified in the circumstance. A little sarcasm goes a long way, as the saying goes. This is especially risky with a total stranger. Trolling? Maybe, or maybe just a convenient rationalization for dismissing comments one doesn't agree with.
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
Not especially. The term troller applies very well to Ohio River X in all his incarnations, but to these? meh.
charlie hebdoTrolling? Maybe, or maybe just a convenient rationalization for dismissing comments one doesn't agree with.
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