Some rails long gone

As most of you know, I'm a railroad buff. Perhaps naturally, since my Dad and my uncles all worked for the old Milwaukee Road, and the Burlington also went through my old hometown. The Burlington had the great roadbed and track and the gleaming stainless steel Zephyr passsenger trains that roared up the Mississippi valley on the way to the Twin Cities and points west. The Milwaukee was more cash-poor and the equipment was generally a bit more weatherbeaten and worn.

In addition, the Rock Island was south of us. It was the first railroad to have a bridge across the Mississippi river back in the 1850s. By the 1970s it too was running on a cash shoestring and looked it. The Illinois Central ran north of us, along the Wisconsin border. The Chicago North Western ran west through Illinois and Iowa on its way to Omaha, and its connection to the Union Pacific (the first transcontinental railroad).

A local road that occasionally gets overlooked is the Chicago Great Western, which was in existence from the 1880s to 1967, when it merged with the Chicago North Western.

The CGW was a latecomer to the Midwest railroad arena and as such didn't have access to the best terrain or most direct routes between major cities. It crossed through some of the hilliest terrain in the Driftless Area and had to bore through the river bluffs near Galena with the Winston Tunnel. It had numerous branches in Iowa, as did most of the other Midwestern railroads. I believe that in the early 1900s, no place in Iowa was more than 20 miles from some rail line. Since a team pulling a grain wagon could cover 20-some miles in a day, the strategic placement of rail branches made perfect economic sense.

By the middle of the 20th Century, trucks began to haul all that grain, and the growth of the highway system took a lot of passengers and freight away from the rails. Those railroads burdened with a lot of (now) light traffic-density branches and no direct lines between major cities were the first to fall into bankruptcy and merger. So went the CGW. After the merger with CNW, the North Western pulled up a lot of the lines they didn't want or need. By the 1980s, most traces of the old railroad were gone.

The hub of the Chicago Great Western was the city of Oelwein, Iowa. Its lines to Chicago, Minneapolis, and Kansas City all merged there. The main engine and car shops were located there, and the North Western did keep these shops going until its own merger with the Union Pacific in the mid 1990s.

Most of the rail jobs are long gone now, and the UP runs through Oelwein these days instead of stopping. But there are a few people in town trying to keep the heritage alive with the Hub City Railroad Museum, located in the old Oelwein Yard Offices. This is where your correspondent took a day trip last Saturday.

The museum has a decent collection of old employee records, pictures, and small equipment. The museum does a good job of showing the CGW's influence in Oelwein.

But....

A lot of the pictures and equipment aren't shown in any coherent order, and the few pieces of rolling stock they own are in somewhat sad shape. That isn't anyone's fault, really. The museum is run by volunteers, most of them getting up in years. It's a classic case of too few hands and too many projects and not enough visitors to fund said projects. It's a shame, but all too common.

Probably the centerpiece of the museum rolling stock is an old F7 locomotive. General Motors' E and F series were most railroads' first purchase of diesel road power. They're something of an iconic design in 20th Century industrial equipment and have been on many US and foreign rosters. Even today, the F7 can be seen occasionally hauling museum passenger trains, commuter trains, and business trains for the major railroads. They weren't extremely popular with road crews (they weren't easy to climb up into), or maintenance crews (major engine work meant removing a good portion of the carbody), but the things still look cool!

From the outside, she looks resplendent in crimson and black with yellow lettering. This is how she'd have looked pulling a long freight up across the hills and plains on her way to Chicago or the Twin Cities or down to KC.

We'll climb the stairs and go in through the vestibule door in the rear of the engine.

The powerplant-an EMD16-567B 16-cylinder diesel engine, producing 1500 horsepower. Fairbanks-Morse made a similar design for its locomotives-but a person would be more likely to see one on a fleet submarine from the World War II era. F-M produced its 16 cylinder diesel in trainloads for the Navy. Even today, a nuclear submarine carries a similar engine for last-ditch, emergency use. But I digress.

At the nose of the engine is, of course, the head office-the control station. Until the 1980s, a freight train carried a crew of five, three in the engine (engineer, fireman, brakeman) and two in the caboose (rear brakeman, conductor). Nowadays the average crew is two. So the engine has three seats-one for the engineer who actually did work, and two for the relatively useless fireman and brakeman.

This would be view from the engineer's seat:

The interior is, to put it kindly, in rough shape. Certainly not beyond restoration, but needs some serious work.

Like military vehicles, railroad museum engines and rolling stock should be kept under some sort of cover. This F7 would do well in a shed, with the interior refurbished and monitored to keep the riff-raff from stealing stuff and ripping the engine up, or traded to another railroad museum that could keep her up properly.

In short, as a city museum featuring their railroad history-not bad. As a railroad museum-not so good, but still  a good collection of a 'fallen flag' road.

yankeedog out.

Hail Atlantis!

And the end of an era:

The last of the Space Shuttle missions will soon be launched, and with it at least a pause in American-run manned space flight. One hopes this won't be the last time the US launches men into space.

It's hard to believe that just over 30 years ago, Crippen and Young flew Columbia on the program's maiden flight. I remember back in the 1970s seeing pictures of the old Enterprise do landing and glide tests. And of course, the losses of Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. Exploration has always been a risky business.

To be honest, I'm not sure if the shuttle program was a huge success, or if it met any of the 'goals' the original designers might have had. The shuttles were instrumental in launching, supplying, and repairing several satellites and space stations. And for the stresses the vessels went through in a typical mission, they were remarkably durable. 30+ years for an aviation program is remarkable enough.

I think the shuttles were largely a victim of being part of the political football that NASA has been during most of its existence. Given a mission to perform, NASA performed generally well. President Kennedy wanted to place and retrieve Americans on the moon by the end of the 1960s-and it got done. Numerous agencies and nations wanted satellites launched-and it got done.

Now what? During the 1970s and 1980s, NASA didn't seem to have a clear vision for the future. Sure, the shuttles were in the pipeline. But what to do with them? Use them to build an orbital station? What about a manned mission to Mars? A return to the moon?

The collapse of the Soviet Union may have been both a blessing and a curse for the US space program. The 'curse' was that any plans to build orbital stations and planetary bases to counter the USSR went by the wayside. The 'blessing' was that the Mir station could be supplied and serviced by the shuttle. Mir and the new International Space Station provided work for the shuttles through the 1990s and 2000s.

After this final mission, the 135th of the program, the Space Shuttles will fade into history. The surviving vessels will be parceled out to various museums.

Again, now what?

Unfortunately, we haven't found a compelling reason to go to the moon or the other planets. The moon doesn't appear to be loaded with a lot of exotic minerals which would make mining a viable proposition. There may be enough water ice at the poles to sustain a small base-someday.

Building a big enough orbital station to have a permanent industrial presence (building interplanetary craft, for example) seems to be a non-starter. Venus, unfortunately, doesn't have the life many sci-fi authors thought it might. Same with Mars, though it is livable after a fashion, and more amenable to life as we know it. I haven't given up on life on the other planets, since we find organisms in the most inhospitable places here on Earth. If a bacteria can thrive on the inside of an operational nuclear reactor, certainly something could be living on Mars. Obviously, if Mars were more Earth-like, every nation would have been building ships as fast as they could to set up colonies there.

Observation and communication relays can be handled adequately by satellites, so it isn't like we need a manned station to perform those functions.

So what do we replace the shuttles with? Or will we?

The Russian space program seems to be doing okay with its venerable Soyuz/Salyut systems. They've been around a long time, but the Russians are believers in the engineer's dictum-if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The Chinese used a Soyuz clone for their manned space flight. Perhaps our next step will be a step back, like the proposed Orion and Constellation craft, which are at heart enlarged Apollo capsules. Perhaps the Air Force already has a replacement craft. There are a lot of strange craft seen out in the hinterlands of Nevada. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if we had something else available to send a brace of astronauts into orbit if necessary. Oh, nothing like a flying saucer with inertialess drive-but maybe a spaceplane like the old Dyna-Soar.

Or some private concern might pick up the slack and develop a manned craft. There may be a market for a very upscale hotel in orbit for the super-rich to spend a few days. Again, with no readily identifiable resources or industry within a practical distance of Earth, it might be a tough sell to get the private sector to invest in space travel. The space program has generated a lot of projects and products that we use every day. I believe continued investment in space, along with a well-defined program with realistic goals, is important for the nation.

In addition to the material benefits, the space program and any endeavors it can accomplish provide a source of pride in a non-violent sphere. Our seeming 'abandonment' of space seems like yet another example of an America in decline. Maybe it is. Certainly, in the halcyon days of the push for the Moon in the 1950s and 1960s, many people and organizations had big dreams and thoughts about man's future in space.

All I know is that by the 1990's, we were supposed to have interplanetary ships like the famous Botany Bay:

And by 2001, we'd have a real, honest-to-God space station with regular Pan Am service:

And I want them!! What the hell happened?

Of course, by some accounts, by 1992 the Apes were to take over the planet and that didn't happen. Whew!

yankeedog out.

I hate a parade!

Another Fourth in the books. Another year, and the country still together! Didn't think we had it in us, did you?

There are some great Independence Day traditions: baseball, family get-togethers, community festivals. We here in the QCs don't do the Independence Day parade very well, though. Now, the Soviet Union-there was a bunch that could do up a proper parade!

Oh sure, they could only produce one roll of toilet paper for perhaps 10,000 people, but if you need a real, honest-to-God, big-boy parade, you'd have to call the guy who organized the annual May Day spectacle in Moscow.

Now, our Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena on New Year's Day is pretty darn cool. The work those people put into the floats (decorating them with flowers, seeds, and other natural materials) is astounding!

The local parade doesn't have big displays or cool floats, however.

TBH's mom loves parades for whatever reason. I suppose it's because back in the day there wasn't all that much to do, and people had simpler tastes. She did, in her youth, see a few (old!) Civil War vets, and that's a great story to tell. That's 150 years past, but in a way, three generations removed. Doesn't seem like such a distant event when put in those terms. But I digress.

Since Bob (her companion) died, we decided to take her to the 4th of July parade. Now, I don't mind spending the time-but the logistics of carting around someone in their early 90s can be complicated. We got to the parade route two hours early. Any later and it's a hike to the route. She doesn't see too well, so you have to get a spot right on the curb of the street. Oh, and make sure it's shady the whole time because those old Scandinavian types got no appreciable melanin and they burn easily. Also, need to find a spot close to a restroom. The choice of spots available goes down tremendously. Those of you with older relatives understand.

The first part of the parade was a series of firetrucks from the local communities. Very nice-and I have great respect of firefighters, most of whom in smaller towns are volunteer-but I don't know if I need six firetrucks in a row. There was one antique that the local firefighter's union restored, which looked right sharp. Other than that, all the fire engines look about the same.

Next were the local vet's groups. The color guards for the Vietnam Vets and Hispanic-American Vets here I'll put up against any other color guard outfits out there-they're crisp, they march in time, and they look like they could go out and fight today-not bad for guys in their 60s! Even had a couple of World War II vets in restored vehicles. Those guys are going away fast now, and before too long they'll all have passed.

The middle of the parade is local businesses and politicians and wannabe politicians. Oddly enough, most of the politicians were noticeable by their absence. Our local representative to Congress, a Republican, came by and shook TBH's hand. I told him to get his arse back to work. Country's drowning in debt and the economy sucks and you've got time to be fucknuckling around out here instead of being in Washington. Next was the state senator, a Democrat, the scumbucket gentleman we send to Springfield to screw up things. That worthy got in a shoving match with another senator over something or other during the last session. I yelled out and asked him who he'd beaten up lately. There. Got one Republican and one Democrat. Never let it be said that I'm not a fair man.

The worst part of the parade is that everyone in the parade tosses candy to the kids. Consequently, the kids (and worse, their parents, who in most of these cases are roughly the size of a dressed-out bull moose) get up in front of those of us who sat around looking at nothing for two hours before the damn parade started! Now we can't see squat. To be fair, if you ask, they'll usually move-but there's always that ten percent who are stone-cold clueless. The kids-OK, really not much problem with them. They're generally small enough to see over or around. When a handful of candy gets tossed to the street, the scene is reminiscent of a potato-chip truck getting tipped over in Mogadishu. A feeding frenzy. You can replicate this by going to a zoo or aquarium. Go to the feeding pond and buy a handful of fish food pellets and toss them into the water. The carp or goldfish or whatever react just the same as the kids. Really, we're hip deep in candy and gum here. I don't know why the frenzy.

Finally, the equestrian team from some Hispanic group here did some fancy riding. They were pretty good and had some fearsome costumes.

So to sum up: First 1/3 rd of the parade OK. Last group OK. Rest was a waste of time, though TBH's mom enjoyed the show. Guess the day's objective was met.

Back to the grind tomorrow. If the 4th were Monday or Thursday, we'd have gotten a four-day weekend. Since it's on Monday-three-day weekend. That's the way it goes, I suppose.

yankeedog out.

235 years on-still here!

Fourth of July weekend. Baseball game and fireworks tomorrow. Don't get much more American than that!

Happy 235th to our Republic, somewhat belaguered and debt-ridden bunch that we are at present.

Later, citizens!

yankeedog out.

Stuff of late

Well, been a while since the last post.

Been a bit busy of late. Mom's house renovation proceeds, perhaps not at the pace I might like, but still progressing. We have the bathroom in running order, and the laundry room is ready for tileboard on the walls and tile on the floor. We'll need to get electric, water, and gas rerouted, and the washer and dryer up from the basement. We should be on the downhill side after that. Still some electrical wiring issues to fix and some copper plumbing to rip out (the Cu should fetch a decent price at the scrapyard).

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Last weekend TBH helped run the swim meet for the local Senior Olympics. I 'volunteered' (read 'was conscripted') to help with seeding, timing, and general gofer duties. That went pretty well, though I think 50 as the minimum age to participate seems a bit young. I'd think 55 would be a better minimum age.

The only major issue was that some of the people wanted to change events in the middle of the meet (scratching an event is no big deal, adding is). In any other meet, changing events really wouldn't be allowed, but what the hell-it ain't the real Olympics. I figure as long as nobody got hurt and everyone got their medals, it was a good day.

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President Obama is coming to the QCs tomorrow to visit an aluminum plant! Lucky us. Now, I'm not going on ideology here, just on practicality. They're working on a lot of the roads here this summer. The last thing we need during morning or afternoon drive is the President's big tank of a limo, his entourage of War Wagons, and Secret Service types closing off the airport and the one or two major thoroughfares that aren't under construction so he can go to see some people actually working for a living. It'd be nice if they'd bring Marine One along and just helo him to the plant. They could park his copter at the Iowa Guard base outside of town (a helicopter unit, so they have the facilities) and it wouldn't tie up traffic. I think this would make some sense. Therefore the powers-that-be won't do it.

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The B-17 Aluminum Overcast is coming to town in a couple of weeks. She's one of the very few surviving airworthy Flying Fortresses out there. A person could take a flight in her-for $429(!) (reckon I don't begrudge the EAA the fare-it isn't cheap to fly a four-engine plane around, and it isn't like everybody can fix the thing if something goes wrong). Not sure it's in the budgetary cards to fly her this year. I did fly in the Collings Foundation B-17 Nine-O-Nine about ten years ago. Truly awesome to fly in a piece of history! I had a great-uncle who flew in Forts during WWII. My flight didn't have any locals trying their damndest to blow us out of the sky, so I suppose my flight went better than his combat missions.

At any rate, one can walk-through Aluminum Overcast for $15. I think I can swing that. I'll get pics.

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That's about it, other than the myriad little details that make up life. Fourth of July weekend coming up-chance of rain at least for Saturday and Sunday. I've got tickets for the River Bandits/Lumber Kings game on Saturday night (with postgame fireworks), so c'mon good weather!

yankeedog out.

Some fastpitch from the weekend

We took a little bit of time off this weekend to watch some of the International Softball Congress adult men's fastpitch qualifier. The winner of the tournament will go on to the ISC World Championship, which will be here in the QCs in August. There are some pretty good teams and players that show up for the event-teams from all over the US and Canada, with players from both countries, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. I believe Kitchener, Ontario, has won at least two of the last three tournaments, so they're the bunch to knock off in August. The fastpitch tournaments are a good time if you're into stick and ball games. And the players at world championship level are talented enough for the scores to be 2-1 or 1-0.

For a time in the mid 1960s, Rock Island was the home of the ISC Worlds. They played the whole tournament on one diamond. Although a given night's games might be scheduled for 6,7,8, and 9 pm, they'd inevitably run much longer and it wasn't uncommon for games to still be going on at 2am! This year's tourney will be at Green Valley Sports Complex, which has 12 diamonds-makes for a MUCH faster tournament.

The Better Half remembers going to some of the 60's tournaments, especially the 1967 series which saw a local car dealer's squad winning the whole thing. One of the players was an affable fellow named Chuck Thome. As TBH remembers it, Thome had a broken arm one year but he was a good player.

Oh yes, he has a son who plays a bit of baseball. Most fans of the game would have heard of him. Not too bad a player-and one of the nicer guys in Major League Baseball.

But that's the past and the future. Back to the present.

This weekend's matches were in Walcott, Iowa, a town just west of us. It's in many ways your basic Midwest small town. You know the place-a couple of bars, a couple of churches, a big grain elevator along the railroad tracks, truck stop on the edge of town along the interstate. A nice quiet place where no one's in much of a hurry and gossip and news travels at warp speed.

Walcott hosts these qualifiers most years. They have two really well-kept diamonds and the community is happy to have the teams and players in town. The townspeople and civic clubs do a great job with the facilities and concessions. While there are many fanatics of bacon that patronize this blog (including the writer of said blog), when it comes to a debate on ham or bacon, I might posit as a third choice a butterfly cut Iowa pork chop, done on the grill and made into a sandwich, for favorite pork product. The pork chop sandwich is a staple at most town fests and local hangouts around these parts.

First game we saw was Quad City Sox vs Life of Iowa (sponsored, of course, by an insurance company). I think the QC Sox were the #1 seed for this tournament, and generally they played like it.

The windup, and the pitch!

Batter up!

And the score after three innings-QC Sox 11, Life of Iowa 0. Oops!

The game ended up 11-1 as the Sox pitchers combined for a one-hitter (the lone hit being a solo home run in the 4th inning). The Sox advance and Life goes to the loser bracket. It's a double-elimination bracket so it's possible to lose a game early on, get hot, and end up playing for the championship vs the winner of the winner bracket.

The second game was Bones Barbeque vs Bowen Merchants Association:

The nine from Bowen look impressive in the old time grays. They had a couple of players who could flat out fly-I've seen MLB players who didn't have those baserunning instincts. Bowen went up 6-2 early and were rolling along until the 5th inning, when the wheels came off the car. A couple of bad defensive plays and a pitcher who wasn't fooling any of the Bones players after a couple of times through the batting order saw Bones come rip-snorting back to win the game 13-6, the highlight of the Bones comeback being a grand-slam homer in the 6th inning. That's the nature of a game played by people who have other jobs-the team looks good, but a play gets screwed up or some error occurs, and the whole momentum of the game changes. The team that was leading comfortably ends up two or three runs down all of a sudden.

Next weekend, the tournament will wrap up. With luck, we'll be there to catch the championship round games on Saturday. It's always a good time at a great venue!

yankeedog out.

A little Zeppelin for the fans

Just not Robert, John, John Paul, and Jimmy.

I read an interesting piece on the US Navy's fleet of zeppelins, which were used in the 1920s and 1930s.

There were four dirigible airships in the fleet: USS Shenandoah, USS Los Angeles, USS Akron, and USS Macon.

As a review: a dirigible generally has an internal structure that the skin is attached to, where a blimp doesn't have much of a structure, more like a balloon.

Germany and Britain flirted with airships as recon platforms and bombers during World War I, with what I would consider mixed results. Dirigibles didn't seem to have a long lifespan. Although they could outclimb the fighters of the day, they were slower, much larger, and filled with very flammable hydrogen for a lift gas. After the war, Britain pursued other avenues of aviation, while Germany concentrated on passenger airships. We all know how that ended-the Hindenburg explosion at NAS Lakehurst in 1937.

It would appear from reading the article in Naval History and the editor's note that the chief of Naval Aviation, Admiral Moffett, used the airships as much as a way to collect scarce postwar and Depression-era defense dollars for the Navy than in any belief in the airship as the weapon platform of the future. The Navy zeppelins crisscrossed the country, hovering over fairs and parades and visiting cities and towns of all sizes, showing the capabilities of the service and no doubt enticing more than a few souls to sign up for a chance at adventure in the skies.

And adventure is what airship crews had, because the vessels were not easy to handle on the ground or in the air. Tie a balloon to a pole and put it out on a windy day. Watch it flop around. Airships handle much the same way, as shown below:

There were several instances of sailors being hurt or killed when securing airships as they pitched up in a wind gust, and also of damage to the airship when a downdraft slammed a moored ship to the ground. The United States used nonflammable helium as the lift gas for its airship fleet, so at least there were no colossal explosions or fires aboard any of the vessels.

The US Navy generally used zeppelins in a military role as long-range scout platforms during the various Fleet Problems of the 1930s. They were moderately successful at this-airships can loiter for long periods at slow speeds and were capable of shadowing the battlefleet, at least as long as the opposing fleet didn't have access to aircraft of their own.

It wasn't long before someone thought of giving the airships the ability to launch and recover small planes to act as auxiliary scouts and for protection. Germany first performed this task, launching a plane from the Hindenburg on two occasions (not counting the work of a certain archaeologist-adventurer and his father).

USS Akron and sister USS Macon both had facilities to carry 4 F9 Sparrowhawk fighters, using a trapeze and conveyor mechanism for launch and retrieval. The fighters were equipped with a large hook on top of the wing to latch onto the trapeze. The whole process must have looked similar to modern-day aircraft doing in-flight refueling, which is a fair feat of airmanship for all concerned.

Impressive work. But the airships were in the end too accident-prone and vulnerable to other aircraft and even the vagaries of weather, in addition to being very expensive to build and maintain, to survive as military platforms. Three of the four Navy airships met tragic ends. Shenandoah first flew in 1923 but was caught in a squall over Ohio and torn apart in 1925. Akron was launched in 1931, only to crash off the New Jersey coast in 1933, killing 73 of the 76 aboard, including Admiral Moffett, the airships' main proponent. Macon was launched in 1933 and crashed in 1935, losing a fin in wind shear and crshing in Monterey Bay, California. Only Los Angeles had a long career, being commissioned in 1924 and decommissioned, struck, and dismantled in 1939.

That was the end of the Navy's zeppelin fleet. However, the Navy also was developing several non-rigid airship (blimp) classes, and the blimps would go on to perform yeoman service in World War II as anti-submarine patrol and search and rescue craft, where their low speed and long loiter time would prove to be advantageous-and they were kept away from significant air opposition. Blimps served the Navy as radar pickets well into the 1950s, so it seems the lighter-than-air program wasn't a complete waste of time and resources-just that the more simply-constructed blimps proved to be more capable platforms for their given missions than the expensive zeppelins.

So ends the story of the Navy's lighter-than-air ships-an interesting era in aviation.

What?

You want to hear some Zeppelin? But I want to hear some country music. Looks like a compromise is in order here.

yankeedog out.