Skip to main content

018-Trains & Highways

As was our preference on the Erie, we would take a free wall in the little towns as they were available to spend the night.  For many of these places, it is a last gasp effort to attract some kind of outside revenue.  The only one investing in the area seems to be the Federal Government, the same guys who provide flood insurance.  It’s not apparent the towns would survive without the Feds however.  Life is passing these towns by.  One town was founded on the paper bag, another Remington guns and another on Peppermint.  These places have a rich history of innovation and growth that didn’t make it to the current generations.  The successful have mostly moved on to the big cities or the next big discovery like Silicon Valley.  It’s sad to see the lack of adaptation.  But there is a legacy of here that isn’t in the rest of America and its there to be rediscovered.
Typical homes for the eastern Erie Canal


The factory that produced Beechnut Gum long abandoned in Canajoharie.

Beautiful old home, a shell of its original glory.  The wood work is a work or art.  This was an expensive home for its day and would drain your wallet today trying to do anything with it so there it sits in a sad state of decay.

But back on topic, the three rivers that make up the Erie; Mohawk, Oneida, and Oswego were the highways of long ago.  So, it’s no surprise that when the baton was transferred to rail and then highways, they generally followed the same path connecting the same centers of commerce.  Along the east side of the Hudson River the train tracks are just a few feet above the water all the way to Albany.  Along the rail race commuter trains headed to/from the Big Apple every 30 minutes or so.  The same is true the western side of the Hudson only the trains are freight and they come every 15 minutes or so and go on for a 100 cars or so.

Oil tanker train.  Does anyone else think this is an inefficient pipeline?

When it comes time to pitch one’s tent for the night, it’s not uncommon to find yourself next to a rail line and/or highway.  One night was particularly pungent, no more than 200 yards from both we were also next to a volunteer fire department.  At 2 in the morning, we were awakened to the roar of a volunteer fire department “all call” siren followed by numerous vehicle sirens.  Just about that time another train comes roaring down the track blowing it whistle drowning out the roar of the highway and some of the big truck compression braking.  It was quieter for us in NYC!  I think I was the first to laugh and before I knew it we were all laughing with delight over our situation.  What fun it was!




Comments

  1. TirebiterJune 21, 2019 at 8:02 PM

    Getting caught up. Enjoying your commentary— It’s a nice combination of facts, observations, insights, out sights, and humor.

    ReplyDelete
  2. art3July 24, 2019 at 8:47 PM

    The Beechnut factory would make a challenging jigsaw puzzle

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

046 - Fog Bank a Comin

To all those who insist on paper charts as a backup to electronics, “what good are they in fog?”  What was a surprise to us was the frequency of fog on the lakes, it wasn’t anticipated by us, seemed like a New England issue not a lake issue.  But the water is cold (60s in the big water) and the air is warm which is perfect for dense fog.  We learned at the shipwreck museum that a large percentage of ship wrecks on the Great Lakes are ships driving into other ships, mostly in dense fog.  Radar, GPS, electronics charts and AIS should mostly preclude this cause of shipwrecks.  We expected the number one cause for shipwrecks to be bad weather (think Edmond Fitgerald) but bad weather only accounted for ¼ of so of great lakes shipwrecks.  With far better forecasting today, this too shouldn’t be an issue like it used to be.  But back to our story, without radar, we played our fog horn, set a watch on the bow, watched the AIS for ships (we could see them ...
Post a Comment
Read more

034 - USS Niagara

What a beautiful working replica of this historic ship.  It is used today as a training ship and offers 10day expeditions for youth to learn the ways of sailing a Brigg.  It is about as exact as you can expect.  I loved their use manila rope, linseed oil, and other items that gives it the smell of an old ship – I don’t know what it is but it’s very familiar.  Below decks were tight, it only had a 5ft ceiling in the galley area – how anyone could operate in that space long term was beyond me but the professional crew does. Galley stove and 5ft ceiling - how do they do it? Watching it sail was like stepping back it time.  It passed us on the breakwater silently, tall, and majestic.  It was easy to imagine the awe seeing this come into an isolated harbor like Presque Island 200 years ago.  Something so big and complicated carrying so many men and cannon would change the balance of power with its arrival.  It would intimidate the st...
Post a Comment
Read more

033 - Presque Island Is A Beautiful Oddity

Most the shore of Lake Erie is a long straight beach.  But jutting out is a very large peninsula that loops back on itself creating a bay.  They say it’s formed by glaciers but this isn’t obvious to the casual observer.  For starters, I don’t see how a glacier can flow if it doesn’t have a mountain to slide down and there is nothing to the North I’d call a mountain worthy of the lake depth gouge.  Call me a geo skeptic, but some of the stories they tell sound more like conjecture than science. Behind the beach is a steep hill that drops to a valley and then a significant mountain behind it so it generally looks like it was formed by a really big dozier.  So why this odd shaped bay jutting out into the lake?  And the bay it creates is very deep and the channel small, what glacier movement did this?  No matter how it was formed, the place is important to American history and is very beautiful and home to a great hot dog stand, “Sara’s.” Lake E...
Post a Comment
Read more