M.D. Trains, Blue Lotus &c.

Posted on September 3, 2026 by admin

Labor Day weekend is nigh, and even in a semi-retired state, I look forward to these three-day weekends, especially if the weather is still warm. Actually temps have been pretty high these last few days, which means that sitting on the deck well into the evening is comfortable, once the mosquitoes have calmed down.

Think I’ll take a stretch off just because. Back to posting on September 13.

The other day while out on the deck before sunset, listening to the loud cicadas, I made up a 19th-century religious movement, in outline. As one does. A farmer in early 19th-century Ohio proclaimed that the late summer cicadas are actually trying to communicate with mankind, but that the last people who could understand them were the ancient Israelites (using the Hebrew term for “locust”). Some Israelites were able to interpret their song as revelations from the Lord, which formed the basis for the lost Book of Locusts. After the destruction of the First Temple, the locusts spoke no more.

Who is suddenly able to understand the cicadas in the (19th century) present? The farmer, of course (Robert, let’s call him). He listens closely, and it turns out the Lord is laying down some new rules ahead of the Second Coming, via cicada song. Including how to organize a new church with Bob as its head, and an exact time for the Second Coming, like the Seven-Day Adventists. Bob gathers a few hundred followers. One of their main rituals is the “Summer Listening,” as they gather outside in the late afternoon and Bob, in a trance, interprets. Some of his grown sons soon have the ability too. Locust Listeners, their neighbors derisively call them, but soon they themselves are using the term.

The day for the Second Coming comes and goes, and Bob has a new revelation for his disappointed flock: they should be listening to crickets as well, to complement cicadas. That will reduce the chance of misunderstanding, as clearly happened with the date of the Second Coming. Groups of Listeners start staying up all night to listen to crickets, but others are dismayed, sparking a schism.

I could go on, naturally – how a few dozen Church of Listeners congregations still exist in the Midwest (and California, of course), how one of the great entomologists of the early 20th century grew up as a Listener, how a descendant of Bob erected a historic landmark in Ohio – a bronze cicada – in 1979…

* * *

On the historic square in Woodstock last Saturday, something intriguing. This setup graced a shop window, though I took the image once I’d entered the building.

We’d found a model train store: M.D. Trains.

Those kinds of shops are few and far between, but not impossible to find. M.D. Trains was empty when we entered, except for an older man I took to be the proprietor and a younger fellow I took for an employee, both sitting near the front, chatting.

“You want to buy everything, don’t you?” the older gentleman said to us. Later I heard him say it to other people entering the shop. “Everything” meant a lot of stuff in a glorious clutter.

“If only,” I answered. I didn’t really mean it, since I’m not in the market for a room full of model train cars, tracks, accessories, model trucks, books, magazines and ephemera. Still, I enjoyed looking around the store.

There’s more than just merchandise. Square in the middle of the store is an intricate model train layout, much more elaborate than the one in the window.

But I did buy a small toy engine for $5. You can’t go in a place like that and not support it.

* * *

I’m glad to report that Blue Lotus, a Buddhist temple housed in a former Congregationalist church, is still active in Woodstock.

In fact, I believe they’ve added some depictions of the Buddha lately.

One of these days, Blue Lotus is going to be open when I happen by. I’d like to see how the temple interprets the space.

Idle Hands and AI

Posted on August 27, 2026 by admin

Most places I go, I take a fair number of photos, because in our time – over the last two decades or so – high-quality photography has become cheap and easy. I took a digital camera on a trip for the first time in 2005 and have ever since, each one making sharper images than the one before, besides an exponential increase in memory. I’d never have the patience to set apertures or figure out film speeds, but point a phone that I use for nothing else? Easy.

Now, suddenly, digital graphic design has became cheap and easy. Is it any good? A lot of AI images look like AI images, the kind of stilted cartoons we all now recognize (well, a lot of us do). But do they have to be?

Earlier this summer, we visited Fabyan Forest Preserve in Geneva, Illinois. Later, I cooked up a series of “postcards” – named for the aspect ratio, since they aren’t real cards – using images I took there. There are a number of advantages to this, the main one being I own the copyright to the images, and so derivative works aren’t an issue. The prompts in this case are “WPA style” or something to that effect. Add some text and there you go.

Promotion-type images for other places I’ve been, recently or not. Again, all the underlying images are mine.

Images for details along the way in Illinois, using a variety of other prompts, exact location not so important.

One more.

Think of it as the first in a fire hydrant series: Van Gogh Fire Hydrant.

The Illinois Railroad Museum: Details

Posted on August 13, 2026 by admin

The Illinois RR Museum, as mentioned, has plenty of impressive rolling stock, some of which actually rolls. But like any good museum, the showpieces aren’t the only pieces. The small items have their own stories to tell, or at least to suggest. At one point I went into a repurposed car — I forget what kind of car it was — and found myself in the Builder Plate Hall.

Builder Plate? “In this hall are the builder plates from the builders of steam, electric, diesel, interurban, streetcars and passenger cars,” said a sign in the car. “A builders plate is like the VIN plate on a car. It gives the car a serial number that is unique to that car. A builder plate can service [sic] the same purpose. It is used to identify a locomotive.”

Evocative, these plates.

Evoking the rumble of finished locomotives on tracks, but also the din and heat of the factory floors where working men put together these machine-age power marvels to specs that began on drafting tables by gas light and then early electric bulbs.

I don’t want to romanticize such hard jobs too much, but it’s hard not to.

Are all locomotives made in China in our time? No. According to this Wiki list, there are many more defunct U.S. locomotive makers than not, but there are still active ones, including major repair facilities. Good to know.

And damn it, every time I look into a subject like that, I uncover a new destination. In this case, the Altoona Works.

At the Illinois RR Museum, the cars themselves offer detail. Sometimes builder plates.

Or branding.

Or warnings.

A curious thing to put on your train, but there’s a story.

The train, or at least the locomotive, looks to have a name: The City of Moorhead. Where the Southern Crosses the Yellow Dog.

“W. C. Handy, ‘The Father of the Blues,’ immortalized the crossing of the Southern Railway and the Yazoo Delta (‘Yellow Dog’) Railroad at Moorhead in his 1914 song ‘Yellow Dog Rag,’ better known under its later title, ‘Yellow Dog Blues,’ ” notes Mississippi Blues Trail. “Handy wrote that he first heard the line ‘Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog’ sung by a guitarist at the Tutwiler train station (c. 1903). Moorhead became a hub not only of rail transportation but of blues activity in local juke joints.”

A more recent interpretation of the song is, of course, on YouTube.

Larger signs. Where there’s a north, there’s a south.

Signals.

The museum has a railroad-oriented book store in another repurposed car.

Lots of material for the enthusiast.

One more item: a bit of re-embedded signage from the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, which traversed Illinois not far from here.

Good to see it. Because, as we all should know, the Rock Island Line is a mighty good road, the Rock Island Line is the road to ride.

The Illinois Railroad Museum: The Rolling Stock

Posted on August 12, 2026 by admin

Not long ago my friend Kevin and I were kicking around ideas for a day trip from our homes in Chicagoland, and we happened on a place he’d hadn’t been since he was a child nearly 60 years ago, and I hadn’t been in years, perhaps as long ago as 2005: the Illinois Railroad Museum, near the town of Union in McHenry County, in the northwestern exurbs. About an hour drive from my house. Definitely worth the trip.

Another example of a place people take their kids, but might not otherwise consider. Not how I think. Good for kids, good for everyone else whose admiration for and curiosity about trains hasn’t gone away. During our visit, on the last Saturday in July, the place was busy but not packed, with small children and their elders well represented, but they weren’t the entirety of visitor demographics. The Illinois RR Museum draws old men (old people) as well, sometimes without grandchildren in tow. In that, Kevin and I fit right in.

Not only that, the museum also seems to attract former railroad employees and railroad aficionados, enthusiasts and nerds of all ages and walks of life. Toward the end of our visit, near a display of dispatcher equipment, a visitor struck up a conversation with a museum volunteer that I was near enough to overhear. Old men both, older even than me, and both former dispatchers for lines long ago absorbed into the handful of U.S. railroads that still exist. They had a lot to talk about – with an intensity of jargon that was nearly opaque to us non-professionals.

But you don’t need to know every technical detail to appreciate the collection.

It’s massive, including locomotives and steam engines, freight cars, interurban cars, long-haul passenger and baggage cars, subway cars, streetcars, trolley buses, railroad work equipment, signals, signs and much more, either open to the elements or in several sizable train barns. Some of the rolling stock is still rolling, and visitors can take short rides out into the countryside along a few miles of right-of-way that the museum owns, with volunteers running the show.

And doing the maintenance: I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone in railroad garb oiling the machinery with a long-spout oil can, as you see (saw) in illustrations.

Mighty locomotives of various kinds.

The collection includes some rolling stock you don’t see that much, such as a 1949 steam-powered Leslie rotary snowplow designed to clear tracks of ice and snow, and one of the last ever made, as these too converted to diesel. To do its job, the blade at the front rotated at 150 rpm.

A wicked red maw, ready to grind its way forward. Just the thing for a fistfight, on the top of the car, between Bond and a nameless henchman; resulting in the henchman tumbling into the blade; think of your own Roger Moore bon mot for that situation (something about a grinding headache, maybe).

Interurban cars. Including this one, in which we rode out into the Illinois cornfields.

A few military cars.

The latter is a troop sleeping car, built by Pullman, doing its part for the war effort in the early 1940s.

Examples of the many streetcars and trolley cars in the collection.

The latter built in 1914, so it’s a little anachronistic, but I thought of it as a Meet Me in St. Louis streetcar.

And — of course it should be last — cabooses.

If you asked me, railroads should still be using cabooses. For aesthetic reasons. No railroad is going to do that, naturally, but that’s my opinion.

The interior of one of the cabooses. A good many of the cars at the museum are open, provided you’re willing to climb into them, and we certainly were in this case.

A somewhat newer caboose. We went in there, too.

This caboose was attached to another caboose and an engine, and you could take rides. We did. I couldn’t ever remember riding in a moving caboose before, but now I have.

Downtown Glen Ellyn: The Historic District

Posted on August 3, 2026 by admin

Even modest buildings have a history. Or point to a history.

Just not much visible history in this case. Yet under this building in downtown Glen Ellyn, Illinois – in the Glen Ellyn Downtown North Historic District – is the main creek that used to pass through the village. Indian Creek, flowing for about 100 years now through an underground manmade channel. Civil engineers were busy in the 1920s.

An article published in 2023, “The Creeks of Old Glen Ellyn, Part 1” by Robert Elliot, offers a bit of detail: “Though we do not know exactly when, the creeks which flowed through old Glen Ellyn were slowly moved underground. Indian Creek appears to have remained above ground for a long time, although it too eventually fell victim to development. Although the exact year remains unknown, it appears that Indian Creek was mostly moved underground in 1922, when a dry goods store was constructed where it used to flow under Main Street. Today, Oak & Steel occupies the same location.”

Glen Ellyn was once marked by open creeks and small ravines and other irregularities, much like the rest of Du Page County. Like in much of the rest of the county, or the nation for that matter, that wasn’t consistent with modern suburbia, so the terrain was modified – in the same spirit as controlling the Mississippi or digging the Panama Canal, if not the gargantuan scale.

The 1920s also saw brisk commercial development near the Glen Ellyn interurban station, and it is these buildings that make up much of the historic district today. Such as a bank building, a sturdy-looking edifice built to re-assure in the days before the FDIC. Sturdy and elegant, I have to add.

The Glen Art Theatre. A spot to take in a motion picture, now as then.

“The Glen Theatre, formerly a single screen theatre, opened in February 1927,” says Cinema Treasures. “It was designed in the Tudor Revival style, along with the storefronts on either side of the three-story building. The architect was William B. Betts of Park Ridge, IL, who also designed a number of other movie theaters in the Chicago suburbs. Originally, the Glen Theatre not only featured motion pictures, but live stage acts, as well, and contained a Barton organ.”

Other historic district structures.

The site of the interurban line station. These days, it includes 2 Toots, a restaurant that delivers your burger and fries by model train.

I didn’t confine my peregrinations to the historic district, mainly because I didn’t know about it until later.

Just outside the district, a couple of churches.

More apartments up/retail down structures.

The Village Office, looking a little New Englandish.

The interurban line that once came through Glen Ellyn, the Chicago, Aurora and Elgin Electric (CA&E), is long gone, as they all are. But it left a legacy, namely the Main Stem of the Illinois Prairie Path.

Worth a short walk or a long one. Traversing Du Page County is possible on its 61-mile network. During my recent visits, I walked maybe 1 percent of that distance, but I’m considering other segments.

Stockbridge, Massachusetts

Posted on May 5, 2026 by admin

Not long ago, I wondered how accurate the lyrics of “Alice’s Restaurant Massacre” were on one specific point. I had my reasons.

You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant
Walk right in, it’s around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track

Seems like a convenient rhyme, but that’s not all. Google Maps tells me that the site of Alice’s Restaurant is about a half a mile from a railroad track. I didn’t save the scale on this map, but the distance is correct. This is mildly amazing. Who expects geographical accuracy from a song lyric?

That morning, April 14, I’d extracted myself from Midtown Manhattan via various sorts of transport, retrieving my car at long-term parking at Newark International, and planned to spend the night in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Though New England isn’t large, it is molasses when it comes to driving through its densely settled areas, and first I had to get out of New Jersey and New York, then cross Massachusetts. All that meant an all-day drive. Stockbridge, Massachusetts, former home of Alice’s Restaurant, was a stop along the way.

Near the eastern edge of New York state, I cruised north on the Taconic State Parkway.

That sounded good, I thought when I noted the name on a map. It was. Budding greenery, smooth driving, no trucks. Or that many other cars, the further north you go. Construction started about 100 years ago, at the urging of then private citizen Franklin D. Roosevelt. The parkway is in the same league as the Natchez Trace Parkway or the Blue Ridge Parkway, though only about a quarter as long as either.

Once I’d gone far enough north, I took connecting roads to the Massachusetts Turnpike. Stockbridge, which is slightly south of the turnpike, counted more-or-less as a midway point on my day’s drive. As I entered town via Massachusetts 102, I noticed a tower. A stone tower, exuding 19th-century New England sturdiness. Its clock was wrong.

The Children’s Chimes Tower, a 19th-century bell tower built on the site of the town’s original church. A 19th-century replacement for that church stands near the bell tower, looking as New England as can be.

The First Congregational Church UCC. Remarkably, it was open.

Musicians were practicing, or rather seemed to be wrapping up a practice. They paid no attention to me as I looked around.

Jonathan Edwards was the church’s second pastor. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Jonathan Edwards? Yes.

Across the road from the church and freestanding bell tower – which doesn’t chime, except in the summer – is the town cemetery.

“One of the earliest burials was the first minister, John Sergeant, who died in 1749,” says the Stockbridge Library. “Members of the Mohican tribe who joined the church also were buried here. Twenty years later, discussions began about ways to enclose the burial area to keep out cattle, horses, and pigs. It wasn’t until 1853, however, that a new organization in town, the Laurel Hill Association, took on the responsibility to clean and protect the area.”

Route 102 turns into Main Street, with its shops, hotels, and other establishiments.

And, around the back (off Main St., that is), just a half a mile from the railroad track, is Theresa’s Stockbridge Café.

Closed for the day.

Palestine, Texas

Posted on March 31, 2026 by admin

Terrific lightning storm rolled by to the south last night at about 11. Little rain but a prodigious amount of cloud-to-cloud lightning, unlike anything I’ve seen in years. The last time might have been when we were under such a near-rainless storm in North Dakota nearly 20 years ago. After watching in fascination from the back door, I got my phone and recorded about 30 seconds of the spectacle.

As usual, video only conveys a fraction of the visual power of the moment. But, in spite of the channel it’s on, it isn’t AI.

I was curious today which volume of the Encyclopedia Brown books — whose protagonist is a sharp grade-school boy who solves crimes and mysteries — mentioned the town of Palestine, Texas. Even though I grew up in Texas, I’d never heard of the place until I read an EB story in the early ’70s that mentioned a string of places that some international jewel thief was traveling to: Moscow, Odessa, London, Paris, Palestine and Athens. The boy detective determined that the criminal would be in Texas, since those are all places in that state, and especially because “Palestine” is called “Israel” now, as he said.

You might wonder (I do now, anyway) what business an international jewel thief would have in a place like Moscow, Texas (pop. 170) or London, Texas (pop. 180), but never mind. It didn’t take long for me to find a YouTube review of Encyclopedia Brown Keeps the Peace (Book 6, originally published 1969), including the case that mentions the Texas towns. The reviewer takes the book to task, asking “can grade-schoolers be expected to know this information?” No, of course not. They can be expected to learn it, however.

Now I know exactly where I learned about Palestine (Pal-es-TEEN) more than 50 years ago. I didn’t arrive in Palestine in person until this February, on my way to Dallas from Nacogdoches. During my visit, I made the acquaintance of this fellow.

The sculpture is called “Chuggin’ ” (2020), created by Dewane Hughes, a sculpture professor at the University of Texas in Tyler. Railroads are important in the history of Palestine, so much so that one terminus of the Texas State Railroad – a linear state park along a former short line RR – is in the town. The other terminus is in Rusk, about 25 miles away. Not running in February, unfortunately.

“Chuggin’ is near the town’s visitor center, a former RR depot.

Also nearby is “Forging History” (2014) by Dale Montagne, with the base made of three actual rail car wheels.

Parking was easy to find in downtown Palestine, traffic light. Parallel parking was available right across from the splendid Sacred Heart Catholic Church, as it happened, an 1890s creation by Nicholas Clayton, who was most active in Galveston before the hurricane. Originally many of the congregation were workers on the International-Great Northern Railroad Co., which had a major presence in Palestine.

Palestine still has a sizable rail yard south of downtown.

Took a walk around downtown. Like most large towns, or small cities, there is a mixture of ongoing businesses –

— with vacancies.

Got some buildings with really good bones, as it’s been said in the real estate biz.

The Palestine City Cemetery is to the east of downtown, but not very far. Nowhere is that far in town.

The crumble is on.

Something you don’t see that often. Not just the Stars and Bars, but the very first version with seven stars. In the fullness of not much time, six more stars were added.

Unknown CSA soldiers.

I assume United Confederate Veterans, the Southern equivalent of the GAR, placed this stone and those like it.

The cemetery has an impressive number of worn, broken stones, soldiering on through the elements.

Victorian sentiment in stone, said with due respect.

Would that kind of soft decay, the romanticism of stones worn by time and the elements, have appealed to Victorian sensibilities? Could be.

The Hermann Park Japanese Garden & A Side of Rice

Posted on March 25, 2026 by admin

My go-to data source for gas prices is AAA, which tells me that the national average today is $3.983/gal, and higher in Illinois, at $4.228/gal. As everyone knows, up markedly this month. People have long seemed to believe that the President of the United States has a magic button that made gas prices change. That was nonsense, of course, but now it looks like the administration has found such a button, except it might be stuck on “rise.”

Be that as it may, I’m glad my recent long drives, and long flights, aren’t scheduled for this year. The summer of ’26 could be a time to stay closer to home. Then again, prices north of $4/gal – in fatter 2008 dollars – didn’t keep us from driving to Great Smoky Mountains NP that year.

In Houston last month, I did a fair amount of driving, including in the airport-area industrial submarket. That is, among the warehouses and distribution centers that form part of the sizable metro Houston industrial market, which totals about 700 million square feet (for comparison, metro Chicago’s market is roughly 1 billion square feet). I’m probably one of the few tourists anywhere who gets a kick out of driving by behemoth industrial buildings, but there you have it.

I also drove the short distance from downtown Houston to Hermann Park, a legacy of the City Beautiful Movement and the landscape architectural talents of George Kessler (d. 1923). He was a younger version of Frederick Law Olmstead, it seems, busy in a lot of places, though more important in planning for Dallas than Houston.

Always thought “City Beautiful” is too far a reach. Like most people, I’d say City Pretty Nice or City Not Bad would be good enough, but that’s not the kind of movement name that inspires grand projects.

The Japanese Garden occupies part of Hermann Park. That seems to be the generic name. I made my way there. It’s a pretty place, even in February.

A mix of imported Japanese flora and the pines of East Texas. Hermann Park itself dates from the early 20th century. The Japanese Garden, the late 20th century, a prosperous time for Japan, and when that dustup between Nippon and the USA had mostly been put in the rear view mirror.

Where there is water, there is waterfowl.

Just outside the Japanese Garden are tracks for the Hermann Park Railroad, a narrow-gauge line that makes a loop through the park. I didn’t ride it, but of course thought of the Brackenridge Park RR in San Antonio, the one by which all others are judged (by me).

Just outside Hermann Park is Rice University. I considered Rice, but decided not to go — or I wasn’t admitted anyway, I don’t remember after all this time. As a result, my short stroll this February was my first visit to campus.

Not a very long visit. Rice has some fine buildings.

But also long sightlines. That make for long walks.

I’d already spent time walking around downtown Houston, and then the Japanese Garden. There’s only so much walking even indefatigable sightseers can do.

Big Four Bridge

Posted on February 2, 2026 by admin

Even the last day of a long trip can include – should include – something to see. With that in mind on December 22, after we crossed the Ohio River from Louisville on the I-65 bridge, which I have done many times, we took the first exit to go to Jeffersonville, Indiana, which I have done only once, in 1990. Then we went back across the river to Louisville, this time on foot on a massive iron structure known as the Big Four Bridge.

The Jeffersonville side of the bridge offers views of that town and its riverfront, where I took a wintertime stroll all those years ago. At that time, Big Four Bridge was a decaying relic, inaccessible to the public.

You can also see the I-65 bridge from that vantage. It too is an elegant design.

But not as impressive as the sweeping ironwork of Big Four Bridge.

The Ohio sweeps along as well.

I couldn’t take enough pictures of Big Four.

Once upon a time, Big Four carried the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway, also nicknamed the Big Four Railroad. The 2,525-foot span contains six trusses, beginning as a late 19th-century project, the sort of pre-OSHA work that killed dozens of workers during construction (so why not ghost stories?).

Completed in 1895, “The Big Four Bridge allowed freight traffic to dramatically increase in Louisville, and began carrying high-speed interurbans on September 12, 1905…” says Bridges & Tunnels. “Due to bigger and larger trains, not only in size, but in weight, contracts were let in June 1928 to build a larger Big Four Bridge. The new span, constructed by the Louisville & Jefferson Bridge Co., was built on the piers of the old bridge, while leaving the existing span intact while it was upgraded.”

That is the structure we see today, except that in the early 21st century, it was redeveloped into a pedestrian/bicycle bridge.

At the Louisville side of the bridge, views of the city.

And looking back at the bridge from the Kentucky (Louisville) side.

We saw the daytime bridge, of course. But “the Big Four Bridge has an LED lighting system that wraps the iron fretwork in vibrant colors,” says Our Waterfront. “The lights can be programmed to have a rainbow effect, highlighting the beauty and strength of the bridge structure. At night, the bridge becomes a colorful beacon in our city. Lights operate daily from twilight until 1 am.”

Another reason to come back to Louisville-Jeffersonville, obviously.

Pardon Me, Boy –

Posted on February 1, 2026 by admin

It was some years before I got the joke.

For good reasons. I was only 13 when the movie came out, with no memory of the original reference, and you couldn’t just dial up any old song on your machine in those days. Still, I’m happy to say I saw Young Frankenstein in the theater, as I did Blazing Saddles that same year, which also included some references I didn’t understand until later, notably the names of Lili Von Shtupp and Gov. Le Petomane.

On the road home from Florida, we passed through Chattanooga, a city I hadn’t visited since sometime in the 1980s. I also have handful of memories of Chattanooga during our family road trip around the South in 1969, especially the hotel.

This time I noticed that the Chattanooga Choo-Choo was only a few blocks from the Interstate. So we paused our drive for a short visit.

“This landmark Chattanooga hotel located on Market Street in downtown Chattanooga initially served as the Southern Railway Terminal,” the Tennessee Encyclopedia says. “Designed by Beaux-Arts-trained architect Donn Barber of New York City, this magnificent architectural gateway to the Deep South opened during the Christmas season of 1909.”

With the mid-century decline of passenger rail in the U.S. came the near-demolition of the terminal, but the lesson of Penn Station and the era’s other thoughtless architectural destruction was apparently enough to fuel the Southern Railway Terminal’s preservation. With its redevelopment into a hotel-retail-entertainment complex came a new, instantly recognizable name: the Chattanooga Choo-Choo.

Inside, the sort of grand hall that marks grand old train terminals.