A walk down an abandoned road…
11 minute read
May 24, 2018, 5:40 AM
On May 17, 2018, I took a solo trip up to Centralia, Pennsylvania. For those not familiar, Centralia is something of a modern ghost town, having gradually been abandoned due to a coal mine fire that’s been burning uncontrolled beneath the town since 1962, likely caused by deliberate burning of trash in the town’s landfill, which was on top of a former strip mine. As of 2013, the town had only seven residents remaining, and when those remaining residents pass on or otherwise leave the town, their properties will be seized via eminent domain.
I had done some research about the site, but was a bit iffy on whether it was going to be good or not. I was concerned about its being a bust, but it was still intriguing enough to make the trip. And as it turned out, it was pretty cool. The biggest “attraction” at Centralia is an abandoned section of road known as the “Graffiti Highway”. That road came about when Pennsylvania Route 61 began having subsidence and visibility issues due to the coal mine fire. The state built a new alignment for the route on more stable ground in 1993, and the old alignment was abandoned. Since then, many people have come by and left graffiti tags on the road, which gave the road its nickname. Besides the road, there are also several cemeteries in Centralia, as well as one remaining active church, Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
When I went up, I wasn’t quite sure how it would work out. Based on my research, as well as a little Google sightseeing, there were the roads of the former town surrounded by empty land and a few houses, and the possibility of seeing steam from the mine fire rising from the ground. The Graffiti Highway was most intriguing. I’d heard mixed reports about how accessible the Graffiti Highway was, though. When it was still under state ownership, my understanding was that police tended to chase people away on a routine basis. I didn’t want to travel that far just to get chased out. But last fall, the state vacated their easement, i.e. they gave up the right of way, determining that it will never again be used for a road, and ownership of the land reverted back to adjacent property owners. So I believe that the old road is now on privately owned land, and as such, the heavy enforcement went away now that the state no longer owns the land. In any case, no one bothered me on my visit.
Continue reading…Categories: Centralia, Honda HR-V (2018), Roads, Urban exploration
They listed the color as black…
4 minute read
April 2, 2018, 2:23 PM
In the time since the Soul burned a little less than two months ago, Elyse and I had been wondering what happened to it afterward. We knew that it had been taken to Terry’s Body Shop in Purcellville immediately after the fire, and then the insurance company moved it to a facility in Culpeper in order to do their investigation. The sequence of events that I described and the photos of the fire itself pointed to a fuel fire, i.e. that fuel started leaking out near the engine, and then, presumably, once the leaked fuel hit the hot engine, it ignited, and the rest was history. However, the results of the insurance company’s investigation were inconclusive, as the fire had burned everything so thoroughly that their experts were unable to formally determine a specific cause that triggered the whole sequence of events.
Elyse had wondered if the car would end up on one of those auto salvage auction sites, and went hunting online to see if she could find it. Her search came up empty. Then, a few weeks later, I put the Soul’s VIN into Google to see what came up. I didn’t expect to find anything, so I was a bit surprised to hit pay dirt. I found a page from Insurance Auto Auctions with photos of my former car. The listing indicated that the damage was “total burn”, with a black exterior and a black interior. The black interior was correct, though I imagine that they weren’t thinking of the one that I remembered, but rather the one that existed after the fire. The description of the exterior color as “black” amused me, because most of the body was no longer green following the fire. Considering that, it’s pretty hard to argue with that description of the color.
Right front view. I imagine that this side, with its heavy smoke and fire damage, is what led the auction site to list the car’s color as “black” instead of green.
Categories: Kia Soul
Now I’m a Honda driver, but I’m still missing my Soul…
6 minute read
February 26, 2018, 1:56 AM
No one ever told me that losing a car would be so difficult. The car itself is gone, and after about a week in a rental car (a Hyundai Accent), I am now the proud owner of a Honda HR-V, a crossover SUV:
Categories: Honda HR-V (2018), Kia Soul
I guess that I can cross “escape from a burning car” off of my bucket list…
9 minute read
February 13, 2018, 2:40 PM
Sad to say, my 2012 Kia Soul is no more. On the night of February 7, in Lucketts, Virginia, as Elyse and I were on the way back home from a trip around the area with friends, my car caught fire and was destroyed in the resulting inferno. Thankfully, we both escaped without injury.
The day had gone pretty well. We had gotten together with two friends, Trent and Jackson, and we went from Gaithersburg to Rockville to Silver Spring to DC to Alexandria to Annandale seeing various things, with a focus mostly on elevators, as Elyse, Trent, and Jackson are all elevator enthusiasts. I have somewhat of an interest in them, but not nearly as strong as the other three. At the end of our day, we dropped Trent off at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, and then took Jackson up to Dulles Airport to meet up with family members of his that were flying in from out of town. After we left Jackson with his relatives, Elyse and I headed out. We took the Dulles Greenway to Leesburg, and then headed north on Route 15, intending to go over the Point of Rocks Bridge, and then continuing to follow Route 15 until we reached Frederick, after which we would turn south to head home.
However, circumstances would dictate otherwise. As we were going up Route 15, the car suddenly started losing accelerative power, getting it back, losing it again, and so on. The end result was that I was rapidly losing speed. Elyse thought that it was the transmission slipping, and with that in mind, I was trying to see if I could get the car to a safe location in order to stop and call AAA for a tow truck. A transmission problem would be covered under the Kia 100,000 mile powertrain warranty, and so, like the engine replacement that I had a couple of months ago, I would take it to the dealer to get it fixed, and everything would be fine.
Categories: Elyse, Friends, Kia Soul, Loudoun County
I suppose that this is why you buy a Kia…
6 minute read
December 4, 2017, 2:59 PM
I suppose that what happened to me recently is exactly why you buy a Kia. My car had been making some funny noises for a while, but since the check engine light had not come on yet, I figured that I had time to deal with it, and put it off until later. This past Monday, the noises got noticeably worse, and the “check engine” light finally came on. That’s when I scheduled a repair with a Kia dealer (since I suspected it might be covered by the warranty) and booked a rental car for the upcoming repair. Then the car finally quit on me on the way to work, i.e. it just cut off in the middle of Georgia Avenue in Olney. Thankfully, I was able to coast to a safe location to call for a tow truck.
The car ended up riding on the back of a tow truck from Olney directly to the dealer, and then I took the bus the rest of the way to work. Then the next day, Elyse and I took a bus down to Rockville to pick up the rental car and talk to the people working on my real car. I decided to kill two birds with one stone on that one, because I had planned a trip to IKEA during that time anyway, so I rented a truck. So for a few days, I went from a Kia Soul – a compact – to a Ram 1500 pickup truck. That thing was massive:
I’m not even going to try to recall how many times I made Elyse cross the street…
8 minute read
October 31, 2017, 2:30 PM
Here’s some “new old stock” for you. Back in March 2016, I had the idea of writing about a fatal pedestrian accident that happened in December 2015 at the intersection of Veirs Mill Road (MD 586) and the Matthew Henson Trail in Rockville. It was an area that I was very familiar with, as one of the routes that I did on the bus went through this area. I did the field work for that planned Journal entry, photographing the area in question, as well as a few other pedestrian control devices in Montgomery County, in order to have a discussion similar to the one I did in March 2013 about an intersection on Georgia Avenue. Unfortunately, however, life got in the way, as I got a promotion at work, and the several-months-long training program that came with that promotion took precedence over the planned Journal entry. The post eventually got shelved, and now it’s a moot point, as the intersection was initially upgraded with yellow warning signals directly over the crossing (vs. 500 feet ahead of it as before), and then after a second fatal accident in the same location, the crossing was upgraded again with signals that actually require traffic to stop vs. only warning drivers of the presence of pedestrians.
I was always a bit disappointed that an entire afternoon’s work never got used. Like the Breezewood photo shoot in 2006, evidence of the shoot showed up fairly soon after the work was done – in this case, a single photo feature – but the intended final product never got made. In hindsight, I’m not too worried about it, because what I would have advocated for in the intended Journal entry came to pass, though I wish that it hadn’t happened as a result of a second fatal accident.
The shoot itself was pretty fun. I brought Elyse with me, and we made a good team. The way we did it was that I set the camera up on my tripod and pointed it at whatever I needed, started filming, and then signaled to Elyse to activate the signal. She then crossed the street, in order to give some legitimacy to the signal activation. After all, I knew that I was stopping traffic on some fairly busy roads for a photo shoot. I had Elyse cross the street so that I didn’t look like a complete dick, stopping traffic for no reason. Someone needed to cross the street, so that it didn’t look like I was stopping traffic just to film the signals. I imagine that Elyse probably did about a mile going back and forth across several intersections in Montgomery County and DC. After all, every single take (and I did multiple takes) required activating a signal, and that meant sending Elyse across the street.
Categories: Elyse, Roads, Rockville, Silver Spring, Washington DC, Wheaton
Buses, fire trucks, ambulances, trains, and… moo cows?
7 minute read
October 19, 2017, 11:17 PM
This past Saturday, Elyse and I got together with our friend Dave, and we went to the Public Safety Open House held at the new Montgomery County Public Safety Training Academy on Snouffer School Road near Montgomery Village. Then we went out to Middletown and visited South Mountain Creamery, which is a dairy farm that sells products on site.
The Public Safety Open House event was a lot of fun. There was a little bit of everything for us to see there. We started out by looking at a row of Ride On buses. Apparently, this facility is used to train Ride On operators, because there is, more or less, one or two of each type of bus that Ride On operates located at the facility. We saw two Gillig hybrids, an Orion VII CNG, a New Flyer C40LF, and two Gillig 30-footers.
Ride On 5822, a New Flyer C40LF. We all commented on how the one panel on the front was so faded. No idea why. I speculated at the time that it might be from the diagonal parking at the old Gaithersburg division’s causing sunlight to hit that corner more than others, but after thinking some more about it, while certainly plausible, I don’t know if I’d necessarily go with it now.
Categories: Elyse, Events, Frederick County, Friends, Montgomery County, WMATA
Renting out eight rooms…
5 minute read
September 30, 2017, 12:29 AM
So apparently, I spoke too soon when it came to the closure of The Inn at Afton. You may recall that last month, I announced the closure of The Inn at Afton, based on a sign that said that the lobby and hotel were closed. Elyse and I went down that way again on Wednesday, and one of our stops was to see how The Inn at Afton looked in the daylight after finally going out of business for good. Much to our surprise, we found that the place was open again. We stopped into room 211, which was being used as the lobby, and had a chat with the lady working inside. As it turns out, the hotel is barely operational, with only eight rooms, all on the parking lot side, in service. None of the rooms on the other side, which has a tremendous view of the piedmont, are in service. I’m told that the remaining rooms have been stripped, and a walk past some of the first-floor rooms that are not in service seems to confirm this. That means that out of 118 total rooms, 110 of them are out of service, presumably for being uninhabitable. That’s an availability of 6.7%. For that few rooms, it hardly seems worthwhile to remain open, but apparently, they do, likely out of habit.
Meanwhile, the room being used as the lobby smelled strongly of mold, and had visible mold and water damage. Definitely an unhealthy environment. We might have stuck around for longer and chatted with the very nice lady working there, but the mold smell was too much. I imagine that the rooms that are still in service are just as bad, if they are willing to let the room that they’re using as a lobby become so bad. Thank heavens for Orbit “Bubblemint” gum. It got the mold taste out of my mouth.
So apparently, and much to my surprise, just when we thought that the book had closed on the operational history of the vintage businesses on Afton Mountain, there’s more to the Afton story to be told.
Categories: Afton Mountain, Elyse, Friends, Railroads, Stuarts Draft, Vintage business, Walmart, Waynesboro
I definitely didn’t expect to go to New York City on Wednesday…
7 minute read
August 25, 2017, 12:30 PM
Wednesday, August 23 had been planned as a road trip day for quite some time. Elyse turned 21 two days prior, and this was my birthday present to her, going on a trip up to Asbury Park, New Jersey to visit the Silverball Museum, a pinball arcade on the boardwalk. We previously visited this facility in May. Then the plan was to go up to Menlo Park Mall in Edison to go to Rainforest Cafe, where we were having dinner, and I was buying Elyse a drink. The day that we ended up having was a lot of fun, but definitely more expansive than I had originally planned.
We left the house around 11:00, with Asbury Park as our destination. We made a quick stop at Maryland House, and then a White Castle in Howell Township:
Categories: Asbury Park, Birthdays, Companies, Elyse, Food and drink, New York City, New York Subway, Roads, Video games
Yesterday’s future is tomorrow’s memories…
3 minute read
June 29, 2017, 8:00 AM
This month, the thing that we all knew was coming finally came: Metro retired the final 1000 and 4000-Series railcars. That means no more of these:
Categories: WMATA
Red Line to Grosvenor…
4 minute read
May 17, 2017, 11:52 PM
You may be aware that in February, Metro began retiring the Breda 4000-Series railcars, starting with 4054 and 4055. While most of the retired cars will likely be sold for scrap, not all of them will. When 4089 was retired, it was cut up and converted into vendor kiosks, intended for use at Grosvenor-Strathmore station. Today was the first day of this pop-up market, which will run at least through the end of June, and eventually be incorporated into a new development at Grosvenor station.
So Elyse, Elyse’s father Joe, and I gave it a look. The car is cut up into different sections, with the various sections arranged around the station entrance. Here’s an overview of one side of the setup:
Categories: Elyse, Montgomery County, WMATA
“Hello! Welcome!”
3 minute read
March 9, 2017, 12:03 PM
You may recall from the Pittsburgh photo set that Elyse has an interest in elevators. I find them interesting as well, though to a lesser extent than Elyse and others. However, I always enjoy seeing an unusual specimen, like the pop-out buttons on the elevators at the Investment Building in Pittsburgh.
This elevator, at the United Office Building in Oxon Hill, takes the cake for interesting features. Check it out:
Categories: Maryland, Virginia, Washington DC, WMATA
“Ride all of the 2000-Series railcars” wasn’t one of my resolutions this year, but…
2 minute read
January 14, 2017, 11:40 PM
Catching a ride on all 76 of Metro’s 2000-Series railcars wasn’t in my list of new year’s resolutions, but that was my accomplishment today, as I caught car 2018 on my way up to Glenmont, therefore completing my second railcar series. In other words, I have conquered these:
Categories: WMATA
Trying my hand at planespotting…
5 minute read
November 18, 2016, 11:02 AM
On Tuesday, November 16, Elyse and I went down to Gravelly Point in Arlington and photographed airplanes taking off from National Airport. In the past, I had photographed airplanes casually, usually when I’m over in Rosslyn, i.e. near the airport, while doing other things (the raw photo set for Urban Demolition II is peppered with random airplane and transit photos, if that tells you anything). However, this was my first dedicated outing for planespotting.
So I put the big lens on my camera and took it out for a spin, putting the camera in sports mode and going to town with it. My first takeoff, however, left something to be desired:
Categories: Airplanes, Arlington, Elyse, Photography
Painting pottery…
4 minute read
November 16, 2016, 12:21 AM
The day before Elyse and I went to Pittsburgh, we got together with our friend Dave, whom we know through transit-enthusiast circles, and we went over to Color Me Mine in Rockville. This is one of those places where they have premade pieces of pottery for customers to paint in the store, and then they glaze and fire it all afterward, and you pick it up a week or so later.
Going in, Elyse and Dave both picked train-shaped coin banks for painting. I got a big plate, because I felt more like drawing, and thus I got myself a nice, blank canvas to paint.
But first, here are Elyse and Dave at the table:
Categories: Elyse, Fire alarms, Friends, Rockville, SEPTA