Scattered Thoughts . . .

O n our last journey to Ohio on Amtrak with Lukey and Kenzie, we spent a little bit of time in Manhattan, both coming and going on our journey.  We had a layover in Manhattan going each way so we could transfer from one Amtrak route to another.  This allowed us to walk around a little bit and to get some "real"  pizza each time we were there.  Honestly, the pizza alone is worth the nightlong layover! This first photo, below, shows us in Penn Station's subway corridors.  This part of Penn Station has not yet been renovated (Penn Station is undergoing a decade-long, much-needed renovation) so it is still the same dark and dirty place it has been for many decades.  We also encountered some problems here at the beginning of our trip.   Naturally, we had planned for either Sheila or me to pay for the subway tickets so we had both of our phones all set up already in anticipation of having to pay.  The current way you pay for the subway is electroni...

T he Transportation Center was one of the sites at Carillon Park that Lukey was looking forward to seeing.  In fact, Lukey was looking forward to seeing this building so much that, in the photo below, he is already inside the building as the rest of us are still approaching the building. As the name of the building suggests, this building is home to most of Carillon Park's vehicles such as train cars, streetcars, trolleys, buses, one or two cars, horse-drawn carriages and even a horse-drawn fire truck.  I think Lukey was most interested in the trains inside the Transportation Center.  Honestly, I am also partial to all the railroad-related vehicles. The "John Quincy Adams" locomotive, below, is the oldest steam locomotive still in existence today.  It was built in 1835 for the B&O Railroad.  This is an unusual steam locomotive in that its boiler is in a vertical orientation rather than the boiler being a long horizontal tube running from the front of the loc...