Scattered Thoughts . . .

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...

Y ou don't really realize it while you are walking around Carillon Park, but there are quite a few historic bridges in this park.  They sort of get lost to the main points of interest and get treated more like a way to get from one point of interest to another.  I've included a few bridges here... This lightweight steel truss bridge, below, is from 1881 and was designed and built by the Columbia Bridge Works of Dayton.  The building straight ahead is the Transportation Center which is really a locomotive roundhouse.  There are tracks that allow display trains to move in and out of the Transportation Center.   It is incredibly difficult to see in this photo, below, but, if you look closely, you'll be able to pick out Lukey standing on the other end of this bridge capturing a photo of me!   Now we are walking underneath the Columbia Bridge Works lightweight steel truss bridge...   This last photo isn't of any historic bridge but it is a bi...

W hile we were at Carillon Park with Kenzie and Lukey, we spent some time at the Wright Brothers National Museum.  This museum is actually a part of the walk through Carillon Park.  It is on one side of the park up on hillside.   Typically, the flow of visitors walks up the main thoroughfare to the Transportation Center, then crosses a bridge to the hillside, then works their way through a few other Carillon Park historical items on their way through the Wright Brothers National Museum.  Once you get through the Wright Brothers National Museum, you then have close access to where you started.  We arrived right when the park opened so the "crowd" was just ahead of us.  In an effort to separate ourselves from the crowd, we chose to run through the park backwards by starting with the Wright Brothers National Museum.   There really was no "crowd" on this day because it was so unbearably hot and humid.  Everyone was indoors or at pools, I sus...

I always have a tough time choosing only a select few photos after visiting Carillon Park and this last visit with Lukey and Kenzie was no different.  Nevertheless, I managed to compile a small collection of photos from our most recent visit. Actually, I also need to sort through all the photos that Lukey captured too!  This blog entry has only my photos though.  I'll publish another blog entry later with some of Lukey's photos.  In the meantime, here are some of my photos. Here is a photo of the carillon from the parking lot of Carillon Park... There is some spectacular art throughout this historic park... There is a whole room or two filled with NCR (National Cash Register) cash registers from the first to the most recent.  Many of them are quite elaborate and beautiful pieces of machinery unlike today's characterless point-of-sale "systems"... Below is an early Cadillac which was manufactured in Dayton... After we arrived back home and we were talking about ...