noise."The Admiral's Epic Trip Up North, part 1 · 1:38am Oct 29th, 2020
Welcome to the tale of my epic adventure!
I had to work a Saturday afternoon shift at a group home, and I’ll be honest, I wasn’t a super-effective employee . . . unsurprisingly, I was all set to just go. The van was packed, and on my way to Lansing I fueled it up. I should have changed the oil before I left, but whatever. Still had a thousand miles until it was due.
My co-worker asked me where I was going, and I said that I didn’t know yet. Didn’t have any particular plan, and let’s be honest, that’s kind a fun vacation. Just drive around and see whatever. My two choices were go north or go south, and I was tossing them back and forth (I had two particular things I wanted to do).
At the end of shift, I decided to drive south, and headed for Gary, IN.
Those of y’all who know about Gary, IN are probably wondering why I would choose that as a destination. There’s not much to offer in Gary (as far as I know) except a permanent haze, steel mills, and abandoned buildings. It’s like Detroit Lite in some ways.
(although with more greenery, so that was nice.)
I can tell you in one word. Trains. Lots and lots of trains. Most everything coming from the east and going to Chicago (or vice-versa) gets funneled through Gary on a collection of rail lines that are bounded by Lake Michigan, ten miles of steel mills, a vast collection of highways also trying to get to Chicago, and residential neighborhoods which likely aren’t overly enthused about dozens or hundreds of trains a day going by.
In order to practice safe social distancing and to save bits, I decided I was going to mostly camp out in my van. On previous trips, that’s been more convenient than tent camping because I can set up quicker, and when it’s raining I stay dryer. And it was raining, off and on since I left Lansing.
I got just across the Indiana state line and found an out-of-the-way parking spot in a rest area, had a decently pleasant night’s sleep in the back of my van, and then drove on to my first destination, which was the Woodland Dog Park in Portage, IN. The park bordered on a diamond crossing and what looked to be at least one main line, maybe two, and it was a good place to eat breakfast and watch freight trains go by, and also to check the internet for what were other good train-watching spots.
(That silver box with ducting is a switch heater, so that the remote-controlled switches will work in snow and ice. It’s a Fastrak Hellfire 900 [which is a great name for a heater]*)
_________________________________________________
*As a side note, I think it was on the Well There’s Your Problem channel, they mentioned that in America we set fire to the tracks, and that’s not exactly wrong.
The first one that got suggested was near the ghost town of Clarke Station (close to the airport), with the warning that CN owned all the land near the tracks and the railroad bulls would chase off trespassers. That one had a lot of traffic--about eighteen tracks (six of them a yard lead), trains going by on an overpass, and I even saw a CN locomotive that had rotating beacons on it for industrial work. Didn’t get a picture of that one, ‘cause it was going the wrong way.
Then to the town of Porter, IN (not to be confused with Portage), which had another diamond crossing and an influx of trains. An Amtrak went by, and a couple of long CN freights. Back to Jeorse Park, which the internet promised me had a pedestrian bridge that provided a great view of the yard . . . and they did, but between road construction and the steel mill, there was no way to get to it without trespassing a lot.
I also got a good look at a monument to the steel industry they’ve got in Gary before heading out of town and up north.
In case you want to follow along on a map, I went north on US-12 to I-94 to US-131 to US-31, and I passed by the Speedway that Silver Glow frequently stormspotted from. Got to Wilderness State Park rather late at night, found a spot, backed the van in, and tucked in for the night. I was going to walk down to the beach and get a look at the night stars, but of course the clouds rolled in and there were hardly any to be seen.
I was up before sunrise, and headed across the Mackinac Bridge. Those towers are hollow, you know, and there might be a pegasus nesting up top. On the St. Ignace side, there’s a park where you can look at the bridge and watch the sunrise. It was a cool and windy day, and besides the sunrise I got to watch seagulls and crows playing in the wind. It’s always fun to see them either flying backwards (usually unintentionally) or using it to keep them aloft or to make a sharp turn or drop they couldn’t normally do. Some of them seem better at figuring it out than others.
(It seems whenever I get out a video camera, the birds stop playing in the wind . . . dunno how many times I tried to film them, and this was the best I got :P)
After sunrise, it was time to head east, to Detour Village. That’s a narrow passage on the shipping route (about a mile wide), and I hoped that I might catch a ship on its way to or from Sault Ste. Marie. I took one stop at a roadside park and then a bit further on I passed by a little turnout that advertised itself as a ship-watching area. I glanced over at Lake Huron, and darned if there wasn’t a ship there, so I made a quick U-turn and headed back to the ship-watching spot.
That was the Saginaw, a 639’ (195m) bulk carrier owned by Lower Lakes Towing. She’s one of the earlier self-unloaders on the Great Lakes (1953), and she now carries stone, coal, salt, or wheat. Hopefully they sweep out the holds between cargos.
I made it to Detour Village and got a closer look as she traversed the channel; unfortunately, the sun wasn’t my friend when it came to getting a detailed shot.
I also was just in time to see the Drummond Island ferry load and leave port.
From there, I made a turn inland and headed up to Sault Ste. Marie, curious if I could get there and see the Saginaw lock through. We’ll leave that part of the trip for the next blog post!
Thanks for sharing! Great to hear you got to experience this!
Did the time zone changes affect you in any way, like with your body clock or remembering what time it is? I know Lansing is in Eastern Time whereas Gary is in Central Time, and based on what I read, it seems like you crossed time zones more than once.
All the side stories were written before doing the road trip?
Trouble is when everyone is living in a mobile home, you get traffic jams so legendary, you need a Doctor to sort them out.
Yay, adventures with the Admiral!
Great photos and I'm glad you had fun!
Sounds like a lot of fun! Looking forward to part 2.
Hey, in San Francisco, that's a quarter-million dollar estate.
Fuckin around in the middle of nowhere? Sounds like a good vacation to me.
Lyra and Bon Bon ship spotters.
Sounds like a potential winter job for a team of engineer niriks to me...
This here is what America's All About. And big balls of twine.
Literally all I know about Gary Indiana comes from
... Lord I miss train watching. Have a Grandpa who used to work the rail up in the Iron Range in Minnesota. I think he was part of the DM&IR railways. Buut he could've worked further south for BNSF. I can't remember which one he worked for and it's been ages since we talked about it. I just remember while in Duluth he brought me out to the maintenance bay for the Engines. IT WAS SO COOL!
I've actually been using a picture of Mackinac Bridge as my desktop wallpaper at work for the past 8-9 years (not one I've taken, mind you; I haven't been up that way since the 80s).
Anyway, looking at that second picture, it's a real shame. That used to be a perfectly livable house once upon a time, I imagine.
[E] The Admiral's Epic Trip Up North
[MLP: FiM] [MLP: Meta] [Slice of Life] [Adventure] [Road Trip] [Human] [Self-Insert] [OC] [Pinkie Pie]
Admiral Biscuit travels through the Midwest, blissfully unaware of his two tagalongs.
This story won First Place in Trick Question's Imaginary Stories Contest.
5387995
It doesn't affect you if you ignore it
"and residential neighborhoods which likely aren’t overly enthused about dozens or hundreds of trains a day going by"
I mean, sure, maybe some people don't appreciate that... :D
And as for switch heaters and fires, yep. There are portable versions that are basically just appropriately-shaped tanks with wicks, if I correctly understand their working principle (it's something like that, but it's been a while since I've seen them in action).
Thanks for sharing! :)
5388282
LOL.
Perfect
5388282
Somebody should write that!
5388282
This story Biscuit wrote for my contest has several upvotes, no downvotes, and a lot of views... but it isn't in the Feature Box yet. Weird.
5387995
There’s more to come (as soon as I write the next section, lol).
No, I didn’t spend enough time in any different time zones to have an issue with it. In fact, I didn’t even know Gary was in a different time zone TBH. Used to be the only times I went through Indiana was in the summer and they didn’t do DST, so Indiana time and Michigan time were the same.
I did also cross over into Central Time in the UP, but since I wasn’t on any kind of schedule to go anywhere, it didn’t matter.
Amusingly, I got close enough to Canada that my phone sent me a text telling me what the calling and messaging rates were in Canada.
5387999
Yeah, I haven’t written anything new since that’s been published here (halfway done with another chapter for Como Salsa para los Tacos, if things go well I’ll have that ready for editing tonight).
This is true, wait until you hear about Whitefish Point and Tahquamenon Falls.
5388033
I think I’ve seen a video or two of that on YT, and there was another one I watched a couple playthrough episodes of . . . I seem to recall there being a ‘z’ in the name but a quick google search didn’t get me a result that sounded like it.
One of the reasons I’ve mostly stayed away from various video games is that they’d consume tons of my limited free time--you are right to fear that happening.
5388038
Thank you!
5388047
Part two will feature more trees and water, and fewer trains.
Part three will have trains again (or part four . . . sorta depends on how much I write for each part)
5388057
You ain’t kidding. It also came with an antique truck (also burned).
5388072
Really, the best kind of vacation IMHO. Although I did miss going to cons this year. . . .
5388077
I wonder if anybody has written a story about ship spotters in Equestria? It’s canon they have ships, and since here on earth there are train watchers and airplane watchers and exotic car watchers and fire truck watchers and I’m sure ship watchers, the same motivation could very well apply in Equestria.
5388088
It would be, wouldn’t it?
Actually, presuming niriks are fireproof (which I’d assume they are), there are lots of industries on Earth where they might be very useful.
5388110
No big balls of twine, I’m afraid.
5388111
According to Wikipedia, it really was named for Elbert Henry Gary, the founding chairman of U.S. Steel. Pretty much all that’s there is rundown houses, trains, and steel mills. It’s not a great town, all things considered, but if you were looking for a cheap house. . . .
5388115
That’s awesome!
I don’t have the time nor the ready access I used to . . . back in high school, I often visited the Tuscola and Saginaw Bay’s yard and engine facility, even got to walk around inside a few times. Something I really ought to get back into, but I don’t know the people I used to know.
5388218
It’s a good bridge for a backdrop. As photogenic as the Golden Gate, I’d say.
Yeah, once upon a time . . .
In the Google Maps satellite view, it’s still standing. Interestingly, it still is in the street view, captured in Aug 2019. Lower windows and front door are boarded up, but it at least looks fixable, if someone wanted to.
5388282
Hmm, that does have potential. Amusingly, I partially covered some of Silver Glow’s trip up north, although sadly without an actual pony companion.
5388304
This is true. And most cell phones change automatically when you’re in a new time zone for a bit, so if you’re using one for timekeeping, you always know what time it is wherever you are. Unless the tower has a malfunction, which has happened to me before.
5388339
Yeah, exactly. For some people it would be a bonus.
Yeah, the general idea with the stationary ones is that the switches can’t freeze if they’re on fire. I would assume that the portable ones are used to get frozen switches moving again. Seems kinda inefficient to have the tracks on fire, but given the number of trains that go through that particular bottleneck, I would imagine having to have them wait while switches were thawed would back things up for days.
You’re welcome!
5388545
Knighty ought to implement some kind of blog post feature box.
Actually, on second thought, he shouldn’t.
5390062
You're welcome!
5390067 Well duh, me too. 'snot like we had an option.
5390057
That's cool to hear! Definitely useful; I get thrown off by time zone changes quite a bit. I've only travelled between them a few times in my life, but I remember the day I flew from the East Coast to the West Coast and went to bed at 7 PM because it felt like it was 10. I then vaguely remember waking up in the wee hours of the morning because of that, plus having to sleep in a new environment... yeah.
Although, that's quite a bit different from the trip you took. If I did something similar to what you did, I don't think my sleep schedule would get that badly thrown off.
5390088
[listens to the sound of the big two-stroke drifting in from the railyard nearly next door]
:)
(We can't actually see into it from here, due to a big opaque fence, but various sounds from the locomotives are common.)
I can also see the portable ones being used in lower-priority areas, where the expected need isn't great enough for the infrastructure investment. Otherwise, aye.
:)
5390277
Oh, yeah, agreed. I wasn’t even going to go on vacation this year at all, but then decided the boss’ll pay me for a week, so I ought to take that week, even if it’s just bumming around in the woods up north.
5390428
The one that threw me off the most was flying to Norway in the summer--not only was there a time zone change, but we were on the edge of the ‘sun doesn’t go down’ zone . . . I don’t remember it ever being dark on that trip, which added to the weirdness.
Yeah, usually with road trips you don’t cross time zones enough to really make it weird. Maybe one per day, versus the literal dozens you can get in a jet (depending on where you’re going).
5390443
I think I’d enjoy that. Happy diesel idling
Yeah, that’s my thought, too.
5391659
Oh yeah, polar areas of the planet have a period in summer where the sun stays up 24/7 for months. I don't know how I'd handle that.
That is true, road trips are much easier than plane trips with regard to time zones.
5391669
The sun staying up part, I wouldn’t mind. I’m a sun-loving
ponyperson. It’s the six months later, the sun doesn’t come up, that I wouldn’t like. Even here in the wintertime, there’s a month or so where I go to work in the dark and go home in the dark and I don’t like that very much.Yes
5391718
Yep, there are also the polar nights. I think I'd feel the same way; I'd rather have continuous light than continuous darkness, now that you mention it.
It's been awesome talking to you!
5391660
Thanks. :D
Hearing it again now (though that's far from unusual, especially at night). :)
Right. The fixed ones probably give somewhat better performance and don't need to be manually placed in complicated and busy high-density interlockings, but they're another thing out in the field and the elements all year round that has to be maintained, have the gas lines inspected for leaks (and just thinking about the complex interlockings near Jamaica (on the LIRR) specifically, with fixed gas-fired heaters, as I recall, and lots of third rail segments starting and ending with attendant arcing possibilities... yeah, not a place one wants to let the gas lines have a problem, I think), etc. The portable ones need a lot more manual handling, but when not needed at a particular switch, they don't have to be there and can just be stored empty in a shed at a maintenance facility or something.
Oh Lord.
My sister and I spent a night in Gary back in 2010. When we got to the Motel 6 or Hotel 8 or whatever it was, there were cops in the parking lot busting someone. When we woke up the next morning and checked out, there were two separate arrests happening in the parking lot. So we fucked right off out of there and hauled ass to Michigan.