[Roadside Relic] MEC Engine 470 | Waterville

(Link to the high res image gallery is at the bottom.) 

I'm a sucker for the weather beaten and disused. Even better if it looks like something that Tim Burton would doodle out of a steampunk nightmare. Here is an item that you're going to have to see soon if you'd like to see it in its current state, because its days are numbered. The last passenger steam train out of Bangor: MEC #470. A steam engine that serviced customers between Bangor and Boston from 1924-1954. What makes this machine remarkable within the context of the general state of the way things now are in Maine is that it was used exclusively for passenger rail service. No potatoes and no pulpwood. Also remarkable is the fact hat this was the last passenger train to depart from Bangor. 470 was given to the city of Waterville as a gift in 1962, by Maine Central Railroad which was celebrating its 100th anniversary. In 1970 it was moved to its current location where it now sits behind a fence in a park in Waterville.

Go see it now, in its charming rusted and weathered state before it goes away. Fortunately, this is going 'away' is more akin to being whisked away for a makeover. The New England Steam Corporation plans to get this 127 ton behemoth up and running again. Here's their Indiegogo pitch! They've come a long way since being set back by the city of Waterville due to asbestos concerns.


While it'll certainly be great to see this thing actually move under its own power, a little bit of melancholy comes with its potential removal. As a kid, I used to climb all over this thing. If there was a place to stand and something to hold on to I was there. This stopped when I got into the coal car and my sneakers couldn't provide adequate traction to get out, so naturally through child logic I concluded that my parents were just going to leave me there. This is why I didn't visit this machine between 1995 and 2015, I suppose.

Since it was first placed in its park in late 1970 it has been more or less deteriorating, and due to safety concerns it should be recognized that the fence currently in place around the site is for the benefit of the machine's new owners, and for the benefit of the proudly tetanus-free. It's new owners, The New England Steam Corporation, have some pretty graphic photos of the carnage wrought by Maine weather on their Facebook page.

I visited "old 470" on an overcast day in May. I didn't get many good shots because my choices were either shooting blind or trying to shoot through a fence. Here's the full res collection, and here are some of the nicer shots for your casual perusal.

 

These are only a few of the photos I took. The rest of the collection is here, and in full resolution.

Resources:

• Engine 470 on WikiPedia
• 4-6-2 Class information on WikiPedia
• New England Steam Corporation on Facebook
• New England Steam Corporation's website
• New England Steam Corporation's YouTube channel. (some seriously neat stuff here.)

Mystery '59 Ford Fairlane 500 | Strong

WARNING: THIS POST IS IMAGE HEAVY. IT MAY TAKE A MOMENT TO LOAD.

I spotted a sad 1959 Ford Fairlane 500 in the cold Maine rain.

Nothing historic here, just a feeling. 

This is what it would have used to look like:

Wikimedia Commons

...that's about it. Here are a few larger images.

[Roadside Relic] M60 Patton | Lincoln

WARNING: PHOTO HEAVY POST. MAY TAKE A MOMENT TO LOAD. 

Pardon my gimmick, but I think Summer 2015 will be my summer of Roadside Relics. New suspension and a new steering rack has a way of inspiring one to drive. And as you're driving into Lincoln via US 2 North, you may have to double take at what is parked behind the retirement home. A twenty two foot long Chrysler that gets one mile to the gallon and has a power to weight ratio of 15hp to the ton. While a giant Chrysler with such fuel consumption isn't all that unusual around here, this particular Chrysler is an iconic and ubiquitous vehicle that rolled off of an assembly line in Detroit in the 60s known as the M-60 "Patton." America's main battle tank during the Cold War period. Interestingly enough, Chrysler and Uncle Sam have had a very long love affair.

 
Wikipedia can tell you everything you want to know about this vehicle and more. Since this is a part of my "Roadside Relics" collection, I must inform you that this object is not at a park, and there isn't really a place for you to park unless you decide to get yourself a fantastic deal at Marden's! Signage indicates the lot is intended for their customers. If you don't like great deals, I'd recommend parking across the street (near the gazebo.)

Here are the remainder of the photographs of the tank.

Above you can see one of the differences between the M60 and its predecessor. The M-48 had a rounded hull while the M-60 has a beveled hull. I'm going to guess that this is because the armor would seem to be less likely to take as much damage if hit from an angle as opposed to head on. This design element reminds me of the Tiger II and its similarly angled armor.

While it's not in a park, I found I was able to get out of the car and walk around this without anyone giving me any trouble. Another difference that you can spot is that the M48 had five support struts to a side, compared to the M60's three. I couldn't find a tailpipe but I did find a heatsink. These 'blades' are to increase the surface area available for cooling. You have this exact same principle working inside of your computer right now. This gigantic 750 hp V12 may be air cooled.

[Retro Tech] 1952 Chambers 90C Gas Range

This is the second 'artifact' post I've written, the first of which was the Doomsday Shitter -- a civil defense relic from the University of Maine. The old/neat things that one can find here are not limited to concrete and wooden corpses of what used to be; something doesn't need to have held nuclear capsules to be interesting, sometimes pots and pans will suffice.

I got the ingredients, for your experience

Wintertime in Maine is one long gray rainy day. I've been trying to 'save' content for it all summer, but it's wearing as thin as my tolerance for snow. I was house sitting over the weekend bemoaning the dearth of things to check out this time of year when I realized I had a bit of a window into a different era just a couple of rooms away. Now, wintertime in Maine is a wonderful time to have access to a gas stove. Not only does it not require electricity to function, but it also provides you with a handy one way ticket to somewhere else. As a fan of all things retro I was thrilled to have the opportunity to house-sit for a friend who had an original Chambers model 90-C Gas range from 1952 in good condition.

After using it to (perhaps drunkenly) cook a meal or two, I realized what I'd been missing by using electric ranges all of my life. Having grown up in a trailer the late 1980s/early 1990s, suffice it to say that this device appeared near completely alien to me. No dials, no digital readouts, no holodeck inspired parallel lines that do nothing but scream "THE BEST 1993 HAS TO OFFER" No plastic, no numbers and no electricity. No safeties, no timers and no fucking around. Everything about this device is evocative of riding around in a car of the era, complete with the sense that if something goes wrong you can really hurt yourself.  Oh, and fire, did I mention all the fire?

Chambers with griddle up and broiler open.

Intimidating? Definitely.

Worth it? Absolutely.

First -- it's apparently impossible to heat a pan unevenly if you're using fire. Second, This device has features that I've never seen in an appliance before: the broiler/griddle combo with an adjustable bottom rack, and the heated (stock) pot well that takes the place of a fourth burner. The dimensions of the pot well are pretty narrow -- either stock pots were thinner back then (like Americans) or Chambers sold this unit with a 'built in' stock pot. Either way nothing fits, so it effectively adds one pound to the (proverbial) list of things that I won't do...

As I got over my inborn fear of losing my eyebrows or gassing myself to death, I had begun to realize the plastic trimmed, glass faced digital lies I'd bought my whole life. I found a handful of ways in which this half century old relic is indeed better than the black glass topped Ikea inspired, soulless hunks of steel and glass that you can buy at a department store. Plus, how could you not love these controls?

Here are the reasons why the Chambers 90C is awesome:

• You can hide in it in the event of a nuclear attack because it's heavier than Kelly Clarkson on a cheap swing set.
• You have a built in griddle and broiler in the exact same mechanism. And best of all, that mechanism is mechanical -- very mechanical. You get a nice satisfying "clunk" whenever you use it. It reminds me of the gearbox of a Mini Cooper S. 
• The knobs have crimped foil inlays. This (above) is how you do bling tastefully. 
• In stead of a fourth burner, you get a sort of little heated cylindrical cubbie in which you can place a stock pot. I'm going to guess this is because the crock pot wouldn't gain popularity until the 1970s. 
• Having one in your home would be like living at Nicky's.  
• The broiler has a depth adjustment, apparently. I didn't try it out because the handle for the adjustment felt pretty fixed in place, and I try not to break things that use gas and fire to function. 
• The oven part is pretty small, but the gas/flame shuts off when it's preheated. Once its heated, you stop using gas. This feature is pretty Priusey because it's green but makes you think that your machine is broken. 
• There's a huge online community for people who have/appreciate these appliances. More fan sites than you could shake a stick at provided you've got the diet and exercise regimen of a drag queen (adderall, lettuce, rinse, repeat.) But no joke -- even though there are only a handful of sites dedicated to these machines, there's some seriously useful information floating around out there.
• There is ample storage for things in a hole that might also be an oven. It's an oven with a cupboard in it.

 Here are some reasons why you might not want to own a Chambers:

• Rachael Ray has one. Not a 90C, but still a Chambers. Close enough. 

Just in case you wanted content that doesn't require you to read through the pithy ramblings of someone who can't even make a room full of stoned drunkards laugh, here's a photo of the whole unit...If I had one of these in any of my previous apartments perhaps I'd not be such a shitty cook.

The whole unit.

[Roadside Relic] AGM28 Hound Dog | Presque Isle & Limestone

Oh. More missiles.

I'm not doing my best impression of a "disappointed Kim Jong Un on Christmas morning", I'm just realizing that this is the fourth time I've written about these fascinatingly retrofuturistic airborne weapons. I hope that between the Snark base in Presque Isle, the Nike sites in and around Limestone and the Bomarc base in Bangor that you're not getting too awfully tired of my mild obsession with the technological progeny of Werner Von Braun.

Summer is coming so it's time to add a new roadside attraction from the age of atomic horror to the list: The AGM28 Hound Dog. Available for your viewing pleasure in Presque Isle and Limestone.

AGM-28 on display in Presque Isle (OC)

This is a distinctively different weapon than what we've covered before. Rather than being located at a stationary base either underground or in a hardened launch structure like the Nike or Bomarc, the Hound Dog was intended to be launched from a B-52 bomber while the aircraft was still out of range of the target area's defensive weapons. This weapon was not designed to destroy the bomber's primary target but rather to get there ahead of the bomber and damage (or destroy) the enemy's defenses.This weapon also carried a W28 nuclear warhead with a 70 kiloton - 1.5 megaton yield. Compare this to the Bomarc and its relatively measly 10 kiloton yield and you can see why these make rather interesting roadside monuments.

To give us a little perspective, according to NUKEMAP if a bomb this size were detonated in the center of downtown Bangor, the fireball would engulf the mall, Husson and over half of the airport. Still, it's a nice place for a picnic.,...

At Veteran's Park (OC)

This missile is located in Veteran's Park in Presque Isle. If you want a picnic, see this one. If you want to see a nicely painted up missile whose graphics are not mailbox letters, the Loring Military Heritage Center can help you there, and their museum is pretty fantastic too.

AGM 28 at Loring Heritage Center (OC)

Spaceport | Bangor Mall

Bangor Daily News

You're living on Bangor's east side and it's 1978. Ten years past the closure of Dow AFB, one of the town's farms had been transformed into a modern mall. Star Wars had just shown everyone that you could do action movies in space and reap in cash hand over fist. Texas Instruments had just released the first microchip, and the first Bulletin Board System was allowing people from all over the globe to dial in to argue about Star Trek and write creepy Redwall fan fiction from basements of pastel split level ranches everywhere.

While in a time of relative tumult, technology was making the world a lot smaller. The consumer computer revolution was just beginning, and computing power six times faster than what was used to track supersonic aircraft and control nuclear countermeasures only sixteen years prior had been dedicated to play Pac-Man.

Video games had gone from being a fledgling industry in 1971  to a loud and colorful "public health threat" by the late 1970s that would surely still make Brewer's city council blush even today. A hubbub grew surrounding these magic boxes into which kids could deposit coins and become transfixed. Even the Bangor Daily News had run a series of  essays from children running from themes like "Pac Man eats the brain" to "video games are no worse than sports." 

There's not a whole lot available on the Internet regarding Spaceport other than the ad above and various news stories related to various incidents, achievements and accidents there. Fortunately for us, Space Port appears to have been a chain which means that it's more or less guaranteed that a lot of what had gone on inside had been standardized to some degree.

In addition to the training video above, there exist several stories collected in the Bangor Daily News over the years that help paint an affectionate picture of a chain that provided a couple generations of us with memories in exchange for quarters. 

• An ad run on October 4th, 1978 gives us an image of the inside of a futuristic wonderland full of top of the line machines that would deliver us to places elsewhere. It touted Space Wars and Middle Earth.
• February 17th, 1983 saw a collection of children's essays about whether or not video games were a social problem on par with rock music and...rock music.
• A touching story from ten years later tells us of a gentleman with muscular dystrophy who received a pioneering piece of adaptive technology; a custom remote control unit that allowed him to play video games. The piece indicates it was one of the first devices of its kind in the country. 
• In 2005 Emily Burnham wrote about Dance Dance Revolution.
• In 2007, it caught fire.

Nowadays it's a head shop. If you want to play arcade games you've got to go to a sports bar so you can get your daily dose of other people's jukebox preferences while you do it. Personally, I preferred the cacophony of tens of arcade machines as they wildly vied for our collective attention.

Caswell Training Site Part 1 of 2 | Caswell

While I don't mean to be some kook who blogs obsessively about the largest SAC base in the country that was closed before he'd stopped believing in the Santa Bunny, here's yet another site that's a stone's throw away from Loring's weapons storage area. Unlike the remains of Caswell AFS to the east, or Loring's WSA to the south, it's a bunch of stuff in the woods. What apparently stands within the relatively dense forest between Loring and the Canadian border is affectionately referred to by one of my local sources as "The Octagon", a military training facility that is another site lending itself to Aroostook's 20th century legacy of potatoes, timber and nuclear weapons.

While the film features a bunch of folks doing kung fu in a training camp being trained by an Asian guy who is supposed to be Chuck Norris' brother, the real life "Octagon" in Aroostook county was an Army training facility that had begun life in 1947 when Strategic Air Command started to construct what was then called Limestone Army Air Base. It was used by the Maine National Guard from the 1960s through the late 1980s. The army's records indicate that there are five operational range and training areas at the Caswell site consisting of maneuver and training areas as well as firing ranges spread out over about a thousand acres. (Source)

Unlike some of the nasty surprises buried under Loring's WSA, the Army notes that all that we may find is 'current and historical small firing points and impact berms.' I didn't know what an impact berm was, so I asked my friend who is currently in the Army. It's a mound of dirt behind a target so that your bullets don't ruin someone else's day, or their face. 

Other than the Army report that I've linked above, the only other piece of evidence that I have of the existence of a training range in Caswell is from the Bangor Daily News from June 3rd, 1983 in which Major General Paul R Day decided to clue us in on what might still be out there...albeit 32 years after the fact:

The Adjutant General, Maine National Guard, is interested in procuring Architectural Engineering Services for Roads, Latrines and Tent Slabs at the Caswell training Site in Caswell Maine

Services required but not limited to are: Surveys, design (siting, preparation of plans, specifications and contract documents), construction (supervision, testing and as built drawings) These are for gravel road with drainage structures, latrine buildings and concrete tent slabs. 

The reported location of "The Octagon"

These renovations had come at the tail end of the facilities lifespan as a training site. Where might these newer structures be? I've combed the area for hours on Google Earth and have found a variety of oddities that may be consistent with its use as a troop maneuver and small arms training site.

There appears to be a rather extensive road network to the north of Willard and Butterfield Lake roads. The presence of the roads is indicated by a mixture of plain sight and man-made lines visible against the tree cover. There are logging roads in the area, but all of them consist of straight stretches and right angles. At several points bridges are visible that may be large enough for a vehicles other than those that are recreational. An example of the general condition of the roads as well as the type of bridge is visible in the photo above. The clump of trees to the right is the reported location of a horseshoe shaped, eight sided bunker of sorts constructed of railroad ties with two of its 'sides' opened.


While I am not entirely certain of the access status of this area, I do plan on trying to find out during the next open house at Loring.