Part Ten

“Room; Antenna; Locomotive; Combine”

Interesting title to today’s blog, eh?! Read along for the explanations, if you will.

“Room”. I have stayed at many a hotel/motel/inn in my travels, but the most unique place that I have ever stayed at is the Super 8 Inn in Pierre, South Dakota where I began my 310 mile journey this morning. The room I stayed in redefines the phrase, “Sung as a Bug in a Rug”. As you can tell by the photos below, this is a small room. :

The bed is a full size bed with the night side table and mini-fridge squeezed in. The room itself is about halfway underground, essentially making this the basement, but a furnished basement, HI HI. The opposite wall has your HVAC unit, a desk and a safe. Down the narrow entrance hallway is your bathroom which is about 6 foot square. Tiny, yes; but very efficient. It may be compact but I ready do enjoy staying here. I do not know how the pheasant hunters of years past fitted into these rooms with their hunting dog/dogs, but with the opening of pheasant hunting season this past weekend, there weren’t too many around. Lesson learned, I guess. Still, a great little inn to stay at.

Antenna. Even though I am recently retired from over 41 years in TV broadcasting, I am still amazed as how an AM, FM or TV signal is sent out there. In my travels today, I went thru a new part of South Dakota on US 183. And one of the towns I went thru was Winner, located in Tripp County, population 2897 and is the birthplace of former “The Price is Right” host Bob Barker. Winner is home to KWYR-AM and KWYR-FW. The AM station is 5000 watts day, 146 watts night and its sister station is 100,000 watts full time. I did not see the FM tower but I did grab a shot of the AM tower:

In the Midwest, 5000 watts on the AM side gets out a lot further than where I live. The same for FM. Below is what KWYR looks like in the daytime and night time.

The image below shows how its sister FM station gets out:

All in all, radio is still a great medium and a fine, old-fashioned way to get your news, weather, sports and music. Long may radio live!!

“Locomotive”. A rail transport vehicle that provides the motive power for a train. Goodness knows in the years that I have been a railfan, I have seen my share of locomotives. And some of the beasts that are out there today are rated at up to 6000 horsepower and can pull very long trains. But in this time of our economy, the locomotive has been affected. Note the photo below. I came across the town of Ravenna, Nebraska last week while I was exploring some new train-chasing territory on Nebraska Route 2. Upon coming up on the railroad overpass to the downtown, I saw these 2 lines of BNSF locomotives, just sitting there. In railroad parlance, this is what is known as a “Dead Line”:

Effectively, these locomotives have been taken out of service, either due to there not being enough freight cars to be moved or that some of them will be taken out of service and scrapped for their metal and parts. It is a sad day when a railfan sees something like this. And I have to say that train levels are somewhat lower than what they were the last time I was out here in 2014. Still, the railfan in me keeps chugging along. Always will. Hopefully there will be an upswing in rail traffic and some of these locomotives will be back on the mainline soon.

“Combine”. Something not associated with the Northeast but it is a BIG commodity here in the Midwest, particularly at this time of the year known as Harvest Season. As I was going south on US 183 in the town of Sargent, Nebraska, I came up upon the back end of this thing:

This is a very big dump trailer, attached to a very big farm tractor. As I zoomed around the tractor/trailer, I noticed that I came upon a combine caravan. I zoomed ahead of the caravan to get the following pics:

That very nice looking Ford pickup was towing the funnel, the front part that gathers the corn stalks into the front end. The next picture is the combine harvester of which the funnel is attached to:

Below is an image of the assembled beast:

The harvester removes all of the kernels off of the corn cobs, stores the kernels internally, and then grinds up the cobs and the stalks out the back end. The refuse is plowed back into the soil for the next growing season. The tractor and its trailer:

Follow alongside the harvester and the corn kernels are dumped into the trailer and brought back to the farm base to be transferred to 60-foot covered trailers to deliver the corn kernels to market. Check out the link below to see an actual combine harvester reap up a field of soybeans:

https://youtu.be/dO1h5tPMWZg

Class dismissed.

Tuesday it was a day of train chasing and picture taking. Just the way I like my train days. We’ll see you later.

I am Philip J Zocco. On the Road. In Kearney, Nebraska.