As you may have heard, Ford has ended production of the venerable Crown Victoria, the mainstay vehicle of American police and taxi fleets for decades.
The Crown Vic assembly line shut down last September, so we found ourselves wondering: What will replace the Crown Victoria in the California Highway Patrol's fleet? Hoping to find an answer, we dropped by the CHP's Fleet Operations facility in West Sacramento, California last weekend, hoping to see what the CHP has purchased now that the Crown Vic is no more.
On one level, our visit was a failure: Instead of finding the CHP's replacement vehicle -- the Interwebs say the Dodge Charger is a likely candidate -- we instead discovered that the CHP is hoarding hundreds of Crown Victorias for future use. (Notice that the ones in the background still have the manufacturer's inventory stickers displayed on the windows.)
But as metaphor, the trip was a stunning success. We happened to arrive in West Sacramento at dusk, just as a firey sunset was exploding in the sky behind the CHP's motor pool parking lot. It was oddly beautiful.
There are still be plenty of Crown Vics on hand at the California Highway Patrol. But no more are coming, and the demise of the type is now a question of when and not if. Sunset, indeed.
The Bernal GT is a collector's-car road rally organized by a few gents from San Francisco's Bernal Dads Racing team. The Bernal Dads are the same bunch that created the oddball Molvo hybrid Miata/Volvo race car for the 24 Hours of LeMons, so it should come as no surprise that the Bernal GT is a serious road rally that refuses to take itself too seriously.
The rally is not competitve -- it's more of a group ride than a race -- but it does have a few rules:
You are eligible by one of the following:
A) Car of 1980 model year or or older
B) Rare and/or exotic car 1995 model year to 1981 Model Year (must be approved for exotic status)
C) If you have kids 17 years or younger and/or kids in car seats, newer cars can be submitted for approval, No minivans or SUVs
This posed a problem for Telstar Logistics, because while we do have a car seat and a kid to go with it, we nevertheless drive a SUV. But the rules say no SUVs. We were about to propose the long-shot idea of seeking approval to reclassify our fake fleet-vehicle SUV as a fake "roadside assistance service truck" when one of the Bernal Dads announced that he was looking for a volunteer to help solve a problem:
"I can't attend the rally this weekend," he said. "But my car still wants to go."
The car turned out to be a sexy-looking 1972 BMW 3.0 CS, so Telstar Logitics offered to help. "Hell yeah," we said. "We'll drive it!"
Keys were exchanged and perfunctory instruction was offered, and everything worked out swimmingly. At the meeting point on Sunday morning, many of the 25 or so vehicles that showed up for the Bernal GT came with both vintage provenance and kiddie car seats — and young’uns to warm them.
The rally roster included two Ferraris, several classic Volvos, a rare Mexican-made Renault Dinalpin, a 1964 Alfa Romeo, a 1956 Jaguar, a DeLorean (sans flux capacitors), and one mutant Porsche 914 that had been the recipient of an engine transplant from a Subaru WRX.
The cars were very serious, but their owners thankfully were not, which may explain why we witnessed the spectacle of a pack of children pile into a Ferrari to gobble down a box of donuts. (Somewhere, Enzo Ferrari was spinning in his grave.)
As for the BMW, it was a joy to drive; it was poised and well-balanced, and the motor delivered plenty of torque with a deep, thoaty growl. Listen for yourself during this uphill section of the rally filmed from the passenger seat on an twisting uphill climb near La Honda, California while chasing Ben Buja's Volvo 124 142:
It was an excellent day, and here's the complete photoset if you want to come along for the full ride:
Inevitably, there comes a time in every parent's life when they are called upon by their progeny to explain the fundamentals of containerized transportation. For Telstar Logistics, that moment arrived about a week ago, when our junior executive (now age 3.75) asked about all the big metal boxes she's noticed aboard many of the big ships that sail in and out of San Francisco Bay.
Since it was Saturday, and we had nothing else planned, we piled into the fleet vehicle for a trip across the Bay, to the Port of Oakland, to watch the operation of a major container terminal first-hand. It was a very successful foray: We saw lots and lots of big metal boxes, of course, but also trains, and trucks, and ships, and giant cranes, and an assortment of weird machines. She enjoyed the tour, and we came away with a tidy collection of photos to show for the trip:
Last weekend Telstar Logistics spent a damp saturday trackside at Sears Point Raceway, just north of San Francisco, for the 2011 running of the local 24 Hours of LeMons (that's pronounced "lemons,") a low-budget auto race where the most important rule is that participants must spend $500 or less to purchase and race-prep their cars. This rule not only keeps the race wonderfully devoid of pretension, but it also opens the door to blatant silliness and wild innovation, so that the race itself feels like a pleasant mix of Burning Man and NASCAR -- or as the organizers of the 24 Hours of LeMons call it, "where Halloween meets gasoline."
The cars on the track were a motley bunch. There were a variety of BMWs in various states of disarray, lots of Hondas, a few Ford Crown Victorias and plenty of one-off oddballs, including a Maserati, a 1960s Plymouth, and an Austin Mini with a reindeer strapped to the roof.
Telstar Logistics was there to support Bernal Dads Racing, a team based near our Global Headquarters in San Francisco. BDR took a mutant "hybrid" to the race: A 1995 Mazda Miata that wore the welded-on bodywork of a Volvo 240 wagon. They called it "The Molvo," and it performed surprisingly well, completing the race intact and in fine form, while also garnering a Judge's Choice award for conceptual excellence.
We went a little nuts with the camera during our visit to LeMons, so there are lots more pictures of the scene to review for your motorsports pleasure. Vroom!
One of the quirks of life along the California coast is that it can be summer almost any time of year. Summer is dry and winter is wet, but both are generally temperate, so if the meteorology lines up right, you can have a warm and sunny day that would pass for a solstice -- regardless of the actual time of year.
About 90 minutes south of San Francisco, Santa Cruz, California is home to an electrified beach boardwalk and amusement pier that would easily make any refugee from Coney Island or the Jersey Shore feel right at home. In operation since 1907, the Santa Cruz beach boardwalk has a vintage roller-coaster, a log flume, and a swing carousel. But unlike the Jersey Shore, the one in Santa Cruz doesn't have many guidos, and it's open all year-round.
Telstar Logistics visited the Santa Cruz boardwalk during a balmy earlier this month, and we snapped these shots of the recreational infrastructure along the way. The crowds are thinner this time of year, but this is what winter feels like in a place where summer never really goes away.
Telstar Logistics loves infrastructure. And if you're reading this Internet weblog, there's a good chance you're an infrastructuralist too. In a very literal way, infrastructure is the stuff that moves us, feeds us, shelters us, and allows us to live these lives that are so throoughly modern.
Document the structures of the built environment that symbolize contemporary life. Share the most impressive bridges, tunnels, airports, power plants, and other monuments to our ability to reshape and reconnect our world. This theme is a collaboration with Todd Lappin of Telstar Logistics.
Telstar Logistics will help select the most sexy photos in the collection, and the best will be included in an upcoming photo feature on Pictory. But you can't get in if you don't submit your pics. So get 'em in fast.
Photos: From top, Oakland Bay Bridge by Ian Collins, Factory in New Mexico by Tim Melideo, Above San Francisco International Airport by Telstar Logistics.
Just when we thought there were no more amazing photos of USAir Flight 1549 - "The Miracle on the Hudson" - left to be found, we were today directed toward a collection of still more amazing photos that we were glad to find.
Photographer Stephen Mallon followed the hulk of Flight 1549 as the plane was recovered from the water and moved to New Jersey for the subsequent accident investigation, and the photos he captured are haunting and beautiful. View the whole gallery.
Although Telstar Logistics celebrated the 100th anniversary of naval aviation a few weeks ago, the event is an ongoing affair for the US Navy. And as part of the commemoration of the "Centennial of Naval Aviation," the Navy is repainting several of its modern aircraft in vintage paint schemes like those used by naval squadrons during decades past.
Many of these are very cool to see. The photo at top, for example, is an EA-18 Growler painted in the 1944 colors of Air Group 85 aboard USS Shangri-La (CV-34). The photo below that is a T-4 trainer painted in the 1938 colors aircraft wore aboard the original USS Enterprise.
Here's an F-18 Hornet wearing the paint scheme of a F6F Hellcat from 1945:
For comparison's sake, here are a few of those Hellcats, photographed in 1945:
Here's an S-3B, painted to look like a Navy aircraft during the Battle of Midway in 1942:
Some of the commemorative aircraft make for improbable combinations, like this MH-60 helicopter in a late 1944 paint scheme used aboard the USS Enterprise (CV-6). That's interesting in a what-if kind of way, because the US Navy didn't operate helicopters in 1944:
Likewise, electronic warfare wasn't practiced much in 1942, but if it was, this EA-6B Prowler electronic countermeasures aircraft would have come in handy as depicted here in the paint scheme US Navy planes wore during the Battle of Coral Sea:
It's always a treat to see the world from the perspective of those who see it from an unusual perspective. We apologize for the tautology, but this explains why Telstar Logistics harbors such appreciation for workingfolk who head off to their jobs each day with a sense of pride in their hearts and a camera in their hands.
That also explains why we were so glad to find 2010 Year in Review, a new photoset by Trucker Chris, a long-haul truck driver who is active on Flickr:
In 2010 I left Schneider National in February and signed on at Redding Lumber Transport. I proposed to my fiance on July 17th in Fort Bragg, CA on a beach overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I visited the Boeing Museum near Seattle, WA. I witnessed a fellow RLT Owner Operator's truck burn to the ground and my facination with trains reached a new level when I found out how to reach the abandoned snow tunnels on Donner pass. Take a look at the photos that I took this year, I'm sure you will enjoy them!
Telstar Logistics took a lot of pictures during our trip to New York last week, but there's something about this shot that makes us keep coming back to it.
Perhaps it's the way the photo makes the New York Police Department look like just another theme-park element in the contemporary Times Square theme-park cityscape? Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's definitely like no other place on earth.
Dean Bowen was a pilot with TWA during the 1950s. He flew the beautiful Lockeed Constellation, and he died 50 years ago today, on December 16, 1960, when his Constellation was involved in a midair collision with a United Airlines DC-8 in foggy skies above Park Slope, New York City. At the time, it was the worst air disaster in American history.
Just after 10:30 a.m. on Dec. 16, 1960, the paths of the Connie and the DC-8 converged in the fog over New York Harbor, claiming, in the end, 134 lives. The collision, the deadliest in the history of American air travel at the time, brought new urgency to the federal government’s staggering transition toward a modern system of controlling air traffic. It hammered home the patchwork system’s inadequacy in protecting the public in the air and the neighborhoods below.
As hard as it may be to imagine today, it was standard practice then for a jet hurtling over the metropolitan area at more than 350 miles an hour to be left to find its own way for minutes at a time. When the controllers on the ground were tracking planes on their radar scopes, using grease pencils to identify them on plastic strips called “shrimp boats,” they could not judge altitudes. Radar had only been in use at New York’s airports for about a decade, and the technology was still rather crude, retired controllers said.
Dean Bowen perished in the crash, but his stepson recently published a lovely set of photos Bowen took before he died. A few of the images appear above -- that's Bowen, in the top photo, in May 1957 -- but the set as a whole is a haunting time capsule of a life lived in the sky, and all around the world, a long time ago:
In practical terms, that means 1 in 36 homes in Modesto is in foreclosure, and as we discovered, the evidence of this is visible from street level. You won’t find entire blocks of Modesto that stand vacant -- it’s not Detroit, after all -- but in on practically every steet in every neighborhood, there’s usually there’s one house that’s been foreclosed.
With some practice, foreclosed homespotting becomes easy: Amid the manicured lawns and tidy suburban blandscapes, the foreclosed homes are the ones where things are slighty awry; lawns go feral, the shades in the windows sit askew, and rows of legal notices are taped to the windows near the front door.
Although at some addresses, there's nothing subtle about the situation at all:
In other parts of town, you can see the remnants of housing developments that were started but never completed, as if the land itself is waiting for the economy to recover:
“We’re going to be near the top of the foreclosure list for a long time,” Bob Johnson from Direct Appraisals in Modesto told us. “The majority of the foreclosures here are people who used home equity loans to buy cars and other things. Banks often try to help out with loan modifications, but that doesn’t really help, so people just walk away. Bottom line is, people here say they just won’t pay mortgages that are worth more than the value of the property.”
Oddly, despite Modesto’s high rate of foreclosure, new home construction continues. At a brand-new subdivision called The Arbors at Graham Estates, workers pour concrete for new foundations, just yards away from a row of newly-completed homes. Prices here start at $230,000 for a 1600 square-foot house.
According to Tim Parish, the project superintendent for developer Frontier Community Builders, the new units are selling well, even though foreclosed houses often sell for half as much. Foreclosed homes are often plagued by mold infestation, damaged walls, and broken appliances, Parish says, so “even in a market like this, some people just don’t want a used car.”
It will be a long time before Modesto fully escapes the havoc caused by the foreclosure crisis.
“We see all kinds of properties, even homes bought in 2008.” explained Omar Perez, an appraiser with Cal Valley Appraisers. “It’s going to be like this for a few more years, and that will keep a lot of downward pressure on values. Home values will eventually climb again, but I doubt we’ll get to where we were in 2005 or 2006, even 10 years from now.”
It's a lovely little event, actually, as older railfans collaborate with well-organized coordinators and about a half-dozen kids to transform the two cars -- New Orleans No. 952 and Milan No. 1818 -- into Santa's own form of public transit. The event provides a unique opportunity for kids of all ages to experience these wonderful streetcars in a relaxed setting, and it filled us with seasonal mirth to be involved.
Pour yourself some egg nog, put some Bing Crosby on the phonograph, settle in by the fire, and watch how the magic happens:
Telstar Logistics took the micro-executive to the 2010 San Francisco International Auto Show last weekend. Once there, however, we realized we'd popped the wrong lens on the camera -- we brought a prime (ie. fixed) lens with a narrow perspective, which made it nearly impossible to get wide shots of the cars on display. Ooops.
Forced to turn lemons into lemonade, we persevered to capture the artsy-fartsy, detail-oriented images shown here. We advise you to stroke your chin and look ponderous while enjoying the short photoset that follows.
