This is not the engine that was in Tallahassee on the 4th, but a very similar unit.
This is a US Railroad Administration GRMS similar to the one I saw in Tallahassee on the 4th of July.
If you were around Gaines Street and Stone Valley Road today (4th of July, 2007), you probably noticed a very strange looking locomotive on the CSX siding. It’s painted blue and yellow, has the CSX logo, is numbered “GRMS-2″ and appears to be a rather high-tech device.
It turns out that it’s a “Track Geometry Unit” and is a rolling computer center on rails. According to Wikipedia.org, it measures the gauge of the tracks, the relative level between the two tracks and does other non-destructive tricks to access the condition of the rails.
I wasn’t smart enough to have a camera long when I saw it today, but there are some excellent photos of GRMS-2 on RailPictures.Net. Click here, here and here for photos of this very engine in other cities.
All the rail in Tallahassee, to the best of my knowledge, belongs to CSX. If you notice a problem with the railroad (such as a stuck signal, a vehicle stuck in a crossing, etc.) the number to call is 1-800-232-0144.
On Railroad Avenue, the All Saints Cafe roasts their own coffee and with coffee, fresh is best.
The state song, Old Folks at Home, by Stephen Foster, has some words in it’s lyrics which in todays context, are, to most people, racist.
This is a slightly redacted version of the song with the offensive line changed. The performers are Tallahassee treasure Doug Gauss and Blountstown fiddle hero, Wayne Martin. The signer is Diane Desloge from the FSDB in St. Augustine. The clip is from the 50th annual Florida Folk Festival on the banks of the Suwannee River in White Springs.
TLH018 - You’re tuned into the TallyCast
City-County consolidation is rearing it’s ugly head again. I have great respect for staff at both governments. The way to look at consolidation is from the standpoint of government services received, economies of scale and natural barriers.
Since I first moved to Leon County in the early 1970’s, the consolidation issue has raised it’s head several time. Past efforts seemed to be supported by the development interests of the community and soundly defeated by a collation of neighborhoods who knew that big government isn’t necessarily good government.
Surveys over the years have generally supported consolidation as a concept but been opposed to actually taking apart the governments and especially law enforcement.
Personally, I’d like to see as much decision making as locally as possible and think that the issue is more complex than just consolidation or not. At one time, I thought that we should just un-incorporate the City of Tallhassee and let the more lean and efficient Leon County government run things. These days I’m more in favor of strong and active neighborhood associations and the Council of Neighborhood Associations. This organization needs to be strong enough to provide a balance to the “pave paradise and put up a parking lot” mentality of much of the development community.
There are certainly opportunities to improve efficiencies in our watershed but we need to look at each function that government is serving.
Let’s start with transportation. We need to cul-de-sac more roads and move as much traffic as possible to a limited number of throughways. Public transit should get priority on roads over everything else short of emergency vehicles. If I were the city, I’d support moving StarMetro from city ownership to a regional transportation authority. Even having a once-a-day route to outlaying areas in the unincorporated areas of Leon County and the surrounding rural counties (Wakulla and Gadsen to start with). Click here to look at the web site for the regional transportation authority serving Nashville Tennessee.
It seems to me that having the county be in charge of all the roads in the area is a good idea.
I’d do the same thing for parks and recreation.
I’d keep law enforcement, fire and EMS as is. Our current systems work very well and it’s stupid to fix what isn’t broken. We do need a unified dispatch center and that should be an independent agency, separate from either the city or county.
There is a big difference in the use of media between the two governments. I really like much of the programming on WCOT, the city’s cable programming. I think that the county needs the same service, as do the surrounding cities and counties. I’d consider moving it to a regional government agency. The on-line media environment is in the midst of a major paradigm shift. WCOT should be providing an RSS feed and on-demand delivery of their content. The content delivery model as it exists is not much different that a video podcast.
One existing regional government is the Northwest Florida Water Management District. Folks, pay very close attention to our water. This years drought is, unfortunately, a taste of things to come. Development downstate is not abating and more pilgrims arrive here every day. We need to have water commissioners who will fight for keeping our water clean and conserved for as long as we can. Right now, the governor appoints this commission. Water is a resource that the people should have direct control of and which should be governed by elected officials, not appointed ones.
While consolidation sounds on the surface like a good idea, remember that to some folk, the privatization of state government seemed like an equally good idea. Look at how good that turned out.
Music on todays podcast comes from the Podsafe Music Network. Artists include Tampa band P.W. Fenton and The Second Ward, and the beautiful voice of Lorena Miré, originally from Santiago Chile and now a resident of Miami, Florida. We’re lucky to have her here.
The TallyCast is a production of MacGuys LLC and the Grumpy Old Guys broadcasting network. You can find show notes, and links to the stories mentioned on todays podcast by going www.tallycast.com. Our e-mail address is tallycast@gmail.com. You can leave audio comments at
From the Florida Park Service:
“The new dates for the 55th Annual Florida Folk Festival will take place Veterans Day weekend, November 9 – 11, 2007.
Plans for the new dates in November include combining the festival with the park’s Rural Folklife Days events already scheduled for the week prior to Veterans Day weekend. For updated information please call 1-877-635-3655. In addition, in the coming months, we will be providing updated information on our Web site at www.floridastateparks.org.”
We received word today from White Springs that sadly, the 2007 Florida Folk Festival, scheduled for Memorial Day weekend, has been canceled due to the wild fires in North Florida and South Georgia. As it stands now, there are no plans to reschedule the event and the next Florida Folk Festival will be in May of 2008.
It’s dry in North Florida
and very smoky. There’s a huge swamp fire burning on the Florida/Georgia border. There has been a haze in the air the last few days, but today it’s so smoky that my eyes burn when I walk outside. Right now, both I-10 and I-have sections closed because of the smoke.
This link should take you to the FHP site for road closure information.
On today’s TallyCast, we travel down to Pinellas County, over to White Springs for the Florida Folk Festival and down to Gainesville.
The podcast opens with a tune by Mary Smith McClain, 
better known as Diamond Teeth Mary, a great blues performer and an amazing person. Check out this story about Mary that was written after her death in 2000. I re-tell a story about Diamond Teeth Mary and her diamond teeth.
I first heard Mary sing and play the piano at the Florida Folk Festival in White Springs about 10 or 15 years ago. If you have some time over the Memorial Day Weekend and are anywhere near the intersection of I-10 and I-75, you should stop in and enjoy a bit of the festival. It’s held at the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park, a Florida State Park. Hopefully, but Memorial Day, the fires will be out, the rain will have come and everybody will be ready to sing and dance.
The podcast ends with a tune by the late Don Grooms; a Cherokee, a professor of journalism at the University of Florida and an amazing singer-songwriter. The tune is called “I believe”.
Both tunes and the photographs here come to us from the official Archives of the State of Florida. You can access some of their collection by going the Florida Memory Project on the Internet.
I’m looking for stories of Gaines Street. If you have a story about Gaines street, please get in touch with me. The email is tallycast at gmail (that period looking thing) com or you can call my new talkback line at (850) 391-4955.
Be well, protect your lungs and pray for rain.
Dave
A couple of weeks ago, I received a note from a listener to my technology podcast. Lynn wrote:
“I’m a listener to Radio MacGuys and a big fan of the TV show LOST. In several episodes of LOST, Tallahassee has been mentioned. I know you live there from listening to your podcast. Do you have any ideas why the LOST writers are picking on your city?”
Two of the characters in the show (Sawyer and Kate) mention connections to Tallahassee. Sawyer is a nickname for a character named “James Ford.” James Ford was a former mayor of Tallahassee but looks nothing like the character on Lost.
In a recent episode of the Official Lost Podcast with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse (the writer/producers), they said that a future episode this season will be called “The Man From Tallahassee”. This was recently confirmed in an ABC Medianet spreadsheet (requires Excel or OpenOffice). The episode will be broadcast on March 21st, 2007.
I’ve been watching Lost for the last few years but didn’t really think much about the connection to Tallahassee until Lynn brought it to my attention. I thought about it while taking a walk in Innovation Park last week I looked up and this is what I saw:
A recurring theme through the episodes of Lost is the subject of magnetism. Meet the the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. It’s located at the Florida State University in Tallahassee and has some of the biggest baddest magnets on the entire planet. Here are a few factoids that might be of interest:
Magnet photo from FSU.com
You can find more photos of the mag lab on my Flickr.com site.
Another area mystery surrounds Tate’s Hell swamp. According to the legend, farmer Cebe Tate went into this huge ( 147,000 acres) cypress swamp to hunt a panther. He entered the swamp near Sumatra Florida (Liberty County) armed with a “long tom” shotgun and his dogs. The dogs found scent and ran toward it as Tate slogged along attempting to keep up. The dogs caught the panther but were killed and Tate realized he was lost. There are a lot of different versions of this story, but they all end with Tate coming out of the swamp near Carrabelle. When he went into the swamp, Tate was a young man. When he came out seven days later, his hair and beard were snow white. As he staggered out of the swamp, he said “My name is old Tate and I’ve just been in hell.”
The story of Tate’s Hell is told in song by the late Will Mclean. While we weren’t able
to obtain permission to play Will’s tune on this podcast, we are including a tune by Sopchoppy banjo (and guitar and …) hot daddy Frank Lindamood. The tune is “Worried Man Blues” by traditional. You can usually find Frank at the Florida Folk Festival.
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