Cooperstown, New York

 

Cooperstown Train Station……Now a private residence

Cooperstown is noted for baseball, of course. There is a great golf course with a hotel too. Find out more about vacationing in Cooperstown.

Not much railroad activity in Cooperstown, but the New York, Susquehanna & Western has offices and dispatcher there. I believe a visit or tour can be arranged if you call them. Closest railroad activity is Oneonta (D&H).

Cooperstown is no longer really on an active rail line although the Leatherstocking Line runs between Cooperstown and Milford with tourist trains. Their stopping point is south of the village on NY 28 south of the former crossings at Chestnut and Walnut Streets.

The NYS&W headquarters is in the old freight station in Cooperstown which lies between Main Street and Glen Avenue (NY 28) on Railroad Avenue and this structure has been altered a number of times to make it more suitable for the NYS&W offices. At one time, there was also a trolley/interurban line into Cooperstown from Index which is south of Cooperstown on route 28. This line was a branch off the line which ran between Oneonta and Mohawk and the line into Cooperstown lasted until the very early 1940’s as a freight railroad. The Delaware & Hudson used to serve Cooperstown from Oneonta every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. They had a water tower with a standpipe, a decent electric turntable and a very nice passenger station which had been converted to a residence. For a long time, the local freight train came in with a combo (coach and baggage car) rather than a caboose. I think this was because they still carried Railway Express shipments to the station at Cooperstown and the job probably had an express messenger on it too. They still did a reasonable amount of freight business in Cooperstown with lumber, coal, grain and feed being the big items but local LCL stuff too. Both Milford and Cooperstown at the time still had full time agents too. This was in the late 1940’s. Shortly after the arrival of the diesels, the turntable and water plug came out but Cooperstown still had three day a week service for a long time after that.

Find more stories like this one.

https://penneyandkc.wordpress.com/central-new-york-railroad/

 

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Denver Winter Park Express ski train A Success, Amtrak Says

The new Winter Park Express weekend Amtrak train between Denver Union Station and the high-country ski resort has seen more than 15,000 passengers since it started on Jan. 7.

The train runs Saturdays and Sundays through March 26, with an extra train added to the schedule on Monday, Feb. 20 — President’s Day.

The success of the train — the result of a partnership between Amtrak, Winter Park Resort, the Colorado Department of Transportation and the nonprofit Colorado Rail Passenger Association — has surprised many.

“The fact that there are 15,000 people who have done this, and we’re half-way through the season — the number is eye-popping,” said Marc Magliari, an Amtrak spokesman.

Saturday trains frequently are sold-out events, Magliari said.

Five of the first six Saturdays have sold out and the remaining weekends in February and March are selling fast, according to Amtrak.

Steve Hurlbert, a spokesman for Winter Park Resort, said resort officials are “stunned” by the numbers.

“Amtrak does this kind of thing for a living and knows the metrics. We’re blown away,” Hurlbert said. “We knew it would be popular but the fact that we’re only half-way through the season and we’re at 15,000 people is incredible.”

The train’s schedule calls for leaving Denver Union Station on weekends, plus Presidents’ Day, about 7 a.m. and arriving at Winter Park between 8:30 and 9 a.m. It leaves the resort about 4:30, arriving back in Denver shortly after 6 p.m.

The train’s special platform, with heated coils embedded in the concrete to combat ice and snow, is about 50 paces from the first lifts.

But the train isn’t only popular with skiers, Hurlbert said.

“We’re seeing lodging pick up on the weekends and we have more non-skiers coming up,” he said.

Each train can hold more than 500 people, and on average “a little more than 100” of the people on the Saturday morning trains are spending the night, Hurlbert said.

CenturyLink signed on as a sponsor of the train service, and new sponsors have also joined, including Noosa Yoghurt, Clif Bar and Koelbel & Co. real estate company.

Cooperstown Looks Forward to Baseball Hall of Fame Induction

The little upstate community of Cooperstown, New York benefits A LOT from the Baseball Hall of Fame

 

On Tuesday, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America elected pitchers Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez and John Smoltz, and a multi-positional player Craig Biggio to the Hall of Fame. They will be inducted the weekend of July 24-27.  It was the first time since 1955 that the BBWAA elected four players in one year.

It will be the second straight strong Hall of Fame class following last year’s inductions of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, Frank Thomas, Joe Torre, Bobby Cox and Tony La Russa.

And it’s a long cry from 2013 when the baseball writers did not vote anyone into the Hall.

Things look promising over the next few years, as well, as players such as Ken Griffey Jr. and Trevor Hoffman are eligible next year, followed by New York Yankees’ favorites Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettitte in 2019 and Derek Jeter in 2020.

 Russ Smith can easily tell when a well-known player is being inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Smith’s disposal company has the responsibility of cleaning after the Hall of Fame’s annual induction ceremonies in the summer.

“We go over there and get a quarter of a load or we go over there and we fill up two trucks,” Smith said, while sitting Tuesday in the Cooperstown Diner.

This summer, Smith should be collecting a lot of trash.

“It probably brings more people … and big fans, but it is also nice to have the little guys that aren’t getting paid millions and millions of dollars to actually have a spot here,” said Paige McKinsey, who was visiting the Hall of Fame from Pennsylvania, when asked if bigger names will bring more people to the community.

Local businesses, meanwhile, are hoping to benefit from an influx of visitors when well-known players are enshrined.

“Induction is a very exciting weekend here in Cooperstown, and we absolutely love to see anybody be inducted, but to have some big-name players is certainly very positive for Main Street businesses,” said Sarah Mower, manager of Mickey’s Place, a baseball memorabilia store at 74 Main St. “When you get bigger player names who are going to be inducted that weekend, it certainly increases the crowd dramatically, which is what we found last year with Maddux and Glavine.”

Just down the street from Mickey’s Place, Cindy Bissell, manager of the Cooperstown Diner, has seen how much of an impact big-name players can have on business. She usually has a line outside of the 20-seat restaurant she manages during a normal induction weekend. But that line can swell when bigger names come to town.

“It’s because they’re more popular,” Bissell said. “They’re more well-known.”

Read more about baseball and business in Cooperstown.

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Scuba Diving 101

Pictures and Plane Tickets

It’s no secret that I’ve been fascinated with the water ever since I was a small child. Some of my favorite childhood memories revolve around our time spent out on the water; every weekend throughout the summer my family would take our boat to the nearby lake and play from sun up until sun down. I’ve always felt incredibly comfortable in the water, so much so, that a day at the beach for me really isn’t a day at the beach, its more like a day in the water, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’ve mentioned on the blog before that I took a Scuba Diving course back in college and it was hands down my favorite class EVER. Unfortunately, due to unknown circumstances, the class fulfilled my elective requirements for graduation but it did not certify students for actual diving. (Talk about a letdown!)

Anyways, last spring I decided it was…

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Football and the Office: What A Team!

Recently we wrote about What Wastes More Employee Time: Fantasy Football or Microsoft Upgrades? Before we went any further down this path, we wanted to give you some more background in the sport.

An estimated 30 million Americans play the cybersport. From politicians like President Obama, who famously played with sportswriter Rick Reilly in 2008, to celebrities like Elizabeth Banks, Jason Bateman, and Paul Rudd, to professional football players themselves, it seems almost everyone has a team.

So what exactly is it? It’s a game in which football fans take the term “armchair quarterback” to a whole new level. About a dozen people get together to form a league. There are various styles of play, and the leagues can have different rules. But, in general, each member becomes an owner and drafts real NFL players for his or her virtual team. The owners pick their starting lineup each week to match up against one another throughout the season. Points are earned based on action from the professional games, such as yards gained, touchdowns and field goals.

Early versions of the hobby started in the ’50s, but fantasy sports — especially fantasy football — became popular in the ’80s and ’90s. The Internet created the optimal platform for the game, and now there are dozens of websites that host leagues for free (not to mention the hundreds boasting of draft strategies, player statistics and game pointers).

Read more about Fantasy Football.

 

Now the question comes up: Should Fantasy Football Be Illegal? As the world of fantasy sports changes, the line between legal and illegal becomes increasingly blurry.

 

Some of the newest incarnations of fantasy football look a lot more like gambling than intricate, outsmart-your-opponent strategy games.

Since 2011, the billion-dollar fantasy market has been infused with dozens of daily and weekly games. Those games allow players to win huge prizes quickly, sometimes in one week, sometimes in just one night. With players betting thousands or even tens of thousands a night, legal experts believe it’s time to review the section of the 2006 federal law that was written specifically to protect fantasy sports from being banned the way online poker was.

“There’s importance in clarifying the law,” says Marc Edelman, a professor at Fordham Law School who studies the law as it applies to fantasy sports. “As long as there’s uncertainty about the legality of these games, some potential businesses that might enter the marketplace stay out.”

Seasonal leagues are largely the domain of billion-dollar companies such as CBS and ESPN, with close ties to the NFL. For now, they have remained on the sidelines of the short-term business, leaving it largely in the hands of companies such as FanDuel, which is expecting to triple its base to 500,000 fans this season.

Traditional leagues at ESPN and elsewhere received their legal clearance from the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which was designed mainly to stop Internet poker. It included an important “carve out” for fantasy football. Meanwhile, most state laws define fantasy football as skill-based propositions, which keeps them legal.

Peter Schoenke, chairman of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, says daily and weekly games that adhere to the group’s rules also are protected by the 2006 law, and that the NFL and Major League Baseball “have fully embraced fantasy sports in all forms, both free and pay.”

“If a game operator doesn’t follow the UIEGA, the FSTA doesn’t consider the contest to be a true ‘fantasy sports’ contest,” Schoenke said.

Now to round out this discussion, let’s look at: Like football, running an Information Technology organization is a team sport. Every member of each respective group—not just the quarterback or the CIO—has an important role to play. Lots of similarities.