This is behind the former (long time ago) Intermountain Telephone Company (often referred to as the “Intermittent Telephone Company”) building in Kingsport. The arrow points to a basement entrance.
Category Archives: Bob Lawrence Photography
Not what you think…
At first glance, it looks like it’s a person crouched over something. It looked that way to me when I happened on it and took the picture. But it’s not. It’s just a coat over a bag of trash, with just a little bit of a shoe in the background. Whew.
A frog
This is a frog. It’s part of a switch in Kingsport yard. It’s called a frog, I’m informed, because of its resemblance to a part of a horse’s hoof. Since I don’t know anything at all about horses, very little about frogs, and only a smattering about railroad technology, I’ll take their word for it.
The Devil’s Inn
This is on the highway between Elizabethton and Hampton TN. Just sitting there, glittering in the morning sun.
Summer: Morning Shift
I was out walking on a pleasant summer morning, just after dawn, when I saw this. The windows are steamed up from the early morning prep. I angled around until the sign hid the sun itself and let the light show through the windows. I had a paper route in downtown Kingsport not too long after this Pal’s was built in the late 50s. I delivered the Kingsport Times (the afternoon paper…the News was the morning edition) right after school, before supper. Several of my deliveries were on Shelby Street. The smell of the hamburgers (still the same today) would remind me how long it had been since I’d eaten.
Nobody comes here anymore
This is in east Jenkins KY. We got a number of pix in a brief stop here.
Teddy by the tracks
I saw this in the former Miller Yard in Virginia. I don’t know what it means. It’s a little teddy bear tied to hollow tube that holds a tool the train guys use for something (I really know a lot about whatever it is I’m writing about….really). It’s all covered in coal dust.
Red Spotted Newt
Yep, saw this little skitterer while walking the rails in Southwest Virginia.
Bird, maybe
It does look a little like a long-necked bird with a curved and pointed beak, doesn’t it. It’s what’s left of a small tree. Ain’t nature fahcinating!
Coke ovens
Coke ovens, in this configuration and in the beehive configuration, used to be thick on the ground around this area of Wise County. We’re near Pine Branch and these are a few of the 60 remaining derelict coke ovens…there used to be over 300 here, with railroad access, from around 1920 to about 1980. They were used to burn coal in the absence of oxygen to produce coke, which burns cleanly at high temperature. Catnip, as they say, for steel makers.
Uncle Bob's Pix 