New bolds Corner NIKE Site

johnnyb

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Feb 22, 2013
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Attached is a picture taken on 04 Dec 2015 of the demolition of the NIKE radar site on the northwest corner. I was curious to see what had happened to the missile bunkers but believe they may have been located elsewhere in the overall NIKE complex, most of which is gone. Put this up for posterity.
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oji

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Jan 25, 2008
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Looks like the Lumberton site. I did work in the housing development across the street from Cherokee H.S. and one of the workers told me that there were still bunkers back in the woods.
 

Teegate

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I visited the Marlton one in 1969 or 1970 when you still had access to the bunkers from a broken fence and someone removing a welded cover. I did not go down. Then in the 70s I took the top photo at this link. It also is the top photo of the photo below it showing the housing development.

http://ph32.homestead.com/index.html


The bunkers are still there and I visited them 15 years or so ago.
 

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johnnyb

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Feb 22, 2013
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The demolition picture was taken at the northwestern corner of Newbolds Corner Road and Eayrestown Road on the southeast edge of Lumberton (Oji was right).
There's one remaining concrete radar support pedestal across the road.
Teegate's pictures and notes (above) are great; didn't know they were on the web.
 
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46er

Piney
Mar 24, 2004
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Quite a few in NJ clustered around NY and Philly. There is one at Sandy Hooks Fort Hancock, i.e. Gateway NRA, with most of it still standing, including 2 dud missiles along the main access road. One a basic missile, the other a Nike Hercules. You can see them in GE.

http://alpha.fdu.edu/~bender/NYmsg.html

In fact the entire area is great exploring; missile batteries, gun batteries, the oldest lighthouse in the USA and old Fort Hancock. Best time is now; winter.
 
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Boyd

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I remember a class field trip trip to a Nike/Hercules site in the St. Louis suburbs when I was a kid. We got to see everything, it was the highlight of the school year! :)
 

SuperChooch

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Aug 26, 2011
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This thread reminds me of something I hadn't thought about in a long time. When I was in my early teens, I explored what appears to be the Dicktown Nike Base. (according to Google Earth) It was the late 80's and, of course, at that time, it wasn't part of our culture to take pictures of everything so unfortunately, I don't have any pictures, so you'll have to rely on my literary imagery :) and pictures I've found on the internet that resemble what I remember. At this time, the base was kind out of in the middle of nowhere, so I never had a reason to walk around or ride my bike in the area, but my friends and I noticed what appeared to be an overgrown military base when we rode by in the car with our parents and we decided to check it out. Our parents just told us it was a Nike Missile Base, but had no other information. Of course this was long before the internet so we had no idea what to expect or what we were getting into. So, we packed up our backpacks, met at our friends house that was closest to the base, got on our bikes and set out to find out. We told our parents we were just going for a bike ride. :) Right next to the base is a cul-de-sac of rancher style homes, that we assumed was were the folks who worked on the base lived. I remember being surprised at what good shape it was in. Even from the 1994 aerial, you can't even tell it is abandoned:
Culdesac.jpg


There was no fence or any barricade at all that I recall, I think we just rode our bikes right up the street. Several of the houses were open and we just walked right in the front doors. I recall they were also in decent shape on the inside too, there were couches, tables, chairs and fireplaces. In the backyard were those old style clotheslines. In retrospect, I wonder if the homes were still used even after the base closed?

Anyway, we felt a little exposed in that open neighborhood, so we went the end of the road and around the back of the base, and entered through a broken fence.
Screen Shot 2015-12-09 at 2.22.09 PM.png


The base was in worse shape than the neighborhood, very over grown and almost jungle like. There were several open buildings with remnants of the equipment in each. We were Cold War era kids, so we imagined siting at the controls, ready to launch a missile at any time.

There were these tall, vertical cylinders with platforms on top, which, at the time, we thought were the missile silos. We climbed up to the top to find out that there were flat, concrete platforms on top with no hole for the missile, so then we were perplexed. They looked something like the white cylinder structure with the platform on top, at this site: (except rusty, rickety and overgrown)

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/17593

We continued to scour the base, but never could figure out where the missiles would have been stored. It was weeks or months later that we found out there was another site, maybe a half mile away!
Screen Shot 2015-12-09 at 3.16.01 PM.png

From outside the fence, at a distance, it looked like an old, very large, overgrown blacktop parking lot. But upon closer inspection, there were several, large pairs of doors, probably 10 ft by 50 ft each, flat on the ground. The doors like like the second picture on this site:

http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/aviation/nik.htm

Near each door was what looked kind of like a bilco door, that went down underground. Both the missile bay doors and the bilco doors were welded shut, very securely. We sat down, disappointed, thinking that our exploration had come to an end. Then we noted behind each door was what appeared to be air intake pipe. They looked like the red lid in the 3rd picture on this site:

http://www.techbastard.com/missile/nike/ba43.php

We checked every one and, sure enough, we found one that was loose and we pried it off. Now we were staring down into an about 2 ft wide, pitch black, pipe. Shining our flashlights down, we saw it was probably only about 8 ft or so down to the stairway landing. There were 3 of us and we had a rope. We all couldn't go down because we wanted to leave two on the surface to the pull the third person up with the rope. So, I volunteered to go down alone. I tied the rope around me and my friends lowered me down until I got to the landing. It was dry and very, very dark. Again, since there was no internet to research before I went, I had no idea what to expect. :) I walked down the rest of the steps and shined my little flashlight around, hoping to see a missile pointing at me, but alas, there was only the platform it was mounted on.

It very much looked like the second to last picture at this site, except much much older looking and much darker and creepier :)

http://ed-thelen.org/F-45-LaunchArea.html

After exploring the underground launch area, I signaled to my friends and they pulled me back up. I never had the opportunity to go back again after that.

The Base (Control Area) was here:
http://maps.njpinebarrens.com/#lat=39.75124781625551&lng=-74.99925949935333&z=17&type=nj1995&gpx=

and the Launcher Area was here:
http://maps.njpinebarrens.com/#lat=39.741130130447814&lng=-75.00199535254852&z=17&type=nj1995&gpx=

You can see that in 1995, the base appears to still be fully intact:
http://maps.njpinebarrens.com/#lat=39.751128211038306&lng=-75.00025728110687&z=17&type=nj1995&gpx=

By 2002, all the houses were gone, but the base was still there:
http://maps.njpinebarrens.com/#lat=39.751128211038306&lng=-75.00025728110687&z=17&type=nj2002&gpx=

and now, it is all gone:
http://maps.njpinebarrens.com/#lat=39.751128211038306&lng=-75.00025728110687&z=17&type=hybrid&gpx=

Likewise, the Launch area is also completely gone:
http://maps.njpinebarrens.com/#lat=39.74142670210674&lng=-75.00222870473281&z=19&type=hybrid&gpx=

I still have a vivid memory of this exploration and, unfortunately, in this hyper protective parental environment, teens of today would probably never get to experience something like this.
 
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Boyd

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Very cool. :) But you should be aware Ben has asked us not use any images in our posts unless we own the copyrights. Unfortunately there was a legal hassle awhile ago about some content that was posted. :(
 

Teegate

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The problem is that each time anyone loads this page that photo has to load. That forces the website it is stored on to give it to this site to load. If that website has a data limit and the photo has to be passed along multiple times it uses up their limit and they "may" be forced to shut down until the end of the month. You read about that happening when a website gets into the news and thousand of individuals go to the site. I doubt that will happen here. But as Boyd says you are linking to the photo and not the web page or website itself so the owner of the photo does not get credit. That is why I always put my name and email on my photo's. If someone links directly to my photo anyone who views it knows I took it.

I would suggest you put the link to the photo in place of the photo and that stops this site from loading the photo each time. Ideally you should link to the webpage and not the photo though.
 

Teegate

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The problem we had before was that a particular site was monitoring their data output and noticed an abnormal amount of viewing of a photo. So by looking at their data they knew it was this website and when they viewed the post they noticed the link went directly to the photo and not the webpage itself. They complained and we had to remove the photo. I would suggest again to everyone that if it is not your photo you must link to the webpage it is stored on.

For those of you who use private websites keep this in mind. If you are on a private website and think that nobody can find out about it, think again. If someone on that private site links to a photo from some other webpage and that website is monitoring their output, they will be notified of the name of your private site and will know about it.

Guy
 
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SuperChooch

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Aug 26, 2011
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The problem we had before was that a particular site was monitoring their data output and noticed an abnormal amount of viewing of a photo. So by looking at their data they knew it was this website and when they viewed the post they noticed the link went directly to the photo and not the webpage itself. They complained and we had to remove the photo. I would suggest again to everyone that if it is not your photo you must link to the webpage it is stored on.

For those of you who use private websites keep this in mind. If you are on a private website and think that nobody can find out about it, think again. If someone on that private site links to a photo from some other webpage and that webpage is monitoring their output, they will be notified of the name of your private site and will know about it.

Guy
Thanks Guy. I updated my post to link to the web page. I also deleted my other comments to keep the thread on track.
 

Teegate

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The demolition picture was taken at the northwestern corner of Newbolds Corner Road and Eayrestown Road on the southeast edge of Lumberton (Oji was right).
There's one remaining concrete radar support pedestal across the road.
Teegate's pictures and notes (above) are great; didn't know they were on the web.


The website is not mine. I gave my photo to John Flack who runs that site.
 

johnnyb

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Feb 22, 2013
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OJI questioned if the warhead was nuclear and mentioned Boeing BOMARC.
According to Wikipedia, the U.S. Army Western Electric built NIKE AJAX missile had a chemical explosive warhead. The NIKE Hercules missile could have either, with several different yield variants of the nuclear warhead. Hercs replaced all AJAX in the U.S. and were nuclear tipped.
Wikipedia also says that the Hercs were faster, had longer range (100 miles) could intercept ICBM's (the nuclear warhead had a far bigger explosion kill envelope) and was more accurate.
I'd guess the improved accuracy was due to the Herc's improved X-band tracking radars. We at RCA took Herc tracking radars (I'm guessing the pedestal/antenna and transmitter were the same for the TTR and MTR) and married them to our AN/TPQ-39 DIR (Digital Instrumentation Radar) (that Vic Hammond and I concepted and spent years selling - but that's another LONG story) electronics .....
The U.S. Air Force BOMARC was an entirely different bird. Again, Wikipedia says it was rocket boosted, ram-jet powered supersonic with a 250 -400+ mile range and had an on-board radar to guide it to the target and to explode its warhead. It carried either chemical explosive or nuclear warheads.
In my job at RCA I was program manager for the radar systems we designed and built that were used used to track all the developmental aircraft, missiles, rockets, space launches, etc. in the U.S., and in several foreign countries. Hence my interest in the NIKE systems. Far cry from Pine Barrens but maybe still interesting......
 
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