Does This Guy Like Trains?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsfTBydTuk8

 

He came twice.

 

He Sounds Like Our Very Own "themnax"......



Cheers Glen.

 

Exactly who I was thinking of when I posted this thread lol

 

I think the excitement and passion cute. I don't get trains, I don't think I ever will, but I know some people are right on into it. I have an uncle like this and he goes all around the world traveling on different historic railway lines. -shrug- gotta have something in your life.

 

EMD F7 units.. pretty train,, Ive always like them , but they require a roundhouse to get it facing the other direction or need to travel in pairs..

 

ugh, what an obnoxious form of transportation. sure, they're useful if you're using them. but goddamn it's annoying knowing that half the time i need to go anywhere, i'm going to have to park on the street for 5 minutes while one slowly saunters across the road. even worse is when i'm trying to sleep, and i can't because 2 miles away some conductor is saying HEY I'M DRIVING A TRAIN LISTEN TO MY WHISTLE LISTEN TO MY WHISTLE AGAIN LISTEN TO MY WHISTLE ONE MORE TIME HAHAHA I GOT YOU, YOU NEED TO LISTEN TO MY WHISTLE A LOT MORE THAN ONE MORE TIME BECAUSE I'M GOING TO BE BLASTING IT NONSTOP FOR THE NEXT 10 MINUTES.

 

If only it were a train with furries on board.

 

so far what Ive learned as a clerical support clerk with the railroad. trains lay on the whistle because people think they can beat the train with a car or on foot. once the train hits something/someone, all traffic comes to a stop for some period of time. backing up traffic for some 200miles. because the train is like a vain, it can only flow in one direction with a cushion of space between each train. this also cost time and money, it can cause lost wages for those waiting on deliveries ect..

I know just how annoying the whistle can be .. whats more annoying is people still think they can beat a train.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4HZkGYXcW4

 

the thing about trains, is they don't have to tear up as much countryside as putting paved roads all over the place. the kind of trains i'm about, aren't really something that has ever been common on this world.
still, anything that runs on some sort of guideway, opperates in multiple, and carries passengers, any two out of the three, is of at least some interest to me.

there are advantages and disadvantages of course, rather a great deal has been written as to the details of both.

btw that's an e-unit and a bl-2. the former, fairly commen in 40 thru the 60s. the latter, extremely rare even in the early 50s when they were still being produced.
possible the only live one still in captivity.

 

I don't like trahains, oh nohoooo


I love them!

 

they wouldn't have to if there weren't grade crossings and people weren't idiots.

 

Its federal law that they blow the horn the way they do..

 

when i was twelve i worked the summer with my grandpa at the atsf hump yard in atchinson. You walk up a spiral metal stair, no case, i think 45 feet up. at the top og the tower is a room with a switch board and a teletype. The room looks out over the trains coming in and over the hump they push the car over the hump and then the car is retarded by brakes, retarders that raise up to squeeze the wheels according to weight contents and track number. Big train comes in behind the hump and they uncouple cars at the top of the hump to be formed into new trains. Got pretty good at it. Enough so my grandpa could sell burritos he cooked on an electric skillet up there and then delivered them via vacuum tube all over the yard. that is why he brought me i think. Only put one car down the wrong track the engine had to go pull back up. beats video games I guess

 

yep i used to live directly across the road from a siding in the mountains and there ain't any one around forever and they still blew hard

 

I showed my husband this, and he looked over my shoulder said right in my ear, "BL-2 !! Where is it?"

Also, a much greener technology, about 4X more energy efficient and less polluting.

I've just been told that the F7 and BL-2 are somehow like first cousins.

I didn't know the name of what I was looking at, but when I was growing up, I used to see zillions of these passenger trains:



I think they look sharp in black and white, with the gold trim (hard to see in this pic). I used to often see them in sets of 4 or 6.

One time, my family took a trip to Asheville on a train that looked like this, but it was only one engine and two cars. As soon as all the passengers were off, they backed the train up out of sight and somehow turned the whole thing around, for the return trip down the mountain. It was back in a few minutes and sat there at the station all afternoon.

There's a big museum not too far from me that has lots of this old stuff on display, and some of it still works.

Amtrak gets the job done, but most of their trains are ugly. It's a fast, cheap, and convenient way to get between the downtown areas of Raleigh, Greensboro, and Charlotte.

 

even if there isnt a crossing, they blow for maintenance personnel, animals they can see like dogs, cattle, even deer, people walking along the tracks.. the code for grade crossing should be two long, one shorts and two longs. however since its operated by hand/manpower its hardly ever that accurate ..

 

One more old train story…

I was talking to my husband about this over the weekend. We both grew up in small manufacturing towns, but I moved around some, and he didn’t. It seems that no matter whether a small town was on a sleepy branch line that had weeds growing up between rails that saw one train a day, or on an important high traffic main line with multiple passenger trains, they all had one thing in common. Every little town around here used to have a daily local freight train that hung around downtown all day long, and a nasty old freight building that looked like this:



Life used to revolve around downtown in those places. Schools, tennis courts, ice cream shops, stores, restaurants, and multiple factories used to be within walking distance, divided in half by the tracks. After school, my sister and I would often have to walk past the railroad freight station on the way somewhere else before going home. Usually by then, the train crew would have finished their day’s work of picking up and dropping off cars all over downtown, and would be hanging around the station to see if any customers called the office about any last minute shipments that needed to be picked up before the train left for the day, headed to the nearest big city rail yard. If the weather was warm, the crew would wave at all the young girls wearing anything short or tight.

It was just one of those familiar, ordinary sights that everybody took for granted. If you couldn’t see or hear the local engine downtown on a weekday, it felt like something was missing.

Now, everything has changed. All the downtown factories are gone from all those small towns. Nothing is left downtown except a few antique shops, coffee shops, and some restaurants for people who speak Spanish. People like me have moved away to larger towns. Schools have been relocated, tennis courts have become skateboard parks, and the few remaining factories are on big tracts of land on the edge of the towns. I guess local trains still service some of them, but the trains never stop downtown. All the old freight offices are torn down or converted to some other purpose. Railroad customers use an 800 number to reach some regional call center.