Passenger Trains > Carstens ceases operation

Please contribute comments to either of these two threads posted almost simultaneously on the Eastern and Western boards:

http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?2,3501473
http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?1,3501492



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/22/14 15:42 by Cumbresfan.

While I did read both post and although things have changed and some printed media may be on the way out there is nothing better than picking up a physical magazine and reading.
It is a great loss to the hobby.
Many years of great contribution.
Its not just the business model that's has changed but people have changed with the times.
The younger generations just don't know how to appreciate what it was like waiting for the next issue to arrive in the mailbox in todays ways of instant gratification those enjoyments have been lost to time.
Now everyone just picks up their tablet, and mobile devices to get the latest up tothe last five minutes update so really its more of a victim of our own creation.
The only way publications like this can be made in todays society is with increased prices and some have found that quarterly issues have worked out.
Hopefully other avenues will open for this once great source of info. Just my opinion.

Posted from Android

I lost interest when Freeman Hubbard and the old RAILROAD magazine ended. Yeah, a lot of recycled stories over the years but they were new to me when I bought my first issue in 1959. "Haywire Mac" McClintock, Bill Knapke, E.A. "Frog" Smith were all fantastic storytellers that drew the reader into the railfaring life. I quit TRAINS because I couldn't stand "The Professional Iconoclast" (remember?) and his anti-union pronouncements. What has been largely lost from railfan books and publications today is the focus on the workers -- the one's who make it happen 24/7. But, as my own long rail career winds down I find very few of today's "rails" think of their work as a "calling" -- sadly it has become "just a job" which is exactly what the corporate sharks running things want.

I'm starin' down the muzzle of 74, and I like instant gratification and almost instant information. Which is why we're on line.

74? I passed that milepost earlier this year and have to admit that I've joined the digital age. Last night I posted a "selfie" on Facebook. Big deal, some might say--lots of folks have done that. But---this one was taken in 1959, just after Kodak introduced Tri-X film, with a Minolta "A" all-manual camera. Haven't scanned the rest of the negative (remember those?), but there should be scenes of Soviet Premier Khrushchev visiting San Luis Obispo CA in Sept. 1959. This was back when computers were as big as a barn, or at least a garage, and needed power by the kilowatt to even start. Getting back to the subject at hand, I go back to the days of Freeman Hubbard's iteration of Railroad magazine, complete with Virgil C. Staff's foxy ladies in railroad locations. In memory of that era, here's a photo of one of the newly-opened BART stations in the early 1970s.

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Just think, that lady in shorts is probably around 65 today and someone's grandmother. Time sure does fly.

Jay

The foxy ladies are at the big airshows crawling over P-51s and P-47s.