Nostalgia & History > Murphy's railfan law #1 in effect!

WARNING: If you’re one of those who can’t stand to see anything but a perfect 3/4 wedgie, you’d be better advised to just close this thread and mosey on down the road…

That poor guy Murphy. He sure gets the blame for a lot of “stuff”! For a long time I myself have been adapting Murphy’s Law to the railfanning world. My own version runs something like this: “NO trains will arrive at any given location until all railfan photographers have vacated said location!” How many times has that happened to YOU???

Then I got to thinking [uh-oh, here’s trouble] about the original Murphy’s Law. Just exactly what is it? And WHO is Murphy? My Enquiring Mind wanted to know, so I went surfing. It seemed like it would be a very pleasant diversion from scanning so I “wasted” 45 minutes revving my Google search engine. And I found a ton of stuff. Of course I can’t realistically relate here everything that I read there, so here are a few high points. I’ll start with some general stuff I found:

Occam's razor (also written as Ockham's razor) … is a problem-solving principle devised by William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), who was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher and theologian. The principle states that among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove to provide better predictions, but—in the absence of differences in predictive ability—the fewer assumptions that are made, the better.
Finagle's Law The generalized or ‘folk’ version of Murphy’s Law, fully named "Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives" and usually rendered "Anything that can go wrong, will".
Hanlon's Razor A corollary of Finagle’s Law (similar to Occam's Razor) that reads "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

And here’s one I couldn’t resist! Some of you older curmudgeon TO denizens will surely embrace this one:
Sturgeon's Law "Ninety percent of everything is crap".

The old stand-by Wikipedia had quite a bit of stuff about the origin that seemed to be quite contradictory. It looks like there are many different dated versions out there. But there was one quote that sounds good enough to be a header for the rest:

Murphy's law (not to be confused with Muphry’s law) is an adage or epigram that is typically stated as: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”

Here is a scaled-down & paraphrased sampling of the rest:
[1] Mathematician Augustus De Morgan wrote on June 23, 1866: "The first experiment already illustrates … what-ever can happen will happen ..." In later publications ‘whatever can happen will happen’ is occasionally termed "Murphy's law," which raises the possibility … that "Murphy" is De Morgan.

[2] Stephen Goranson has found a version of the law… in a report by Alfred Holt at an 1877 meeting of an engineering society: “It is found that anything that can go wrong at sea generally does go wrong sooner or later…”

[3] Bill Mullins has found a slightly broader version of the aphorism in reference to stage magic. British stage magician Nevil Maskelyne wrote in 1908: “…everything that can go wrong will go wrong.

[4] Arthur Bloch, in the first volume (1977) of his Murphy's Law, and Other Reasons Why Things Go WRONG series, prints a letter that he received from George E. Nichols, a quality assurance manager with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory…. Nichols recalled an event that occurred in 1949 at Edwards Air Force Base in Muroc, CA that [according to him] is the origination of Murphy's law, and first publicly recounted by USAF Col. John Paul Stapp. An excerpt from the letter reads: The law's namesake was Capt. Ed Murphy, a development engineer from right Field Aircraft Lab. Frustration with a strap transducer which was malfunctioning due to an error in wiring the strain gage bridges caused him to remark – "If there is any way to do it wrong, he will" – referring to the technician who had wired the bridges at the Lab.

[5] Fred Shapiro, the editor of the “Yale Book of Quotations” has shown that in 1952 the adage was called "Murphy's law" in a book by Anne Roe, quoting an unnamed physicist, later though to be physicist Howard Percy "Bob" Robertson

[6] The contemporary form of Murphy's law goes back as far as 1952, as an epigraph to a mountaineering book by John Sack, who described it as an "ancient mountaineering adage"

[7] AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss was quoted in the Chicago Daily Tribune on February 12, 1955, saying "I hope it will be known as Strauss' law. It could be stated about like this: If anything bad can happen, it probably will.”

[8] And lastly there is: Yhprum’s law, where the name is spelled backwards, is "anything that can go right, will go right" — the optimistic application of Murphy's law in reverse.

So… back to my experience under the effect of Murphy’s 1st Law of Railfanning: I was killing time in advance of the monthly NRHS meeting in Topeka and had been down shooting trains off the famous Pine St [pedestrian] over pass in Melvern, KS. I met & had a very amiable chat with a fan from Bartlesville named Mike, who’s last name I did not get. The weather was turning to crap so I headed back toward Topeka. I stopped at Carbondale and annexed a Subway sandwich with the intention of checking out a northbound shot in tiny Wakarusa, KS. I knew BNSF was running eastbounds up this way. The shot I had in mind would show the small girder bridge spanning the Wakarusa River. And if I’ve done my research correctly this would be very near the spot where the fledgling Santa Fe had is famous 1st “Company Picnic” after completion of the first few miles of the original RR in 1869.

I found my spot and commenced to biting on my Subway delicacy. It was raining lightly, but I had positioned my rig in a spot where I could just open the window, shoot and close it right back up. Since I’d skipped breakfast the sandwich was delicious. But I wasn’t exactly wolfing it down because I still had time to kill. And I was hoping to wait long enough to get a train, thus get some kind of reference shot for the location.

1. The location I had waited over 30 minutes looks like this. I sure could have used a train bearing down into my telephoto view of the Wakarusa River bridge…

But I finished eating and reluctantly left my spot. At the north edge of town (TT east) I stopped for another general reference shot, and guess what! I heard a horn. There was NO time to retrace my steps, so I just grabbed a shot where I was. I had been zzzzapped by Murphy’s Railfan Law #1!

2. BNSF 6521 on a grain empty at the SW 97th St crossing.
(photos 1-2 taken in Wakarusa, KS)

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Oh, what the heck! It was raining anyhow. I set up for second shot at Pauline and due to a slow order(?) was able to “pace” for a third shot a little further north.

3. The 6521 rolling TT east along S Topeka Blvd, and…

4. …crawling over the SW University crossing in Pauline.
(photos 3-4 taken in Pauline (Topeka), KS, ALL photos taken July 10, 2015)

Thanks [I guess] for the close call!
Lance Garrels
santafe199

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Capt Murphy was from Wright Field. He worked for Col Stapp at the Edwards rocket sled track. Never give an officer a sharp pencil.

Lee

"Sliding down Occam's Razor of Life"



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/01/15 12:23 by KR6LH.

Some subsections of Murphy's Railfan Law:

1) Just as the train you were hoping for comes into view, your camera battery goes dead.  (old version: After using all your film on ordinary subjects, a special train with a unique engine or consist comes by)

2)  Just as the steam special comes by, a regular freight train shows up on the near track.

3)  The special train arrives at your photo spot, but is so late there's no daylight left.

4)  If there are two possible routes for the special train, it will be switched to the one about a mile away--you can hear it but can't see it.

There are some that went away with the advent of digital photography, such as: You left the lens cap on.  You loaded the film, but it came loose from the takeup spool.  You're shooting with ASA 24, but the camera is set for 200 (or vice versa)

Then there's the traction fan who went from Los Angeles to Portland OR back around 1958, hoping to get some photos of the last electric railway operation in town, but when he arrived, found that the line had been abandoned a few days earlier.

Or the time I took the Santa Fe to Stockton in 1970, so I could get in at least a few miles of Western Pacific California Zephyr travel before it was abandoned.  Went from Stockton to Oakland, then took the bus over to the San Francisco station on 4th St.  I looked up 4th, expecting to see a PCC streetcar, or at least a Muni trolleybus, but didn't see any transit action.  Got to Market St. and looked up and down--Nothing!  Then I saw a newpaper rack, and the headline MUNI STRIKE!  Oh no!  So I went to the downtown PSA ticket office, bought a plane ticket to Ontario, caught the Greyhound suburban service (a.k.a. the "Nickelsnatcher") to SFO, flew to ONT, took the RTD bus to San Bernardino (where my car was) and drove out to Orange Empire, where I rode SF Muni 171 the next day.  I was determined to ride a Muni car one way or another.