Eastern Railroad Discussion > What's The Purpose Anymore?

I grew up a lifelong railfan and have now worked for the railroad for 25 years as an engineer. Looking back at old photos I can't help but wonder why modern railfans are even interested in railroads anymore? Everything is all the same now. No variety whatsoever. I guess I'm biased a little also as I know just how bad the railroads really are, being on the inside and all. Even if I wasn't though. What drives any interest anymore? To me it's sad how things have changed from just 25 years ago.

A train just evokes something out of those of us who enjoy them all of our lives. It's not the same as it was, either railfanning or working wise (28 years in the seat for me), but our options other than dwelling on nostalgia are pretty limited.

We can all thank God that there are many regional and short-line railroads in the country where we can still witness varieties of locomotives including railroads such as the Reading & Northern in Pennsylvania that has now completely rebuilt their Reading 4-8-4, T-1 Steam Locomotive for excursions, plus they have a good variety of diesel locomotives including a set of F units.  Another favorite railroad of mine is the Strasburg Rail Road up in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania area that operates several well maintained steam engines, hauling passengers and also hauling freight.  There are others for sure, around the country, otherwise there isn't much to stir ones enthusiasm any more for railroading, especially with the big class ones.
John in White Marsh, Maryland

I have struggled with this also. Grew up in the 50's transition from steam to first gen diesels. My fan experience included many 'nurturing' employees who educated me in the various crafts on a personal level, memories I still hold dear to my heart. Kept my interests through the years except for a brief hiatus involving cars and women during my teenage years. 
Eventually worked for the railroad in the operating division and enjoyed a successful career, all the while continuing my train watching pleasures by visiting the high traffic areas like Altoona, its west slope, the 'Iron Triangle' , Reading Pa and its intricate locales, the Allentown/Bethlehem/Easton area, etc.
I have a trip planned with 2 other retired RR employees to Fort Madison,IA. for a week and we are looking forward to that experience, 
There are still things to keep my passion flowing but they are rapidly waning. I do still see kids enjoying the hobby. Having the R&N nearby is a great advantage to kindle the flickering flame.

Having worked as a rail shipper for 40 years and having a son who was employed by a Class 1 in train service, I can state unequivocally that I dislike railroads but, I still like trains.

My interest in trains was either inherited from my father or planted in me at an early age from growing up along the PRR Middle Division.

While trains today do have a homogeneous look to them, the sound of a horn, the rumble of the engines and the sound of wheels on rails, still stirs my blood. And I’m sure nostalgia is the largest aspect of this.

CW

Posted from iPhone

If it's in your blood, it's in your blood.
JB

Before family and kids,I very much enjoyed traveling to exotic or remote locales and photographing trains. I enjoy travel, the outdoors and trains. This kept me engaged for a number of years. I don't really do photography any more other than snapshots with the phone.
Railroads are fascinating, though, regardless of paint schemes. I'm involved with a railroad museum and contribute in several ways and look forward to preserving whatever history we can save and interpret. I'm very interested in the history of railroads and America in general and railroads played a huge part in the America we have today. That will keep me engaged presumably for the rest of my life.
As others have said, the physical dynamics of watching a train roll past is enjoyable so keeping a pulse on current operations will continue to be of interest.
If you lament the past, get involved with a preservation effort where you can make a difference either financially or with your involvement or both. Many ailroad museums are often short of help in these areas and need both to preserve what once was.

Posted from Android

All I can say is thank God for shortlines and regionals.  As some of you may know, my office is like 100 feet from the NKP main, but last year I think I took less than 15 pictures total in that location.  If you've seen one NS freight train in this era, you've pretty much seen them all.  Unless I go afield and shoot them against some interesting scenery, there is no reason to even waste megapixals on them.  I spend far more time shooting old depots, bridges and right of ways than I do shooting current trains.  I only went out specifically to railfan once last year, and that was to Lima OH to catch the I&O and the CF&E.

Back in the mid to late 80's I had just nailed yet another nice shot of a CV freight passing the Waterbury, VT station in perfect light and suddenly thought, why am I doing this? And that was it ... stopped chasing trains just like that. Nowadays I visit the occasional museum, always stop at Ashland, VA en route north or south, keep my eyes peeled for trains while on the road, and find DPU's pretty cool, but active railfanning is pretty much a thing of the past for me. The mess of crappy patched CR stuff in the late 70's was a big turnoff but the discovery of the CV and CP in Vermont, and the variety of eastern Canada, captured my interest for about another decade. But then, it was all over. Certainly the loss of 6-unit sets of GP9's on the CV and clean Action Red MLW's on CP had something to do with it. I remember being at Palmer, MA on the night the CV was sold and feeling like it was all over. For me, I guess it was.

Whats the purpose? Its as simple as it gets.  

For me-its the fact I live right next to the NS Chicago Line through Port Clinton, Ohio.  Thanks to my now disabled father and his love of the big blue as he called it (Conrail), I am still a railfan to this day.  I really dont care what is running as long as I can photograph it im all good.  

The second reason-my one year old son.  Just last tuesday I took him outside to watch NS 205 fly right by my house around 1030 am.  He watched with excitement, curiousity, and wonder as to what he just saw.  IF you have it you have it, and if not, let the youngsters grow up doing this, as those youngsters are the future of this hobby we enjoy. 

Michael Fair
Royal Oak, MI

This is a theme that comes up over and over. I recall when I was young and the old timer raifans had little interest in modern railroading (mid - 1970's). It was all diesels and they all looked the same and most of the passenger trains were gone and many tracks torn up and the whole lot bankrupt, rusty and weed grown.  I have read many issues of the old railroad / railfan magazines going back to the 1930's and the same thing crops up. The new modern steam power and operations didn't have the same appeal as the old wood burners in the days of yore .... or camel backs, or whatever.

I think we all evolve in our railfan journey from open-eyed, curious and innocent to maybe worn out and disillusioned or simply bored.  I don't know, I seem to think I was a railfan since the first time I saw a train in maybe 1959 or 1960. I grew up next to the tracks, so to speak. In my teens I was switching freight cars with the crews and riding local freights. After those formative years I hired on in the industry and have worked many different facets of it from shop labor sweeping floors to dispatching to VP Engineering of a Regional Railroad and many things in between. I've seen the good, bad, ugly, plenty of stupid, had more bad days than good overall, but still kept coming back. Retired now after 42 years and still like watching the trains go by. Does it seem to have gotten dumber and dumber, less personal and more cookie cutter cold ? Absolutely ! Does it still fascinate me ? Indeed it does. The movement of goods, the development of new technology (yes I have worked with PTC and don't get me started there...), the ways things have changed since my early days with cabooses and 19 orders, and stuff I could never have imagined. But somehow I still have a curiousity and watch what goes on and goes by. And I am very glad I stuck it out, and I am very, very glad to be retired and not have to deal with and solve all the stupid problems, many of which were are still seem to be self-inflicted.

I think it is an ebb and flow. Sometimes it is there and other times it isn't.  After many years you start to think .... "what was I thinking" and begin to understand the gruff old codgers that came before, and realize why they were so gruff and grumpy. Yup .... same cycle for them too. Seriously, I''ve read about guys that wrote about the 1890s and how it had all gone to hell with putting numbers on locomotives and they no longer had names. Switching from wood to coal and not having all the brass, fancy paint and trim anymore. Just old black ugly hogs. I longed to have been born in the grand old days to see steam as king in the heyday, and felt so cheated to grow up in the infant 100% diesel age. But then I meet young fans today who wish they could have been around in the 1980's when railroads were cool, Conrail was around, SD40-2's were hot power, and doublestacks were new. I guess it becomes a generational thing. Every 20 -- 25 years a new generation comes along or there is a generational shift that leaves some of us behind whether we work in the industry or are just fans. But as Edna St. Vincent Malley wrote in a poem, "Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take, no matter where it's going". 

Your Mileage or Coal and Water Consumption may vary.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/11/22 15:33 by train1275.

This is a really good question, and one I've thought about quite a bit.

The answer for me is that there is just something fundamentally very interesting and fundamentally important about railroading. I've felt that interest since I was a boy. My dad started his career in the rate department of the Frisco, but shortly moved to industrial transportation, and a career of over thirty years managing traffic, mostly rail, for one of the largest chemical companies. His work interested me, and he often discussed it with me. In my teenage years, I could recognize how it fit into the bigger economic equation. Even though I went another way with my own career, and never worked for the railroad industry or in industrial transportation, I never lost my interest. Nor my feeling that in watching the industry I was not only watching something that was visually powerful and compelling, but that was also economically very important. I still feel that way today in my recent retirement.

Those values prevail even in the more homogenized railroad world today. The visual interest and power of a passing train is still there, even as it is much more similar and less diverse and varied than in the past. And the economic value is still there too. I still watch passing consists, particularly on less and less common manifest trains, and think about the possible cargoes for cars or traffic blocks, their origin - destination pairs, possible routes, and blocking patterns. And when I get home, I'm into the maps, old timetables, track charts, posts here on TO and other materials to further analyze and give context to what I saw and photographed.

Photographically, I focus more than ever on the context and scene, working to capture and convey the unique presence of the train in its environment. That has never changed, and never will. Great photos by fine photographers in the past seen in books and magazines like Trains, by some friends whose work was superb, and here on TO from people like Photobob and Bill Rettberg, constantly educate me on scene selection, lighting, composition and other elements. The locomotives and cars may be more homogenized, but all of the challenges of making a great railroad image are still the same. That was the fun then, and it's still the fun now.

And sorry to break the news, but even though there was more variety in the past, there was plenty of homogenization and same old - same old, too. News flash: that's how a railroad makes money, by shaping an operating pattern on the shipper's cargo to as close to optimum as possible, then repeating it over and over. Wash, rinse, repeat. It's fun all these years later to see an image of, say, a PRR coal drag on the Middle Division behind an M1 Mountain. Wow! Guess what? Back in the day, it was, "Oh, just another coal drag. Ho-hum." Just like for me in my early railfan days in St. Louis it was, "Oh, just another MP Labadie coal train". Day after day. So what do you do? You find multiple ways to capture that same-old same-old with different scenes, different context, different composition, different lighting. And guaranteed: years later you look at it, and say "wow!".

That's the fun, and the challenge. Sure, more variety would be great. I crave that as much as anyone, and I too am starting to focus more and more (particularly after being dragged by a longtime railfan friend, somewhat kicking and screaming) on those thank-goodness-for-shortlines railroads. But when it's yet another G&W orange engine, with just a small differentiating logo on the side, the homogenization has kicked in there, too. And so has the fun of the challenge to make it look interesting, and to give it its place and context -- even if its, yes, another G&W orange engine.

The challenge and the joy has only slightly faded for me with today's more homogenized environment. And after two years of being mostly cooped up at home, I'm planning that this summer will be a good one for that challenge and joy trackside once again. Can hardly wait.

MC
 

You might as well throw in model railroading and how it survives. It does and in a sense because maufacturers and fans have embraced niches,
no different in real railfanning. Both will soon reach a bottom or hopefully a sustainable level and we can contunue on the basis. Somebody is
making good money off buggy whips and there's a leson there.

Out

Many plane spotters share similar concerns. So many 737, A320 etc planes. Little variety. Mergers have produced cookie cutter planes and liveries.

No more Piedmont, Allegheny, PSA, Peoples Air, etc. No more DC3, Constellations, or Viscounts, Caravelles etc.

Posted from Android

Been a while since another "It's all crap now!" post.  I'm in my 60's, been railfanning since I was a teenager.  I still enjoy getting trackside and videoing current operations.  It keeps me busy in my retirement and is still fun!

Now....GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

While there is less variety on the rails and there has been plenty of rail interest which is now gone, as I get older, I just find new ways to enjoy the hobby including learning more about railroad history, having a greater appreciation of tourist/excursion railroads and rail-trails (both rails to trails and rails with trails).

For me a big part of the hobby is riding trains whether its Amtrak, commuter rail or even urban rail rapid transit. Many on the passenger board bash Amtrak, but I usually enjoy my rides whether they are on the Pennsylvanian or California Zephyr or the Northeast Corridor.  Whenever I'm in Philadelphia, I try to ride a new SEPTA regional rail line.  In the Midwest, a true jewel is the NICTD South Shore Line.  During my visits to Cleveland, I always enjoy a ride on the Cleveland RTA Red Line.  The view of Downtown Cleveland approaching from the west is wonderful. 

I also enjoy seeing and hearing Amtrak trains.  Many mornings, while waiting for a bus, I can enjoy the gurgling of an Amtrak P42 as it accelerates a Pennsylvanian up a slight grade on its way east out of Pittsburgh.

My interest in/enjoyment of passenger trains had generated an interest in train stations.  Many of these train stations are truly architectural gems.

Lastly, even with all of the changes freight railroads have undergone in recent years, I still enjoy experiencing freight trains, as a rider on Amtrak trains, as a trail user along a CSX line, and as a train watcher wherever I encounter freight railroads.



 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/11/22 21:05 by RuleG.

I'm glad you brought you this scenario to the to Trainorder.com table. So I'm not imagining it, after all. We TO Members are becoming increasing a more of a minority, after all. I was reluctant to post a outrageously sad claim to the community, myself.

My closest trackside ROW is the CSX's Metropoliten Sub., outside of the Washington D.C., one of the very first lines in our nation's history. Unlike many of the you affiliated with the online forum, I'm still in my mid-30s, quite a very junior position of sorts. Typicically, when train watching in my area if lucky, I may encourter some form of a unit train, usually a Intermodal, coal drag or a autorack, quite often accompanied with DPU, comprising 125 or up to a massive 200+ consist. And there are those countless commumter trains and, of course Amtrak's Capitol Limited. But there are not those manifest trains all the time. I only wish a could have wistness lines, especially like the B&O and the Western Maryland. At the same time, I semi-respect the remarkeble, technology innovation achievements people have invention over the past 20 years, to make our country lead the Nation, despite it can be hard to come to terms.

It will be very hard to forcast what our railroads will look like 20 years from now - visually and operationally. However, I'm sure it will be surprising in ways we do not currently anticipate.

Matthew Jablonski

PS

My father and I have been members of the WM Historical Society for over 25 years now. At this point, during their monthy meetings in Union Bridge, MD, the entertaments are usually just randem digitally scanned slides around the WM, unlike having people host presentations they documented themselves.

 



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/12/22 10:20 by Cumberland.

3rdswitch Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If it's in your blood, it's in your blood.
> JB

I have found out how true this statement is.

I got "hooked" by the Lionel trains my dad set up at Christmas time. There is something about a train layout and the town(s) you create around the Christmas tree that I can't explain. My dad got started as a kid by watching the PRR coal trains that ran to Sodus Point, New York.

As a teenager, I watched Conrail quite a bit. I thought those days would never end....

Now as an adult and someone who sees the rail industry from the inside out, my feelings have changed some. I still enjoy watching them, taking photos, etc., however my "knowledge of the business" has dampened my enthusiasm some.

I share some similar feelings involving the "boredom" aspect. Besides 611, my last "great railfan trip" was when the UP OCS came to the east coast. With all that said, this is one reason why I started to do my abandoned rail posts. After a couple of years of working on one off and on (and working crazy hours), I just finished one. I also started another one......

Posted from Android



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/12/22 06:51 by ns1000.

I've been watching this discussion for a couple of days (and yes, this discussion has been appearing since long before anyone here ever heard the phrase "internet"). I'm late to the party, but will add a quick contribution. Before I continue, I'll tell you I'm 59 and have been a "serious" railfan since 1976 . . . taking pictures, taking notes, etc. I was born and raised in Saginaw, Michigan, and a great majority of my time spent railfanning back in the day was in my home state, along with Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky. And, after a lengthy career in print journalism that ended in a corporate downsizing, I found myself going railroading in 2014, at age 51.

1) I want to take the focus off of the actual trains for a moment. I know I'm in the minority here, but what I miss most about railroading from my earlier days is the people. Sure, the trains were the original lure, and all of the sensual stimulations that came with them. But even when there were no trains, there were people. I caught the tail end of the era of small town depots, interlocking towers, local dispatching offices, caller's offices, even crossing towers -- why, I could even walk into a roundhouse or yard office without the risk of being thrown in jail. These places were all staffed with people, and 99 percent of them were friendly, and knowledgeable. And, even when the N&W coal train going behind my aunt's backyard in Knox, Indiana was fairly boring, I waited for the red caboose at the end, knowing there likely would be a rear-end crew member who would give me a wave.

Today, most of those people are gone. I believe the industry employed 1.6 million people on Dec. 31, 1946. Seventy years later, that number stood at 215,000. The last number I saw (I believe from year-end 2018) put the number at 195,000. This includes the white-collar folks in the corporate offices, people far removed from the ground. So, the human element is largely gone from the hobby, and has been for some time. That's what I really miss.

2) As for the trains themselves, as I thought of the train behind me yesterday -- a DASH-9, a GEVO, 116 almost-identical grain hoppers, and another GEVO -- I wondered what lure there is in that to the railfan. Time does not permit me to "go foamin''' too much these days, and when I do, the show is often predictable. But I will never belittle the modern-day version of our hobby, or those who remain enthusiastic, and here's why: Back there around 1977-78, when I was in Durand or Deshler or Fostoria or who knows where, armed with an Instamatic camera that cost $20, I would invariably be approached by an "old guy" (ya know, probably someone who was 50 years old . . .), and this guy would almost always say something like "Why are you wasting your TIME?? These trains are junk. There's no STEAM!!!!" Well, I was born in 1962, and so steam meant nothing to me (honestly, it still doesn't). So, i kept watching trains, kept photographing trains. Today, these are my "good old days." And so, I'm happy to see a young railfan today who gets excited about two miles of container platforms. I really am.

The hobby is still worthwhile.

My Dad worked for a railroad. Some of my best childhood memories are railroad-related. I've built on those memories with trips of my own, volunteering for the safety crew on Southern-NRHS steam excursions out of Atlanta, limited collecting, publications and later social media, and other activities. Railroading will stick with me for the rest of my life. I still see and learn new things... some of which are unpleasant, but most are interesting.

That said, in the year I was born, railroads employed 1.2 million people. Today, railroad employment is just 20% of that. So, to the extent that people are interested in what their parents did, there is an inevitable reduction in the numbers of "my-dad-worked-for-a-RR" railfans like myself. Of course, not everyone becomes a railfan through that path.