Strickly from my railfan's perspective, the railroads today are rather bland and not nearly as visually stimulating as they have been in the past, and as a railfan, that is the only thing I care about. I know railroads are businesses with an obligation to use the best equipment in the most efficient manner possible to get as much of a share of freight traffic as they can to fulfill their obligation to the shareholders to earn them dividends. But it is how they look while they do it that determines if they are interesting or not to me, not the bottom line on their annual reports.
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 50's and 60's. I did experience mainline steam locomotives first hand, but not until the 70's. I have memories of solid sets of F's, of a time when a turbocharged 2000hp GP-20 was a mighty impressive machine, and in my mid twenties when a set of 6 SP SD-45's was as good as it got. I can remember a time when the most common freight car was a 40' boxcar, and enough of them were wood sheathed to not be worthy of much comment. I hated it when SP went bloody nose, and GN turned Big Sky Blue, but I loved the BN right from the start.
Railroads were businesses back then too, but it seemed they went about their business in much more interesting ways. Like the time in the mid 60's my family was driving along the Embarcadero in San Francisco, and there she was, Western Pacifics beautiful car ferry, the "LAS PLUMAS". My father quickly parked, and for the next hour or so we watched as a burbling orange WP ALCo switcher pulled about twenty five freight cars off of her and then loaded another twenty five on board for the short trip across the bay to Oakland. It was a several times a day, everyday activity for the WP crews, but a much cherished, unique experience for me.
Railroads today are still businesses, and very efficient ones at that. But the evolutions in railroading that makes them so has brought with it a sameness of locomotives, equipment and operations that to me, has erroded the visual enjopyment of it all. Although the massive power of the locomotives still gives me cause to pause and watch, its a rare occasion when I'm motivated to get out my camera to take a shot of the action. But every now and then, a tiny scene of the old-fashioned, more casual style of operations emerges, and reminds me of the railroading of old that will always be my kind of railroading. Just today I stood smiling as I watched a Tacoma Rail switcher as the engineer blew for the crossing at E 11th St., stopping in the middle, dropped a lit fusee to the ground, lit another and arched it up over the cab roof onto the other side, and then proceeded, confident the crossing was now flagged for his reverse move.
Tom
(CNW) 
