Evidence of longevity at Calverton, Virginia; photo by George W. Hamlin
Admittedly, I don’t spend a lot of my time trackside examining rails. While they are a foundational part of railroading, typically something else causes me to appear trackside, camera in hand. For that matter, their sides are typically not well-lit, and they are often in the shadows, both literally and figuratively. They spend most of their time waiting for relatively brief (in most locations) in...