Hi Everyone!
Most readers are aware that TRAINS magazine just hired a new associate editor. That's me, Steve Sweeney. But since most of you still don't know much about me yet, fellow editors here thought it would be a good idea to blog an introduction.
But first, a little plug.
For the two weeks that I’ve been learning the ropes at TRAINS, memorizing names and editing copy, I’ve also been planning for my first big event: WRI 2013. For those of you who don’t know, the Wheel/Rail Interaction conference is an event co-presented by TRAINS with conference organizer Wheel Rail Seminars and LB Foster, an international supplier of infrastructure materials and services. The goal of the four-day conference is to give railroaders a practical bend on all of the railroad research and best practices available today – focusing on what happens when the flanged wheel meets the steel rail.
That WRI 2013 is going to be a nuts-and-bolts kind of conference featuring some of the best and brightest railroaders in the industry today is nothing short of incredible, from my point of view. It’s incredible because it dovetails with my own background.
Suffice it to say, my interest with railroads dates back to Christmas 1981, when a 6-month-old me sat watching his uncle's 3-rail O-scale Blue Comet zipping around the tree at Grandma's house. With the Blue Comet’s headlight on; puffing smoke fluid and that oh-so-fake, but satisfying pre-digital steam chug; I was hooked for life.
My first experience with a 1:1 scale railroad came a few years later at the newspaper.
You see, my father and mother both worked for the same newspaper in Jamestown, N.Y., so it was natural for me to grow up there as they grew older. The newspaper is where I learned to paste-up pages “working” for Dad, play hide-and-seek in the darkroom and even visit the railroad tracks behind the building. The tracks back then belonged to Conrail and represented the last dying remnants of the old Erie and Erie-Lackawanna main line between New York and Chicago. My Dad would take me along the tracks on sunny afternoons to pick-up discarded spikes and look for date nails (that went back to the 1940s, easy). He even let me run around inside a disused, rusted dinosaur of a boxcar, until Mom found out and put an end to it.
From then on, family trips included zoo trains and the few excursion trains that were available in the places we could afford to travel. With model trains, O-scale dreamlands gave way with time to attempts at HO-scale re-creations of an imagined reality. Childhood faded all too quickly into college, a new job at that Jamestown newspaper and the blessings of a new wife and family. The good news was that as a newspaper reporter, editors would let me report on railroads and old-time railroaders whenever I could justify the story. TRAINS magazine articles supported my thirst for more information on the industry, and what I liked best about it, the nuts-and-bolts.
Fast-forward 10 years to the present, and I found myself fortunate enough to have many rewarding years news writing, including two years as a contributing “Technology” column writer for TRAINS. It was enough to earn a spot on the TRAINS staff.
Beyond that there’s little left to write, for now.
And about the conference, there’s plenty of detail about WRI 2013 at the conference website and I’ll be blogging interviews with conference participants and interesting factoids in the days ahead. The important thing to know is that WRI 2013 is happening May 6 to 9 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel and Conference Center near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.
Hope to see you there!
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