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Gabe- I'm not that old an old timer but I do remember the walk to school...with snow... both ways... bare foot (us Connecticut folk are hardy). I guess what I miss nowadays is stuff that younger fans wouldn't miss because they won't get exposed to it. That is the human side of railroading. I was a pest to the stationmaster/tower operator in Guilford, Connecticut in the late sixties. He coerced the local way freight crew to let me up in the cab of the aging (even brand new stuff on the NH was aged, it seemed) ALCO road switcher. My dad and the conductor (who worked out of a caboose) even conspired to let me take a trip with the way freight... but it ran on school nights and fell through. Now the tower is gone. The century old station has been replaced by a very nice bus stop type thing. There is no way freight any more. There is no brakeman, no switchman, no fireman. No stationmaster, either. Engineers were guys that had been doing this stuff for millenia, it seems, and conductors- passenger or freight- sat on the right hand of the Lord. That's why I like these forums, and why I subscribe to TRAINS. There's an Ed, or a CSXEngineer, or a Mark Hemphill, who put the human side of railroading back into what would otherwise be a large industrial operation. There's a reason why they do what they do... besides money... and it's folks like that that are a vanishing breed of people. Trains are bigger, faster... cleaner... but they are now big machines run by a couple of guys (or gals) who are often too busy to wave... or too suspicious of what it is you are doing. That's part of my youth I miss, and I wonder how I can get my grandchildren interested in railroads when there aren't people around to add a human touch. Erik
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