There are some pretty interesting screen names among the posters here. Some named for a specific locomotive or specific RR, others perhaps a little more cryptic or mysterious.
Perhaps some of you would honor us w/ "what's behind the screen name ... and perhaps even more interestingly why you chose that?"
I work in the intermodal business - hence the screen name Doublestack.
Have a great day.
Mine stands for the ex-CNW SDCAT, a rebuilt SD45 with Caterpillar prime mover. Not sure why I picked it...since I like widenose power more, but it is unique and identifiable.
Dan
My screen name is my real name...I guess I just couldn't come up with anything imaginative.
After some log in problems way back when, my name was assigned...now I use it all over the place when dealing with railroads and trains as a hobby or avocation.
RIDEWITHMEHENRY is the name for our almost monthly day of riding trains and transit in either the NYCity or Philadelphia areas including all commuter lines, Amtrak, subways, light rail and trolleys, bus and ferries when warranted. No fees, just let us know you want to join the ride and pay your fares. Ask to be on our email list or find us on FB as RIDEWITHMEHENRY (all caps) to get descriptions of each outing.
Mine is from the neighborhood in which I grew up and is the only non-Metra suburban station inside the Chicago city limits. My avatar is the old Hegewisch station.
One day, way back in the '70's, a few C&NW engineers went to downtown Chicago during our suburban job's layover. We ended up seeing a movie called "Zardoz". Some of the more 'straight' guys didn't understand the movie at all, but a few of us that were more, shall we say, broad-minded (these were the days before Rule G was strictly enforced) were quite blown away by the movie.
After that day, each time any of us would meet on the high iron, we would say some line from the movie that made the biggest impression on us. Somehow, I ended up being called Zardoz by my fellow rail movie-goers, and since others heard our exchanges on the radio, the nickname stuck.
Zardoz (the movie) is rather strange. On the surface, it seems like a cheesy sci-fi flick; but there are many subtle themes and concepts woven into the movie at a deeper level.
I chose diningcar because I always thought the RR's dining experience was a unique experience. The food was excellent and was presented very professionally.
I collect authentic dining car china, silver and menus.
Mine was associated with the job I did. I was a lubricator at the time,and was nick named squeeze the grease. I just shortened it as I never did like it, but couldn't shake it.
Carl
Railroader Emeritus (practiced railroading for 46 years--and in 2010 I finally got it right!)
CAACSCOCOM--I don't want to behave improperly, so I just won't behave at all. (SM)
Murphy Siding was along the Milwaukee Road, near where I lived east of Rapid City, S.D. It sounded more interesting than Boring Guy.
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
Well, I'm half Crazy anyway; so thought loco(short for locomotive also)
would be appropriate for that; and my dog is almost always next to
me when I'm at the computer (Mutt; which she really isn't, but that's
one of her nicknames.)[13 1/2 year old Huskie/shepherd mix, and very
much part of the family.]
Being Crazy,keeps you from going "INSANE" !! "The light at the end of the tunnel,has been turned off due to budget cuts" NOT AFRAID A Vet., and PROUD OF IT!!
Nothing cryptic: my name is Al, I live in Chicago, and my avatar is of me standing next to a PATCO train in Philadelphia shortly before riding the PATCO line.
I don't know where that orange plume sticking out of my head came from; I don't have the real Photo Shop program and had to use a lot of "tactics" to get a makeable small likeness of me. Long-timers will agree that it is much better than my original avatar, from Rochelle, where I was bleached out standing near an eastbound BNSF IM train.
ValleyX, short for Valley Crossing, south side of Columbus, OH, now NS/CSX, (I&O trackage rights) but once Scioto Valley/Hocking Valley, hence Valley Crossing. Tower long gone but a place familiar to my childhood.
I am a navy veteran, and I remember the navy publications I read. One of them was Naval Aviation News, and there were several memorable features. One of them was "Grampaw Pettibone" allegedly written by a cantankerous old barnacle, who had a Dear Abby type of column about problems pilots face. He was amazed that most pilots had survived more than one carrier landing or other airborn mishaps, and his exasperated spicy answers were very entertaining reading. He began life in 1943 and is still around in 2009. When It came to choosing a screen name, it was a natural.
Tom
COAST LINE FOREVER
It is better to dwell in the corner of a roof than to share a house with a contentious woman! (Solomon)
A contentious woman is like a constant dripping! (Solomon)
My screen name is pretty much what you would expect. I lived in CPR stations up until age 11. It was the norm rather the exception to have the agent's family live behind and above the station office. As amazing as it may seem in these litigious and safety conscious times there were never any family members killed as far as the author's of the definitive work on the subject "Canadian Pacific's Western Depots" by Charles W. Bohi and Leslie S. Kozma were able to determine. We lived at Hatton, SK from 1954 to 1956 and then moved to Irricana, AB and lived there until 1965 when my father became a dispatcher in Calgary, AB until he retired in 1985.
I was exposed to telegraph, dispatcher's phones, hand crank regular telephone service with an operator whose office/home was just up main street, big telephone batteries with the two clips on top, glass block signal batteries, hoops, signal flags, and kerosene lanterns. I've been in water towers, coal docks, sectionmen's houses, roadmaster's house/offices, section men's tool houses and ridden engines, cabooses, and motor cars/speeders. My sister who was not born until we moved to Calgary says I am the oldest 55 year old she ever heard of. Oh, I forgot about having a boxcar of coal loaded into our basement every fall, and getting our drinking water from a tank car every Monday. It seems like there was always something going on, and I have no idea how many times I was as close or closer to moving railroad equipment as was the photographer in the mystery photo thread currently in progress.
I suppose you always want what you can't have, but due to a physical disability and an inability to pass the colour blindness test I was never able to work for the CPR. I became an accountant instead. I talked railroading with my father at least once a day, I think, every time I saw him from the time I could talk until the day he died in 1992. I don't remember steam on our tracks as a kid, but my father started railroading in 1947 and he worked almost every station open then on the Laggan and Red Deer Subs. before he married. He figured out once that he had worked at somewhere between 50 and 52 different stations, and the stories he could tell.
As for my avatar I have had that file through many computers. I downloaded it from a railway hobbyist dial-up BBS in the mid nineties. For my money, the beaver over the shield is the best corporate logo in the history of Canada. And as they say, I guess that is that.
AgentKid
So shovel the coal, let this rattler roll.
"A Train is a Place Going Somewhere" CP Rail Public Timetable
"O. S. Irricana"
. . . __ . ______
My freelance (after a Japanese prototype) model railroad is the Tomikawa Tani Tetsudo - literally translated, "Richstream Valley Iron Road." Tomikawa is a proper name that could have been a place name, but wasn't. A former lady friend gave her surname to the valley, the railroad and the junction where it connects to the local mainline of the Japan National Railway system.
So, why do I model Japanese practice? Mainly, I'm modeling the Upper Kiso Valley as it was in 1964 when I visited it with my wife and our two (then pre-school) kids. We all loved the place!
What does my wife think about having the key point on my model railroad named after one of her predecessors? She knows that I met Tomikawasan on an R&R from Korea, and that caused me to request reassignment to Japan when all of my squadronmates were shipped back to the States - which led in turn to meeting and marrying my wife.
Then there's the fact that my wife also has a railroad named after her - the Kashimoto Rintetsu (forest railway,) two of the stations of which are named after our children...
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Senshi means soldier or warrior in Japanese. It actually is reference to an anime I like.
I'd been using this name on several other forums so I used it here to keep the number of user names I need to remember to a minimum. Also I figured that a foreign word would more likely be available than a more RR related one.
Go Huskies. Forward Together Forward
Fan of - C&NW - Milwaukee Road - CGW -
AgentKid [snip] For my money, the beaver over the shield is the best corporate logo in the history of Canada. [snip] AgentKid
Agree completely - probably in North America, too, and maybe the world as well. Now there's a possible thread topic, if someone wants to start it. Someplace I read that it's the only one - at least for a major coporation - with an animal in it. Don't know if that's true, but that's how I recall it. I thought it was great when it came back a few (10 ?) years ago.
Someplace I've got a poem from Trains back in the early 1980s - titled something like "Song of the Holy Name" - that ends with a line to the effect of, "And consign to outer darkness the dratted CP Rail". I've been meaning to send it to the Tamarack folk music group ("Canadian Routes Music") - Alex Sinclair, James Gordon, et al. - as a song suggestion, but haven't gotten around to that yet. Someday . . .
- Paul North.
EDIT:
The song of the holy name Trains, July 1982 page 23 ( CPR, "EMMOTT, N. W.", POETRY, TRN )
Paul_D_North_Jr AgentKid [snip] For my money, the beaver over the shield is the best corporate logo in the history of Canada. [snip] AgentKid Agree completely - probably in North America, too, and maybe the world as well. Now there's a possible thread topic, if someone wants to start it. Someplace I read that it's the only one - at least for a major coporation - with an animal in it. Don't know if that's true, but that's how I recall it. I thought it was great when it came back a few (10 ?) years ago. Someplace I've got a poem from Trains back in the early 1980s - titled something like "Song of the Holy Name" - that ends with a line to the effect of, "And consign to outer darkness the dratted CP Rail". I've been meaning to send it to the Tamarack folk music group ("Canadian Routes Music") - Alex Sinclair, James Gordon, et al. - as a song suggestion, but haven't gotten around to that yet. Someday . . . - Paul North.
Well, yeah, but.....no explanation about how you picked your screen name.
i am not only a 3rd generation railroader but a 3trd generation CNW employee and I have CNWFAN on my lisecne plate on my Jeep. just ask Jeff LOL and 51 was my age when I jioned the forum. Sorry I missed you carl Larry
I picked my screen name, cherokee woman, because I'm 1/16 Cherokee. I know that's not much, but I'm kind of proud to have at least some Native American blood in me.
Back when I started college, I fell in with a group that my older brother was in, so I was given the name "Degges the Younger," or, "Younger" for short (there is still a handful of people who call me "Younger:" I saw two of them about three weeks ago) (No, my brother was simply "Kindly Old Uncle Tommy Degges" or "Kindly", for short). These, of course, are properly written "Degges t/y" and "t/y." When I started using the forum, I wanted to call myself "Younger," but I was told that someone else already used that name. I then tried to spell the name properly, but the slash was not permitted.
While I was in college, I simply put "t/y" with the college name and address as my return address on mail that I sent . One letter that I sent was returned as being undeliverable, and the assistant treasurer (who put the mail up) put it into my box; she knew what the symbol meant.
Johnny
cnwfan51 i am not only a 3rd generation railroader but a 3trd generation CNW employee and I have CNWFAN on my lisecne plate on my Jeep. just ask Jeff LOL and 51 was my age when I jioned the forum. Sorry I missed you carl Larry
He really does have CNWFAN on his jeep's license plate.
I just used my name bunched together. Sometimes something happens that I'd like to share, but can't because it's too easy to trace. It's those times I think I should have thought a bit harder about a screen name.
Jeff
Hey CNW 6000
During its life, I saw the SD Cat a couple times here in Green Bay. I had the opportunity to see it pulling the grade east of Green Bay, headed toward Manitowoc on the once-great Lakeshore Sub, with a standard SD 40. Pretty cool. The great old days!!!!!
AgentKid My screen name is pretty much what you would expect. I lived in CPR stations up until age 11. It was the norm rather the exception to have the agent's family live behind and above the station office. As amazing as it may seem in these litigious and safety conscious times there were never any family members killed as far as the author's of the definitive work on the subject "Canadian Pacific's Western Depots" by Charles W. Bohi and Leslie S. Kozma were able to determine. We lived at Hatton, SK from 1954 to 1956 and then moved to Irricana, AB and lived there until 1965 when my father became a dispatcher in Calgary, AB until he retired in 1985. I was exposed to telegraph, dispatcher's phones, hand crank regular telephone service with an operator whose office/home was just up main street, big telephone batteries with the two clips on top, glass block signal batteries, hoops, signal flags, and kerosene lanterns. I've been in water towers, coal docks, sectionmen's houses, roadmaster's house/offices, section men's tool houses and ridden engines, cabooses, and motor cars/speeders. My sister who was not born until we moved to Calgary says I am the oldest 55 year old she ever heard of. Oh, I forgot about having a boxcar of coal loaded into our basement every fall, and getting our drinking water from a tank car every Monday. It seems like there was always something going on, and I have no idea how many times I was as close or closer to moving railroad equipment as was the photographer in the mystery photo thread currently in progress. I suppose you always want what you can't have, but due to a physical disability and an inability to pass the colour blindness test I was never able to work for the CPR. I became an accountant instead. I talked railroading with my father at least once a day, I think, every time I saw him from the time I could talk until the day he died in 1992. I don't remember steam on our tracks as a kid, but my father started railroading in 1947 and he worked almost every station open then on the Laggan and Red Deer Subs. before he married. He figured out once that he had worked at somewhere between 50 and 52 different stations, and the stories he could tell. As for my avatar I have had that file through many computers. I downloaded it from a railway hobbyist dial-up BBS in the mid nineties. For my money, the beaver over the shield is the best corporate logo in the history of Canada. And as they say, I guess that is that. AgentKid
I'm glad you appreciate Canadian history -- maybe you yourself should be documenting or writing an autobiography about your younger years as a Railroad Kid. - a.s.
al-in-chgodocumenting or writing an autobiography
Thank you for your suggestion. That is precisely why I bought my first computer for home use back in 1996. My sister had been suggesting it for a long time as well. But life is what happens while you are making other plans and it just never happened.
Now I am really concerned about what is being lost. I have started several posts on this forum only to realize I longer recall all the relevant information, or if I know where to look, it would take too long to find before the members here have moved on to other things. And my mother's health has begun to slip to a point where I can no longer reliably use her as a fact checker. if you take my meaning.
I do wish there were the same number of active participants on the CLASSIC TRAINS forum as there are here because these discussions are a great way for me to draw out facts and ideas I otherwise would have forgotten. I hope both forums keep operating for a long time.
al-in-chgoFWIW I'm a very old 53-year-old.
Why, Al! what will you be when you reach my age? Remember, I left Southwest Virginia/Northeast Tennessee before you heard of the place.
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