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| Re: TM Nostalgia Train - Destinations announced (254579) | |||
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Re: TM Nostalgia Train - Destinations announced |
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Posted by SilverFox on Wed May 17 18:39:33 2006, in response to Re: TM Nostalgia Train - Destinations announced, posted by Howard Fein on Wed May 17 13:48:26 2006. I second that. A typical MOD trip would go to three or four different outer terminals and often use trackage not usually in revenue service. Fine. So then maybe the Transit Museum trips can cover the same ground and for the same reasons in three or four civilized and well-balanced trips than one marathon session where if you've seen one yard or one outpost of the system, you've seen them all. If we did go to the yards, I would then have liked to have seen the interiors of some of the rider cars in the yard, but that is something we probably would've never seen anyway. The outsides of the cars were all made uniform in the late '80s. It is the insides that are the differentiating factors nowadays, and that will never be revealed, sad to say, due to some very decent liability concerns. The non-revenue trackage we traverse is minimal at best, usually consisting of a siding used for relays, or a junction not normally used to get to another line. At most, two minutes of the itinerary. BFD. Like a shmuck I've always tried to feel the difference between riding revenue rails and those which haven't been used. Other than some very insignificant and barely perceptable changes in perspective, there ain't no difference. No need to say "Shhhh! We're going over the actual diamond crossing between the Astoria Line and the Flushing Line. Hear those wheels grinding the barely-used rails!" because it just doesn't happen. I can't speak for others on here, but after about a half-dozen of the MOD trips, I started questioning my desire to be on them because they lasted too long for any responsible adult, took too much out of me, began to all feel "the same," were run too often, and weren't really a good place to socialize. I went anyway, and began to hate myself more until I flat out stopped going altoghether at some point near to the end of the trips' complete cessation. This is not to say they weren't professionally run, coordinated, planned, and executed. They were wonders of urban railroad engineering and choreography from a technical perspective. But they were just too much of what was once a great thing. Everybody tells me that MTA's bigwigs read this board as if that were some sort of warning to me to stay away from promoting the Establishment's stance on matters you are working against. Maybe they sense that, and purposefully work against (y)our interests as they see what (y)our interests attract. Couldn't it be that we could all work with them as maybe adjunct ambassadors to their efforts, however limited they may be in our interests, so that we can be further trusted with more and enhanced programs going forward? Who knows, if we all volunteered at the Transit Museum or as crewmembers on the trains, or sharing our picture databases with the Museum showing these cars in fantrip service, they may reward us with an exclusive ten-hour marathon cruise throughout the system and the privilege of thoroughly dismantling an about-to-be-scrapped set of cars for whatever souvenirs we want. Maybe they won't now; maybe they won't ever, but we have to try. Right now, I don't believe the railfan community, as defined by this board, has the power to police its membership and its voice. We're still too far into the deep end. Make our hobby/obsession an amateur "profession" and maybe we will be treated as such. We now have to make the first move and extend the first olive branch. |
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