For Toyota trucks. No further comment...http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=85751

The Caltrain commute service between San Francisco and San Jose has three "wrapped" train sets, two with Target ads, one for a Spanish langrage radio station. This was allowed as an experiment, and found to generate significant additional income with few complaints from the riders.They are currently contracting for more, with an modified standard including how many windows can be covered. You may not like it, but in an era of limited resources, the income helps, significantly.

This isn't really a new thing for trains, and is quite common on buses, taxi's, etc. Why not? It helps pay the bills. It's not like Amtrak's equipment is otherwise beautiful.Mike

Hell, I'd rather see a mainline steam excursion with a billboard on the side of the tender than look at cold former-excursion engines in a museum somewhere.

I think we may have one of those defining moments in the museum vs. operation debate....Wowak wrote..."Hell, I'd rather see a mainline steam excursion with a billboard on the side of the tender than look at cold former-excursion engines in a museum somewhere."Is operation so important that it trumps historic appearance? I don't mind the commutes (local vernacular for commuter train in the San Francisco area) running by my house, but believe it would be wrong on a museum piece, unless the loco or car carried such ads in service. If a tourist train wants to paint the wheels of its steam loco red, and put a big funnel stack on it that is their choice, but it isn’t preservation.I believe that a preserved car is preserved first, and then operated only if it can be without damaging or negatively affecting the artifact. I tolerate movie paint for the money it can bring, but advertising (other than a commercial photo or film shoot) seems to cross a line. I believe that preserved locomotives and cars have a certain dignity which needs to be protected in the same way we protect the paint, or the brass bearings.

May be semantics Randy, but to me the term "excursion" seems to indicate tourist railroading as a special event rather than railroad preservation as a special event. Some excursions are themed as recreations of the past, some as just the events they are, some for commercial promotional purposes - lots of gray areas. Thomas the Bank Engine might not have dignity but does more to grab the interest of future railfans than the most expensively conserved hermetically sealed formerly operable relic. Room for both?dave

Please see to it that Randy Hees never lays eyes upon 1) the Verde Canyon RR's ex-Alaska RR F7's with their big eagles or 2) the Grand Canyon RR's web URL and toll-free phone numbers on the sides of their FPA4's and tenders........................... to say nothing of the Wild West shootout that precedes each trip.........

Neither the Verde Canyon Railroad or the Grand Canyon Railroad are museums, they are tourist railroads. Tourist railroads exist for the experience first, not to preserve railroads or the rolling stock (even though many do, either by accident, or by design, congratulations to the Stasburg Railroad on all it does) Tourist railroads can put anything on the side of their cars, from eagles to stinky rodents, that they think will increase ridership. I support that the same way I support Amtrak or Caltrain wrapping their trains in exchange for the money the advertisers pay.On the other hand, if the loco is a museum piece (as mentioned by the previous poster) the museum which owns it has a responsibility to the locos history, and that shouldn’t be traded for the dollars that are brought to the table by a big sign on the tender. Running a loco for the sake of running it doesn’t have a place in a museum. Running a loco to support the educational goals of a museum can be good, but probably doesn’t include the big sign on the tender.Gun fights and Indian attacks work well at a tourist site, but not in a museum.Within a museum I am willing to accept occasional visits by the little blue guy, or hosting receptions in your gallery as acceptable commercial uses of museum space, and well thought out movie rentals can benefit the cause, but the cause is preservation and education, and may not include running steam excursions. Its not that tourist railways and fan trips are bad.... They are not. But we need to understand the difference between tourist lines and museums.

Moreso than the difference between preservation and excursions, I think we need to come to terms with the symbiotic relationship the two have.Face the facts, folks.. if not for the fact that most of us have seen real, moving, smoke belching, huge steam locomotives doing exactly what they were meant to do, very, VERY few of us would have any interest in preserving them in museums. If future generations don't get to see and understand what railroading was about, then our museums will eventually go bankrupt and either fold into the Smithsonian or the NPS, or worse yet be sold off privately and eventually find their way to the scrapper's torch.I personally cringe to imagine a future, say, 175 years from now, when not a living soul has seen an operating steam locomotive, and that wonderment is completely lost. In that world, I doubt it would be easy to justify keeping every steam locomotive we've preserved around and maintained... they're all the same, aren't they? Maybe they'll keep one of the biggest, or one of the fastest, or the one that future historians consider the "best" example of the technology (maybe something like 614?) But who will be able to justify keeping hundreds of old hulks around when no one can feel even the slightest emotional connection to them?

Which is why the technology needs to be preserved just as it existed at the point where the artifact passed from being a working example of its type to being a museum piece. Backdating to illustrate an earlier era is permissible, as that just takes the artifact back to a earlier time in its development, but "forward dating" comes with a risk. If someone makes the decision to change the 6ET brake equipment to 26L because it's too hard to teach the crews to run 6ET, or change the fuel from coal to oil because the logistics of handling coal are too difficult, then what justification will be used in the future to prevent someone from dropping a fuel cell in the tender to feed current to traction motors in the trucks? After all, the locomotive still "runs". That the control equipment detracts from the appearance of the locomotive? Heck, just cut a hole in the backhead and hide it in that space they used to call a firebox.Railway preservation needs to preserve the whole deal; the artifact, the technology, and the skills required to use and maintain it. Otherwise, railway preservation will be nothing more that pushing the little blue guy, or his successor, around with whatever motive power exists at the time.

All valid points. I suppose in an ideal world, we'd have the manufacturing capability to construct new steam locomotives and operate them to generate interest in preserving the historical ones.

The challenge is to find a new business models that permit the operation of pieces that are operational or to make replicaiton a feasable option. Take for example ex-VIA FP-9 6304 owned by IFS leasing (?). This unit is considered to be Amtrak qualified and was temporaily painted in Western Pacific colors for a special last year and has just been repainted into Southern Pacific Black Widow paint for an excursion this year (see the link below). By using temporary paint jobs, this unit can be made suitable for many trips - allowing its owners to better recover costs. There are also real Western Pacific and Souther Pacific F-units that are operational (or planned for restoration)? Would it make sense to go through the high expense of upgrading them (and discarding their historic fabric in the process) for what may be very occasional trips? Tom Cornilliehttp://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?1,937297

The other problem is that we'll always face a sliding scale of when something goes from being a revenue maker to being a piece of history. At what point did it, or will it, become more historically significant that #90 operated for so long on the Strasburg than the #90's original job on the GW? When will Suzy-Q #142 become more historically relevant for being an imported locomotive than it is relevant as a revenue earner? I'm sort of playing devils advocate, only to point out that as time marches on, the line between something being equipment that does a job and a historical artifact that must be preserves becomes more and more fuzzy. At some point should #90 be taken out of service after a major overhaul, so that 100 years later historians can dismantle her and try to infer exactly how the shop crew at the Strasburg did things, the way they documented the condition of the 7002 when they rebuilt her? And will that be as relevant or more relevant? Or will it be irrelevant? At what point will our ability to document our world electronically become so complete that we won't need to "interpret" history through artifacts, because we'll already have a complete electronic record, and the artifacts will just be something pretty to look at, or will the artifacts become irrelevant altogether?To an extent its already happening.. I bet every major railroad museum has a piece of rolling stock or two thats not of any particular interest to anyone, even if it is "the only one of its kind left," because it doesn't have anything specific interesting about it outside of its own mundane existance? So what if its the last 2-8-0 from XYZ Railroad, if it worked on a particularly boring branchline, and in the early 70s some goofball who loved steam bought it out from a scrapyard and kept it around in a shed, and when that goofball died it got picked up by the nearest railroad museum because it was free and they felt some odd obligation to preserve it?Wow, I'm rambling now, I'll stop. We're WAY off-topic anyway.

Not hard questions at all, to my mind. #90 went from working for a railroad hauling beets to working for a railroad hauling bumpkins. It's still at work, hasn't been retired, never been in a museum, and if Strasburg decides it would look good in pink with elephant ears, then so be it. Just let's not kid ourselves that this is historic preservation. Perhaps someday, when the engine's service life is over, THEN someone can decide to which period of that life it should be restored.Likewise. it is my impression that the Chinese engines were bought specifically to be sacrificial revenue earners; there is really nothing historic about them, at least not in the context of U.S. railroading.But, we need to not confuse gittin' em runnin' with historic preservation. There are more than a few engines that were "preserved" in parks that have come back out, and then the changes begin anew. I have one in mind, which I won't name because the example is no better or worse than many others, that in the course of being "restored" had the only extant example of an original wood framed cab destroyed because it was too much trouble to rebuild, and "steel is better"; lost its single stage air pumps, replaced with a cross compound, because "we need more air" (never mind that the engine ran in passenger service for thirty years and didn't seem to have a problem); and lost its 6ET equipment because "26L is better." The way things were headed for a while, it stood to also lose its grates in an oil conversion, and I have no doubt that if the feed water heater would have taken a crap, that would have gone, too. Now, Worthington SCA feed water heaters mounted on the pilot deck aren't exactly pretty, but one can't deny that there are not many examples left today. Let's not kid ourselves. There is NO compelling reason that these changes were made, other than the people making the decisions didn't take their stewardship of a historic artifact seriously.And that's my point. It is stewardship. Artifacts can be run for the purpose of interpretation. They may need to be changed to meet current safety regs, but the changes need to be done thoughtfully, always keeping in mind that if they are irreversible, they leave the artifact as something less than what it was. Strasburg, who by their own admssion is not a museum, seems to "get" this better than many of the other groups. Their recent rebuilding of the wood WM car was well researched and sensitive to the original fabric of the car, even if they did need to change its function from a parlor to a coach. That sort of conversion is something that many, many railroads did in the course of going about their business, and there is nothing that Strasburg did to the car that can't be reversed at some future date.

In another topic a while ago, we discussed how the replica of the "John Bull" that was built to be run while giving the real engine a rest is now itself considered too historic to be run!