Folks -

I sometimes note that past threads are resurrected with the poster, or those who later comment, not realizing that the original post is OLDER! I wonder if this shortcoming might be helped by simply putting the date of the original post in the subject line? Might take a few seconds extra to do it, but might be of use "down the line". Anyway, just a suggestion and comments certainly welcome.

Also, let me take a moment here to wish everyone a Happy New Year. Hope things go well with you on the rail preservation front in 2015!


Les

That is a good suggestion.

A little to report here-still pushing ourselves to get our 1924 Brill finished and pushing the City of Tucson to permit vintage streetcars to operate on the modern Sun Link line. That and attempting to procure property so that we can actually have a permanent home for our buses and other equipment. A couple of years ago, we moved our stuff to the current storage yard, which will have to be vacated in a year or so for street widening. That we knew at the time we made the first move, but we didn't have any other reasonable choice. Now we have a real possibility of getting a building and property that we will own.

Right now, bus operations look more likely for us now than streetcar operations as we have operable buses (a 1938 Yellow Coach and 1960 TGH-3102), both from local operators-the Yellow Coach came out of Bisbee, Arizona and the TGH-3102 is original to Tucson (delivered new to Old Pueblo Transit in 1960).

Les,

The date the post was made shows at the top of every post. If people don't read that, they aren't going to read the date anyplace else either. Typically, posts that exhume long dead threads come from neubes who are scanning the whole of the discussion list, and they quickly learn to look at the date after they do it once.

I think you are proposing a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

Have a Happy New Year,

On some forums with a younger crowd, necro'ing old threads is considered trolling and is forbidden.

Not sure I understand.

If you have a valid comment or contribution to an old thread, where should you post it? Just because the thread is old, doesn't mean the topic is not interesting.

For us, it's not a bad thing when the original issue still lives and the new info is strongly relevant (and a quality post).

It's usually bad because the probability of that happening is so low. )On other forums it's nigh impossible, hence the ban, or forum set to auto-lock old threads.) E.G.
- blatant fluff "I visited that line in 2003… real shame about it"
- is a dead issue "OMG I just found out about this forum, what happened with the lawsuit?"
- adds nothing genuinely new "Patriarca is a stubborn guy, so yeah, no surprise there."
- wild snap-turn from the original subject matter "I'm modeling Pemberton, does anyone have photos of the depot?"
- wants regurgitation of a 5 page long thread he doesn't want to read "So what ended up happening?"

I was trying to find an example of that happening with the Lake Whatcom Railway but apparently mods deleted the junk, which is great. Posts are the product, not the customer, and the respect owed to a post is directly proportional to its quality.

Placing the date in the subject is a good idea, but there are still 16 years (1245 pages) of previous posts without them. The odds are that most of the necromanced posts will continue to be dateless.

Jeff