Since nobody else has mentioned this in the last couple of days I will. I think it's relevant here. Longtime transportation writer and columnist Don Phillips died this past Tuesday after a long illness. He was 83.

While Don is probably best known around here as a formerly monthly columnist on rail and other transportation topics, he was also one of the best around in writing about railroads and transportation for a general audience, something that has become a lost art in a world of increasingly consolidated media that only values generalists. When he was transportation reporter for the Washington Post their stories on any significant event having to do with Amtrak or railroads in general were accurate and easy for the general public to follow. His coverage of the 1987 Chase, Maryland Amtrak wreck and subsequent fallout for the industry was the best in the business, as was his later coverage of the TWA Flight 800 crash over the Atlantic several years later. If one is not getting accurate information about the subject, one cannot have any kind of informed opinion about it, and you got the straight scoop from Don.

I got to know Don a little for a number of years in the late '00's, having struck up an acquaintance with him at an NRHS banquet, and later bringing him to Akron to be a banquet speaker for the Akron Railroad Club. Above all, he genuinely liked working railroaders, and treated us as equals, not just the "suits" in the head office, although he counted people like the Claytor Brothers as friends as well. As far as I know, he was the only active journalist who was a member of the Lexington Group in Transportation, mostly because he kept that activity separate from his writing. He could move through multiple levels of the transportation universe, which no doubt greatly improved his reporting. He will be missed, and transportation writing and reporting may very well never see his like again.