Your memory fails you, Howie, that one never happened. I just imagined it would. Some of the real ones below are better.

I did manage to act it out, though, last October, playing "Who's Next" (the greatest rock-and-roll album ever recorded) on the CD player in the Chrysler (AM only in the Lincoln) while the 1225 cruised under the Zilwaukee Bridge. But no foamers could envision that photo angle, so there were no videotapers around to object. Now all I gotta do is find where I can get Kodachrome developed. All the film camera stores around here have gone out of business since I last finished a roll of slides.

Then there's the stupid comment that wasn't stupid. Some friends in another steam operation told this one on themselves to me, but I'm not going to say who they were.

A steam locomotive was in transit to an excursion, and its crew was eating lunch in a yard office. A working railroader came in out of the yard and told them, "Hey, your engine's on fire."

The steam crew replied jovially, "Ha, ha, ha. That's a good one."

"No, really, there's smoke coming out of the front."

"That's okay, it's supposed to do that."

The railroader replied with something like, "Okaaaay . . . "

When the steam crew finished their lunch and went outside, they saw smoke pouring out from between the cylinders. Seems 20 years' worth of oil leakage had soaked the cylinder lagging and caught fire. Superheated steam will do that.

(Incidentaly, the book "Nautilus 90 North" describes an identical incident aboard the USS Nautilus, while submerged. Not so funny.)

The folling is true and names have NOT been changed.

In the early 1980's, UP 8444 was heading to New Orleans from Cheyenne, WY. A service stop was made in Lincoln, NE and all the locals and gawkers were standing in the below freezing weather to see 8444.
As my friend, Dick Schmelling, and I wanted to see the action, so we made our way through the throngs to the side of 8444.
A UP worker was manning the Alemite grease gun and lubing the loco. A nearby bystander pointed to the UP worker and asked me what he was doing.
With a totally straight face, I replied that he was injecting the sound for the locomotive. The bystander thanked me and turned away.
Dick looked at me and doubled over laughing as hard as he could.

Ira Schreiber
Aurora, CO

I can think of two:

"No one will ever go to Campo to ride trains"

and

"You'll never be able to get your equipment up to Campo"

Here we are, 27 years later, going strong.

I'm all for making sport of obnoxious idiots that think they know it all, but deliberately misleading casual bystanders that have sincere, if ignorant-sounding, questions, doesn't really do much for the image of our hobby, IMHO. It's all too easy to come across as being in the same category a the jerks we hate, and alienate possible supporters in our cause if we're not careful.

Ross,

According to the late great John Wilson Vickers of Beaumont, TX and the world of steam, Willie Lump Lump and the Mole also frequented the CB&Q fantrips out of the midwest. I was too young to have ever met either of these characters, but certainly heard the stories. There was also Miss B.U. of Baylor Univ, and the Hogman from Arkansas. On a cold dank winter day like today, you might be haunting the dear departed All-Nations Hobby Shop on west Madison in the Chicago Loop, and run into one of these characters out of makeup. And it was an experience. And for our fellow members of the old Blackhawk Chapter of the NRHS, there was the infamous Dr. Dirty, who wore the same suit to every meeting, and had remnants of the blue plate special at the Forum Cafeteria pemanently attached to his vest!

HJebone in KC, formerly the Windy City and friend of Silver Sky

Motion/opinion heartily and firmly seconded.

Hmm, let's see. This one conversation I had with a pretentious know-it-all who moseyed up to the cab seems to stand out...

"Excuse me...this is a diesel, right?"
"Nope, this is about as real of a steam locomotive as you're gonna find."
"What are you burning?"
"All of our locomotives are oil-fired."
"So it's a diesel."
"No. We're using an oil fire to boil water into steam, harness that steam under pressure, and in turn use it to power the locomotive; 'external combustion.' A diesel locomotive is powered by an internal combustion diesel engine."
"Well what kind of oil are you talking about?"
"We originally burned bunker C, but more recently have been using reclaimed motor oil, which is lighter and more economical."
"So it is a diesel!"
"No..."

The guy gave me a "Hmm, okay, thanks." and walked away with that same smug look on his face like he still knew better.

Oh well, it still doesn't beat a friend's story of the guy complimenting his engine's "fake fire effect" because he knew the locomotive "wasn't really steam," and then proceeded to lecture him how it "couldn't be real" as steam engines were outlawed "because they kept blowing up!" I won't even get started about close encounters with the more "special" folk (or "(t)rain men," as I like to call them in writing) who seem to be everywhere there's an engine hot. Is it just me or does there seem to be a beyond exceptional number of these guys drawn to this train stuff?

Upon completion of one of the New River Trains we had pulled the 765 and her train into the old C&O Station in Huntington. We were stopped waiting for the first half of the train to unload. (With 34 cars we had to make two unloading spots.) A 20-something fella on the platform dressed in scraggly shorts, t-shirt, long blond hair and a baseball hat on backwards asked me if he could come up in the cab. I told him to come on up. He climbed up the ladder, stepped into the gangway and did a double-take as he surveyed the backhead. He then turned to me and in classic "surfer" style speech he said, "Whoa dude! How many guys does it take to steer this thing?"

I made no attempt to explain...

Arne,

There is one place left on the planet that still does Kodachrome. It is in Kansas, either Parsons or Wichita, not 100% sure. They stopped doing it in Japan about a year ago.

How many miniature "steering wheels" are there on that backhead?

Yeah, I've myself gotten very poor mileage out of telling a dad he's wrong in front of his kid. On the other hand it works real nice to (once you know the dad is keen on impressing his son) secretly slip the dad some other, correct info...

Robert

Dumb organizations... here's one.

Newbie railway museum acquires a beautiful historic line. One hitch: They're landlocked unless a Class I reopens a megabuck interlocking. The museum line is older, so museum feels that by the law, Class I "must" do this. Necessary letters are sent off; Class I responds "We sympathize, but, realistically, not gonna happen." Museum fires off further protestations and threats, quite sure they can press the issue and prevail with the ICC.

As it happens, same Class I owns a weedgrown, dormant and historic line which connects Class I to museum's line. So museum has actually had continuous rail to the national system this whole time, save for two cut highway crossings and a couple of pave-overs. Museum has been lusting after this line, actually. Class I delivers the happy ending: We offer to DONATE this line if you forget about the interlocking.

[the museum owes a huge mortgage on their main line with no visible way of paying it off... think this through... if they accept this line, they are assured a railroad even if they default on the original line.]

Museum board (of adults, no less) carefully mulls over these considerations, and decides to smartly retort: "Only if you fix the crossings, prove it passable and throw in a GP9 just for kicks."

Class I is speechless: "Our offer is withdrawn." You go hungry, bow bow bow.

Famous president of Class I, riding excursion train past site of interlocking, is rumored to have interrupted his discussion with subordinates to look and say "No f***ing way."

The second line sat for a few more years (in case museum managed to extract head from derriere, perhaps) ... and eventually became a bike path. So much for that idea.

Big surprise, the interlocking is not yet installed.

But bridges are mended; the museum is on good terms with the Class I.

First, in answer to Brother Mitchell’s query – No, not him, his sidekick from New Jersey who is alleged to have gone into the roundhouse and told the crews there that he was gong to start delivering their road salt by rail – after he finishes with the rotting Ping-Pongs.

Second, both of my daughters read my comments and the backchannel questions and said, “Tell them the rest of it.” One of my grand-daughters said, “If you don’t, I will!”

So –

Father-in-law: At least one of you caught what you thought was a discrepancy between the story of that fateful day working a fan trip and the letter I sent from New Zeeland last Christmas. Your observation was correct as was your inference. Julie's father was Marine killed on Guadalcanal. Her mother remarried after the war. The man she married gave my wife his name, his love, and a little brother, and did things such as sign the college tuition cheques and cram himself into a uniform he had not worn since the Korean War (actually I suspect he bought a new one) to walk her down the aisle. I never once heard him refer to her as anything other than his daughter and she always referred to him as “Dad” or “my father”.

A father-in-law that shares this addiction is not a bad thing. I spent countless enjoyable hours discussing railroads and going railfanning with him and if he were still with us I suspect he would get at least as much pleasure as I do out of a photograph showing his great granddaughter and her husband holding his great-great granddaughter on the platform of a caboose.

Probability of meeting young ladies on a fan trip (or speaking of snowball's): I did not go on that fantrip, or for that matter any others, with any expectation of meeting a suitable young lady. The odds against such an occurrence were astronomical. The demographics on those trips tended heavily toward men with a median age of around forty-five. There were very few women (maybe two percent certainly never more than five percent) and they were primarily the wives of the organizers. Had I known what was going to happen that day I might have found a last minute excuse not to go. I was about to start my last year of graduate school and that was going to be followed by the active duty which I owed the Army. Until that day I had had no real reason to work the possibility of marriage into the plan.

I was twenty-four, which made me one of the youngest men on that trip. Julie was twenty. I believe that she may have been the only lady on board who was less than twice my age. She was there primarily because those tickets had cost her good money and her brother had not been able to go. Of course we ended up talking to each other. It was like finding another American in Vladivostok.

Now there we are at the photo stop. Her father, wearing a jacket and tie and a snap brim hat, is climbing a signal mast so that she can take a photograph. He is one of many on that mast. (Side Note relevant to the Rules Class thread: Think of how close we must have come in those days to the disaster we all dread.) He wanted her to climb up also and have me take the picture. She demurs on account of the skirt she is wearing. She snaps a couple of pictures of him and as I walk over to her she snaps one of me and asks the fatal question. I stuttered my answer and her response was more of the Martian Look and an answer that began with, “Not a snowball’s chance…” Seeing the look on my face she amended that comment to, “I mean that I’ll ever understand. I’d love to have dinner with you sometime.”

Answering the question (or as Chico Marx once said, “There is no sanity clause”): They went back to New Jersey and I went back to work in Boston. We exchanged a handful of letters and when school started again in the fall since I was in New Brunswick and she was in Morristown I called her. That one dinner became going to football games at both Rutgers and Princeton and to movies and then Rockefeller Center and of course the Lionel Showroom before Christmas. Her parents invited me to Thanksgiving Dinner (Nellie Bligh and PRSL to Cape May and they drove me up to Atlantic City to catch a train home). My parents invited her up to Boston over New Year’s. Remember that we were both students, this was the late fifties, and I did not own a car until we were married. This courtship involved many train rides just to see each other or get where we were going.

That February, thinking that I was probably going to be making a total fool of myself, I spent what was close to a year of Army Reserve drill pay on an engagement ring. It came out of my pocket over dessert in the dining room at my father’s club in New York. The look that I got this time was not at all the Martian Look. Her answer was “I thought we were going to do this on the train.”

In answer to Brother Pincus’ question, I got lucky. Aside from the fact that she was not yellow and not in the way, she had grown up in a household where railfan dementia was already the accepted normal behaviour of the dominant male. Given where we met there was no point in trying to hide it. She actually expected it.

For the record and to keep this at least somewhat related to the thread topic, the itinerary which she worked out for our honeymoon involved the Twentieth Century, the Super Chief, the California Zephyr, the Pan-American, and the Southerner.

GME

My grandfather built a 5/8 sized steam tractor. One day at a show this fellow asked me if he could have his picture taken with it...okay by me, UNTIL he decided to pose leaning with one hand on the boiler...I no sooner said "I wouldn't do that" than he yelped and looked at me like I'd done it to him on purpose.... At least he didn't sue. (Tho I can't help but wonder how the pic turned out)