I surfed onto this old story about Southern 4501, it talked about her purchase by Paul Merriman.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=Wj ... tion&hl=en

Read that story, and the two letters to the editor next to it, and tell me we do not live in degraded times.

The Milwaukee journalist was something rare, a newspaper man who understood railroads, and was familiar with local industry, including a publishing house called Kalmbach. He was willing to research his subject matter and understand it. Was he a railfan? I have to admit that sounds likely, given what's been said above, but it still stands out in contrast to the more usual things in the media, such as descriptions of trains that chug along, or a description of a local freight that derailed on shortline Winchester & Western as an "express cargo train," pulled by "engine cars."

This is not new; David P. Morgan himself used to fuss about this sort of thing in his column in Trains. I recall, a year or two later in 1970 or so, a story in a Wheeling paper (which is where I'm originally from) about a train derailment there that was notable for blocking a very busy crossing at 33rd street, in which the local reporter commented that it was fortunate a large "tank car" that had derailed was empty, with no hazardous materials inside. What was funny was the photo tha accompanied the article revealed a cylindrical-sided covered hopper, its outlets facing right at the camera!

Never mind the charges of "bias" in the news! I'm worried about what we are being misinformed about now because the reporters don't know their subject matter!

Then there is the attitude (touched upon in the the Generations thread) of the rail officials at Southern (and some years earlier on the Reading, in the T-1 stationary power thread), in which the officials aren't afraid of the public, and are willing to reach out to them. Contrast this to what sometimes seems to be a sense of paranoia in the modern corporate world, and not just the rail field, either. I wonder if what we are dealing with is really a lot of guilty conscienses about pursuing money and nothing but money, to the detriment of not just your customers (and some would argue the planet), but to your own soul. . .after all, we must remember that these corporate bigwigs are human creatures, too.

Then, in the letters, one asks about the scheduling of an Apollo mission right around Christmas (but does so in a better writing style that you usually see today), and then there is the other letter, with a discussion of opera singers! Who would write about opera today in a local letters column?

Somebody tell me where I can get in touch with Mr. Peabody. I definitely need to make a trip with that WABAC machine of his.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Peabody

Go to your local library or historical society. Hundreds of thousands of old local country newspapers, all jammed chock full of such occasionally overwrought prose, reside on shelves and in microfilm boxes, awaiting someone to peruse these functionally obsolete passages and reports once again.

I can provide fair warning, however:
Many of these reports amount to little more than filler, even in the modern era. Just yesterday, I was browsing through a scrapbook assembled by a Pennsylvania historian in which he pasted EVERY article written about the construction of a local power plant between 1947 and 1950. These amounted to near-daily regurgitations of progress on every conceivable aspect of the plant's construction--up to "spur down Blue Hill now 65% complete after the latest round of blasting"...........

Further observations upon the intellectual level of the contents of newspapers then and now, however, will by necessity descend into some fairly impolite observations upon the actual and intended markets of such media. There wasn't a day in the 19th and early 20th century when "everyone" read the newspaper, but rather only the established gentry, those that had leisure time and reason to peruse what was going on in the world (i.e. no women, no illiterate laborers, etc.).

I knew from the first sentence before I even scrolled down the page to see the book mentioned that the author had read the DPM book, "Locomotive 4501." That line about steam being prosaic and giving the masses of hydrogen and oxygen is very similar to a line on page 6 of the book. Maybe DPM had a hand in the writing. If not he was certainly a major source.

There are many ways to put Mr. Merriman's purchase into words. Both the book and this article phrase it as him writing a check for $5,000.

Good article whatever the source.

Steve