On the other side of the coin I find it kind of annoying when crews automatically assume that anybody that comes up to ask questions is dumb as a brick. Been turned off of revisiting more than a few places because of that attitude. Also the reason I lost any interest in volunteering anywhere because a lot of places act like anyone young enough not to die of a stroke at any moment is automatically stupid.

Although it is entertaining at some places when I walk up and start asking genuine technical questions and crews are flabbergasted that someone young enough to still have color in their hair actually knows something.

Example being when I did a throttle time event with the Gramlings #126 and proceeded to name everything on the backhead without help during the orientation and then just quietly ran the engine back and forth with the correct signaling for the half hour without any direction. At the end of it they ask me how "somebody like me" (meaning younger)knew how do that to which I responded that believe it or not some of us do have a basic understanding of mechanics and some of us can even still read.

After reading some of the goofy things we get, and some of us, including myself have seen (and some things I haven't mentioned to boot), and seeing how often it happens, how could those engine crews NOT be flabbergasted to find someone of any age who knows anything?

More brain cells being tickled. . .from a fellow I used to know in Martinsburg, W.Va., who shall be nameless for obvious reasons--

He was telling me about a bad wreck on what was still the B&O in Martinsburg. This occurred right on the overpass over Queen Street in that town. He was driving through the underpass and noted a train was going over. As he was coming out he noticed it suddenly got very dark--and drove through an avalanche of ballast and coal. As he got clear he looked in his rear view mirrors and was watching the derailment in progress, cars crashing, and torn up rails "writhing like snakes."

Later, he came back to watch the cleanup efforts with two steam cranes, one from Cumberland, the other from Brunswick. There was a crowd, and his bulk--he's tall and just plain big, with a deep voice to match (think of Bowser from the group Sha-Na-Na, but a good deal heavier). He had a nice height advantage in watching the action.

As I mentioned, this was when the road still had a sizable roster of steam powered cranes. Anyone who's seen a steam crane at work can tell you it can outsmoke the biggest locomotive, and there were two of them here, fogging up downtown Martinsburg.

Next to this fellow was a little old lady. As he put it, "She should have been old enough to remember coal being burned in factories, homes, and on the railroad, too."

She looked at this big guy, and said in a, well, high pitched, little old lady voice, "Pee-yew! What's that smell?"

Being a rail enthusiast and a steam fan, he responded in his booming voice, "Ma'am. that's coal smoke. Don't it smell good?"

From the Rio Grande Southern No. 20 thread--it's not just steam:

Supposedly they get people that "dense" in Britain as well, where you can hardly throw a stone anywhere without it landing on the site of some long-ago battle, massacre, or atrocity.....



If you study the English language (and dialect formation and different grammar forms of other languages) long enough, you might be able to deduce that this is a mangled (through poor education or English as a second language) way of asking "When do we start seeing elk instead of deer?" Given the large number of foreign tourists the Canyon attracts,. that has to be a safe assumption, and points out just one of the challenges of running a railroad aimed more at tourists than history buffs.

(I've heard a sarcastic remark from locals that if you want to see elk, drive way too fast on the local roads and they'll be happy to step in front of you....)

But there are two prominent signs inside the log-built Grand Canyon South Rim station next to its (unmanned) ticket window, answering two apparently daily questions there that are nonsensical to those of us who know how the railway operates but are actually quite sensible for anyone else:

"THIS TRAIN DOES NOT GO INTO THE GRAND CANYON ITSELF"

"If you board this train here, you will NOT return until the following afternoon!"

Considering that the (relatively) nearby Verde Canyon Railroad makes a point in all its marketing about travelling through the Verde Canyon itself, the first one answers a completely sensible question.

Some years ago I was in Colorado for an Assoc. of Ry Museums meeting and we had an after dinner speaker who during his talk told of the same question about deer and elk being asked on the Pikes Peak Cog Railway.

He then told of an interesting problem that they have on the Cog Railway. The cars were named for Colorado communities and carried these near their doors. One of the cars was named for Salida, Colorado. Tourists visiting from Spanish speaking counties avoided entering this door -- after all "sallida" is Spanish for "exit".

Sandy's comment on the Grand Canyon Ry brought me to my WABAC Machine.

Back when ATSF was running their daily Summer passenger train from Williams Jct. to Grand Canyon, the late Trains Editor David P Morgan noted his favorite employees' timetable entry:

"No. 15 will turn on wye and back into Grand Canyon."

Phil Mulligan

I’m right in the middle on this topic. Having worked at a tourist railroad as an employee for 16 years now l, I’ve heard some pretty crazy questions. But having been trained at Disney I was also taught to respect each and every customer and to listen for the question within the question.

One of the most common questions at Disney is “what time is the 3-o-clock parade?” Disney taught us the only wrong answer is “3:00” since the guest obviously already knows this. Disney taught us that the guest is actually wanting to know where they can watch the parade, or what time will it arrive in this area, etc.

Let’s all remember that we all started out knowing nothing.... perhaps we can be a bit humble and hope that we get a chance to spark curiosity and a genuine caring for steam locomotives and the history of transit.

Well, the WABAC Machine is still on and Brian put me on the West Coast at a time when few cities had trolleys and they were all legacy systems. In San Francisco, MUNI ran all their trolleys down Market St. to the East Bay Terminal. George Horn was a MUNI motorman but he was from Brooklyn, and he had been a trolley motorman there, then later retired from the NYCTA.

On MUNI, tourists would board George's car, look at him and ask "where's your steering wheel?" George would answer "I don't use one; some of the younger guys do but the car knows where it's going."

Phil Mulligan

Yes, George operated both Brooklyn 1001 and MUNI 1040 in revenue service: the first and last production PCC's.

San Francisco and New Orleans are two of the best “transportation museums” in the world. The mixture of cables cars, ferries, PCC, Vintage trolleys, and more modern LRT is simply not to be missed. The scenery of the bay isn’t half bad either ;).