I removed three posts in this thread which identified a specific individual by his actual name.

I did this not out of any prejudice against the posters at all (actually I think they had only the best of interntions) but because in my judgement it is very problematic for this forum to be commenting on individuals by name in a context that could be viewed by the individual in question as potentially libellous or actionable.

RyPN and the Interchange as a forum are immune from suit for libel for material that appears on the Interchange under the Communications Decency Act of 1996. This act, among other provisions, affords a much much higher level of protection to the hosts of online bulletin boards than it does to newspapers or book publishers. This immunity has recently been upheld by the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in the case of Baztel v. Cremers.

Note, however, that this immunity extends to RyPN as the publisher of this forum, and not to individual posters. Individuals can still be held liable for the words they publish by submitting them to this online forum.

So--I encourage you all to reflect before you post, and ask you to think carefully about the wisdom and, for the matter, the necessity of this thread when it gets to the point where we are identifying precise individuals instead of telling generic or anonymous old stories.

More broadly: does this thread really advance the mission of this forum, which is to exchange information about railway preservation? I would submit that though these people are known to many of us, further discussion of their individual pecadillos even in the abstract, much less by name, is not really what this board is intended to be about.

You are free to disagree, and anyone may continue this thread, though I don't really encourage it. But I have decided that mention of individual names in this context amounts to something akin to flaming, so we won't do that going forward.

eledbetter@rypn.org

Might I suggest that this type of discussion would be more appropriate and definitely welcome at the Chaski Railfan site, which has a broader scope than strictly preservation. I've always thought of the two sites as complimentary since they have different objectives.

Chaski Railfan WWWBoard
mrwowak@yahoo.com