http://www.commercialappeal.com/mca/collierville/article/0,2846,MCA_25358_4943574,00.html

I read this article with great interest in the Flimsies section. Based on this article, does anyone know what equipment they sold and if any of it has been moved?

I would also be interested in knowing what equipment that they have sold, or that they own but is not in Collierville, TN. In particular, the Burlington Route Historical Society states that they owned a GP-7 (when the list was composed in 1999)

http://www.burlingtonroute.com/rosters/remain/equipmnt/diesel.htm

Tom Cornillie

Could someone please explain why, in most news articles, each sentence is a separate paragraph?

This drives me nuts every time I read one of these linked articles.

Is is simply the dumbing down of America?

Or is it actually taught at j-schools?

I know there are some professional media types here.

Could you provide an answer?

Howard P.

(sorry, couldn't resist....)

Can't say what they teach these days in j-school, but when I learned the newspaper business by doing some 30 years ago, the rule of thumb was no more than three sentences to a paragraph. Even if you had more to say on the same subject, you broke up the paragraph. It went totally against my grain as a born-again English teacher, but that's what they wanted. And no words or sentence constructions that a 4th grader couldn't understand. Dumbing down started a long time ago, I'm afraid.

In the back of mind is the thought that some group in Memphis had an ex-Amtrak, Ex-Santa Fe pre-war Budd lounge car.

Thirty or more years ago I recall hearing the same thing about newspaper writing. I think some of it is the inch-length of the paragraph in the standard newspaper column.

I've read newspapers from the 1880s and some of the stuff is written without any thought of breaking stories up into paragraphs -- the closest is a sub-heading that serves to break up the story. Also some of the writing then was with some very involved complex or compound or complex-compound sentences or just rambling sentences.

Brian,
It was the "Picuris". I had the pleasure of riding in this car on Amtrak #16 between Houston and Chicago during the first couple of years of Amtrak. The car was virtually unmodified and retained all of the nice AT&SF art deco touches. Unfortunately it was "disco-ised" along the line, a fate which befell many classic cars in Amtrak's desire to become "modern". What a shame.

Don C.

Yes, the PICURIS!

Anyone know what happened to it?

Here is a photo of former DL&W diner 469 at the Memphis Transportation Museum in 2002. I don't know what the other cars are as I didn't take this photo.