NW-Mailing-List Digest, Vol 121, Issue 30

Sat May 16 12:16:19 EDT 2015

Agricola et nauta ad portam stat.

Cogito ergo sum Conservative.

EdK

From: NW Mailing List via NW-Mailing-List 
Sent: Saturday, May 16, 2015 7:40 AM
To: nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org 
Cc: NW Mailing List 
Subject: RE: NW-Mailing-List Digest, Vol 121, Issue 30

      Abram and Frank, old pals, you all remind me why Latin and I parted ways some many decades back, not long after studying "quid est tu'um praenomen." Trains, girls and beer were more-pleasant objects of pursuit! 
      Andre Jackson, Atlanta

      Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPad

        From: NW Mailing List 
        Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2015 12:15 PM
        To: NW Mailing List 
        Subject: Re: Location

        Abram, my dear fellow curmudgeon;

        I can certainly agree with some of your points, but the language does 
        evolve, for better or for worse. And in most fields, even in mine--the 
        Federal Bureaucracy--a lot of the terminology today would be incomprehensible 
        to someone who retired 20 years ago. But, yes, calling it the Norfolk 
        And Southern bothers me, calling a simple articulated a "mallet" is a bit 
        disconcerting. And I have no idea what the correct term is for the 
        person who is the sole crewperson on a train.

        And "Better". Hmmm. I've talked to more than a few engineers 
        who thought diesels were better riding than their railroad's best steam 
        locomotives. And I remember reading articles about when racial 
        segregation still existed on the railroads. So, hmmmm. Now if 
        you're talking from a railfan perspective, there's a reason I'm modeling the 
        Virginian in southern WV in the mid 1950's. 

        But it's kind of sneaky for you to throw in a phrase in Latin. 
        Correct, but sneaky.

        Frank Bongiovanni (who not only knows from law school what the phrase 
        means, but learned it when Latin was not yet a dead language). 

        On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 11:20 AM, NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org> wrote:

        Since when do we "PARK" engines? Oh, since maybe 15 or 20 years 
        ago.

        More "Vocabulary Slippage," gentlemen. 

        One "parks" an automobile or a bicycle, but one "ties down" (or even "ties up") an engine. 

        Guess it's just part of the overall demythologization of railroading as 
        a whole. Along with railroaders dressing for work in baseball caps and 
        tee-shirts and people saying "units" (for engines) and "grown throws" (for 
        switches) and "grabs" (for grab irons) and "heads" (for signal arms,) and 
        trainmen who would rather quack on their radio than give a hand signal (... 
        or who don't even understand something as basic as talking to the engineman 
        by the use of hand signals.)

        Ah, but then our brilliant news media also calls railroads "train 
        companies," calls enginemen "train operators," refers to individual cars 
        (whether passenger or freight) by using the collective plural noun 
        "trains," and uses the terms "Conductor" and "Engineer" 
        interchangeably, as if there were not the lightest distinction between the 
        two. Oh yes, and the "train operators" (engineers) "drive 
        trains." And the degradation goes on and on. Give me a break...

        Yes, I must be an old-school curmudgeon.

        A friend in Kansas, a 1955 Santa Fe man, just yesterday lamented, "I 
        can't even talk to today's railroaders. They don't speak the same 
        railroad language I speak." (Yeah, we were having a conversation over 
        the Morse telegraph wire when he made this statement...)

        Forgive the rant. I just no longer fit in this world. The 
        world of old school railroading was a lot better.

        This constitutes my blog for the day. Quod Erat 
        Demonstrandum.

        -- abram burnett,
        nove cumberlandhorodshchina, oblast pennsylvaniensis

        ===========================
        Sent to You from my Telegraph 
        Key
        ... better than AT&T 4G LTE 

        ==========================

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