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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
>
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