As a casual observer of the rail industry, I'm nostalgic for the days when there were more online customers, local switch jobs, and branchline trackage. Factory towns always intrigued me, and I get nostalgic for when the names of towns were synonymous with the names of their factories. Many towns had factories or even a specific industry that made them unique for the products made there. The City of Holyoke for example, had both the textile and the paper industry and they were connected. High quality fine writing paper was manufactured best using cotton rags; therefore having Holyoke as a textile center was a boon for its paper industry. The industrial landscape of America continues to change and nowhere is that more evident than when you look along an urban railroad line and see the metamorphosis that has occurred around it. Chasing ghosts from our industrial past seems to be a natural progression.