Pondering
I have been thinking lately about conflict and truth in the railfan community. I recognize that I often feel a need to be right and when I know something is wrong, I feel a strong desire to speak up. I don’t know how much of that has come from my own upbringing vs. my own experience as an engineering student, but it can almost be compulsive to prove a desire to be right. As I approach making the transition into my first engineer job proper soon, I often question what is the fine line between corrective behavior and antagonism; and I wonder how my behavior online in the railfan community has conditioned me to respond to such issues.
There is a family event which still makes me chuckle regarding my late grandfather. We were out to lunch with him at a Thai restaurant, and he began to discuss (in his thick central Utah accent, similar to Wilford Brimley’s voice) how “Thai food ain’t that spicy, they just sprinkle the spice onto the top of the food and it burns off quickly, it ain’t that bad.” Almost to prove a point he ordered the spiciest thing on the menu, and as he began to eat it, we watched his face turn a bright red. Tears were streaming down his eyes, and sweat forming on his brow, gulping down water as if it could quench the flames. It seemed as if steam was coming out of his ears like a Looney Tunes escapade. Yet he persisted “see it’s not THAT spicy, it’s not that spicy, look I’m fine!” Even as more evidence mounted that grandpa’s assessment was wrong, he stubbornly held his ground to prove a point, and I am sure if we had asked him about it before he went to his grave, he would have asserted he was still right, although we’d never see him order Thai food that spicy ever again.
Such stubbornness is not always an inherently wrong trait. It gives someone the ability to dig their heels in and do hard things. It can allow people to hold firm in their beliefs and prevent the world from causing them to yield to error. Such stubbornness though when mixed with pride can make people antagonistic, and harsh. It can turn people callous and cruel. Like many human attributes there is a fine line in stubbornness, to much can cause damage, to little can cause people to yield to falsehoods.
There has been a lot said about the idea of a “post-truth” society, but the railfan world has in many ways always teetered on being a post-truth hobby. Early pioneering railroad authors, erudite people of their age; often wrote in business journals and scholarly reports. Textbooks on the operation and design of steam locomotives were found on the shelves of respected engineers. Knowledge in railroading was a matter of trade, and only the occasional interjection of yellow journalism from outside parties could taint that knowledge. An extensive folklore tradition of truisms and tall tales also arose, but it was the type of stories comrades could share with each other while working a locomotive together; the type of story to brighten the mood during a day of hard work.
The early-20th century saw this world of railroad knowledge open up to the masses through people such as Lucius Beebe. A rich socialite, Beebe and his partner Charles Clegg published many comprehensive books on railroad topics that became like a Biblical canon to early rail enthusiasts, capturing the moment many shortlines began to fold and steam began to yield to the diesel. Beebe injected his writing with romanticism and turned the railroad into a symbol of American mythology. However, Beebe carried with him biases that impacted his work from ideas of strict classism (much of rural America and its diverse peoples was regarded by Beebe with a rich New Englander’s disdain) and a desire to expound the folkloric history of railroads as the definitive history. When aspects of history didn’t match the artistic brush Beebe cast, he changed them or tweaked them to better suit his narrative. Lucius Beebe was equally pioneering and pompous, and when faced with criticism he stated his ambitions clearly “Neither Clegg nor I have ever been a member of the tractive-force and cylinder-dimension contingent of railfans. We prefer the beauty and romantic aspects of railroading.” (You can see why as a mechanical engineer my own attitude comes to clash instantly with Beebe’s dismissal of the mechanical nature of the railroad)!
The school of Beebe-isms spread to other prominent railroad authors and figures of the era and those who followed. Ward Kimball the Disney animator with his love of women, music, and fire truck red tones; playfully mixed his own image of railroad history with that of his cartoonist background; casting an image of gaiety along the American frontier. Stephen Ambrose, famed for his World War II histories; bungled through the history of the Transcontinental Railroad like a sledgehammer, producing a tome of history that would have been forgotten for its apparent sloppiness had it not been for the author’s own Band of Brothers fame. Countless authors turned the history of the Denver & Rio Grande Western and its predecessors into a lopsided focus, romanticizing the San Juan narrow gauge routes which were part of steam’s last stand in the Rockies; and omitting much of the standard gauge history of the railroad from their records. The Denver & Rio Grande Western Railway, the Rio Grande Western and almost anything west of Grand Junction became after-thoughts; and if you pick up any Rio Grande book from the mid-20th century, I dare you to try and find more than five or ten pages about anything beyond the state-line that says anything more meaningful than “Oh yeah I guess Utah had Soldier Summit.”
Even the children’s stories of Reverend Awdry set about a romantic notion of the steam era, and while he vividly captured the emotions of rail enthusiasts watching British steam come to a close; he perhaps accidentally caused thousands of railfans who were introduced to the hobby through his Thomas stories to harbor a resentment towards the new, towards change. Don’t believe me? Look at the comments under any article about battery locomotives or hydrogen locomotives. A Stadler FLIRT running on hydrogen power just ran 1700 miles without refueling on the Pueblo test-track, but reactions from commenters online continue to be angry cries of the “Gadgetbahn” and how such technology is a waste when overhead catenary already exists. The notion that soon diesels might yield to strange battery and hydrogen engines, even if not fully proven yet; seems to awaken a fear in railfans who seem poised to witness another technological shift in locomotive power soon that will rival the change from steam to diesel in the last century. I chuckle at the thought of a future 2060’s equivalent to Rev. Awdry, writing stories for children mourning the romantic loss of the diesel locomotive and creating a fanciful freelanced railroad where diesels can still roam free thanks to the kind heart of a stuffy British businessman.
Historian Carl W. Condit noted the impact of these attitudes on the railfan community, “I referred earlier to this paradoxical combination of love for facts and a propensity for erroneous assertions. The reason, I think is that the buff’s infatuation with the accumulation of exact and detailed information convinces him that he possesses knowledge when he does not.” Oh, how many times have I felt the fury of watching someone go off on a tirade with facts I know are inherently untrue, insist on maintaining falsehoods which have no foundation in reality! Oh, how many times have I been shut up by somebody more skilled than me in the railfan world, people with real world experience calling out my own fanaticism from being someone sitting on the sidelines, leaving egg on my face for espousing false ideas I had fervently defended! It turns out that my engineering degree was not an instant achievement of unlocking “all knowledge that has and ever has been” and oftentimes I find myself reflecting that I am the very creature Condit warns about, enough knowledge to know some truth and enough to stubbornly stand by falsehoods, my face red, tears streaming out of my eyes and sweat on my brow as I continue to stand by a false observation. The creature Condit warns about is also my enemy, and I watch in frustration as others dig in and hold onto falsehoods, I exist in a state of duality knowing the people in this hobby who frustrate me the most seem to hold a mirror up to myself.
I worry about those confident in their thoughts though who refuse to learn. I am only 30 so maybe complaining about "them kids" only prematurely ages me further, but there are many railfan conversations I have seen shutdown by the smug image of "Thug Yoda" with 'Mucho Texto' as it's caption. I feel an early 2000's desire to tell somebody in the voice of former First Lady Laura Bush to "GO READ A BOOK FOR ONCE" instead of relying on TikTok reels and shorts for all their world view, but that suggestion to read a book seems self contradictory with my own knowledge that the railfan literary canon is flawed at it's core. Still, I fear a generation that rather than searching for new information under self initiative is content to have it spoon fed to them. I praise the cohort of talented railfan video makers who are trying to make knowledge accessible to all, but I worry for their own sanity in the process. I would recommend some rather frank discussions from Steam Locomotives in Profile on the matter on how working for the YouTube content machine is taxing on mental health, and the greater need for people to take care of their own being while trying to endeavor to make history and art.
Now a new dangerous aspect has entered the railfan world, the rise of artificial data generation. I am not perfectly AI-less, Adobe Photoshop’s AI assisted upscaling capability is one of my favorite tools and I have used it on almost all my rail photos (including the one attached to this essay) since it was first introduced. But I have also seen a rise of poorly AI colorized photos, the ChatGPT writing on railroad history, the image that the railfan world already so poorly unawares of its own true history will soon be stuck in a cycle of bias-affirming AI garbage. Even the AI tools in Photoshop which I rely so heavily on are in a bundle, sure I have only used the upscaling feature to shove more pixels into my images; but it sits in a suite next to generative abilities that in a click of a button could expand an image with a false reality; create landscapes and trains that don’t exist in an instant. It is frightening and fascinating, a Pandora’s Box sitting right at my fingertips, a nuclear football that if I were but to play with it could create a fantasy around the reality my camera hopes to capture. I do not know how the railfan community will weather this, especially as the algorithm demands creators churn out content; more content. Truth must yield to money creating content. It’s like Orwell’s 1984 but somehow stupider; the Ministry of Truth isn’t some intelligent conspiracy but a stupid profit searching snake eating its own tail, a machine that can’t begin to understand its own purpose but runs without opposition because of the profits it manages to generate for those at the top. Yes, we’re still the peons beneath Big Brother here; but Big Brother is blatantly stupid and emotionless and yet we collectively yield to it; while the tech giants reap the profits.
For my issues with Beebe’s pompous false realities, he carries with him a human element of emotion I can understand. His love of the fine things of life, his impeccable dress and rigid ideas of photographic composition are emotionally driven. The tragic death of Charles Clegg after years of mourning his partner’s own passing; cries for sympathetic understanding from modern day critics. I can cry foul about the myths and lies perpetuated by Beebe’s pen, but I can’t fault his desire to see the romanticism of the rails. Sure, I may consider myself now to be more of the “school of Richard Steinheimer” than that of Beebe’s camera lens, but even as a poster child of the “tractive-force railfans” I am seeking with my own photos to capture a romantic image of the railroad (even I have to note the faults in some of the captions in Steinheimer’s books, mistakes by him and David P. Morgan in trying to use words to give justice to the imagery). I travel hundreds or thousands of miles to see steam locomotives at preserved railroads, to mourn alongside Awdry for the loss of a motive power that ceased to be mainstream before my own parents were born, and am fascinated by the vivid imagery of steam evoked in the words of William Gould (perhaps it is only appropriate that William Gould’s son shares my same academic degree and alma-matter, a reminder of how the emotional love of the steam engine can drive men in the mad pursuit of engineering mastery). A human emotion drives us all, even in our clashes and disagreements. The algorithm and the AI lack this emotion, and letting it touch the railfan community could rob us of the heart of the hobby.
So, we sit at a strange crossroads. A broken foundation of half-truth railfan literature guides us as our collective canon, while a mindless machine regurgitates it back at us. Emotions run high, and everyone (myself included) wants nothing more than to prove we’re right and we’ve won some sort of moral and intellectual high-ground. The railfan hobby is hostile and self-destructive. It is also welcoming, and home to many great people I call friends. It is a hobby which attracts outsiders and losers, and is a place where many of us have been able to share in our collective interest despite disparate backgrounds. Do our conflicts threaten to destroy that, or is it merely part of the same passion which drove us here to begin with?
I wish I had easy solutions to hard problems, but all I can say to each other is to take care. Mind your own health and emotions; and also try and consider the other person on the side of the screen. But never lose that crazy passion, the emotion which burns at the heart of this absurd hobby. Be humble and open to correction, but never let critics or the machine destroy the fire that burns inside us. Even if you disagree with every word I said, I hope that this rant inspires you to continue healthy discourse on the nature of this hobby.
Oh the train photo is at Bauer Utah, the same autorack train I posted earlier, for anyone still wondering.
Pondering
I have been thinking lately about conflict and truth in the railfan community. I recognize that I often feel a need to be right and when I know something is wrong, I feel a strong desire to speak up. I don’t know how much of that has come from my own upbringing vs. my own experience as an engineering student, but it can almost be compulsive to prove a desire to be right. As I approach making the transition into my first engineer job proper soon, I often question what is the fine line between corrective behavior and antagonism; and I wonder how my behavior online in the railfan community has conditioned me to respond to such issues.
There is a family event which still makes me chuckle regarding my late grandfather. We were out to lunch with him at a Thai restaurant, and he began to discuss (in his thick central Utah accent, similar to Wilford Brimley’s voice) how “Thai food ain’t that spicy, they just sprinkle the spice onto the top of the food and it burns off quickly, it ain’t that bad.” Almost to prove a point he ordered the spiciest thing on the menu, and as he began to eat it, we watched his face turn a bright red. Tears were streaming down his eyes, and sweat forming on his brow, gulping down water as if it could quench the flames. It seemed as if steam was coming out of his ears like a Looney Tunes escapade. Yet he persisted “see it’s not THAT spicy, it’s not that spicy, look I’m fine!” Even as more evidence mounted that grandpa’s assessment was wrong, he stubbornly held his ground to prove a point, and I am sure if we had asked him about it before he went to his grave, he would have asserted he was still right, although we’d never see him order Thai food that spicy ever again.
Such stubbornness is not always an inherently wrong trait. It gives someone the ability to dig their heels in and do hard things. It can allow people to hold firm in their beliefs and prevent the world from causing them to yield to error. Such stubbornness though when mixed with pride can make people antagonistic, and harsh. It can turn people callous and cruel. Like many human attributes there is a fine line in stubbornness, to much can cause damage, to little can cause people to yield to falsehoods.
There has been a lot said about the idea of a “post-truth” society, but the railfan world has in many ways always teetered on being a post-truth hobby. Early pioneering railroad authors, erudite people of their age; often wrote in business journals and scholarly reports. Textbooks on the operation and design of steam locomotives were found on the shelves of respected engineers. Knowledge in railroading was a matter of trade, and only the occasional interjection of yellow journalism from outside parties could taint that knowledge. An extensive folklore tradition of truisms and tall tales also arose, but it was the type of stories comrades could share with each other while working a locomotive together; the type of story to brighten the mood during a day of hard work.
The early-20th century saw this world of railroad knowledge open up to the masses through people such as Lucius Beebe. A rich socialite, Beebe and his partner Charles Clegg published many comprehensive books on railroad topics that became like a Biblical canon to early rail enthusiasts, capturing the moment many shortlines began to fold and steam began to yield to the diesel. Beebe injected his writing with romanticism and turned the railroad into a symbol of American mythology. However, Beebe carried with him biases that impacted his work from ideas of strict classism (much of rural America and its diverse peoples was regarded by Beebe with a rich New Englander’s disdain) and a desire to expound the folkloric history of railroads as the definitive history. When aspects of history didn’t match the artistic brush Beebe cast, he changed them or tweaked them to better suit his narrative. Lucius Beebe was equally pioneering and pompous, and when faced with criticism he stated his ambitions clearly “Neither Clegg nor I have ever been a member of the tractive-force and cylinder-dimension contingent of railfans. We prefer the beauty and romantic aspects of railroading.” (You can see why as a mechanical engineer my own attitude comes to clash instantly with Beebe’s dismissal of the mechanical nature of the railroad)!
The school of Beebe-isms spread to other prominent railroad authors and figures of the era and those who followed. Ward Kimball the Disney animator with his love of women, music, and fire truck red tones; playfully mixed his own image of railroad history with that of his cartoonist background; casting an image of gaiety along the American frontier. Stephen Ambrose, famed for his World War II histories; bungled through the history of the Transcontinental Railroad like a sledgehammer, producing a tome of history that would have been forgotten for its apparent sloppiness had it not been for the author’s own Band of Brothers fame. Countless authors turned the history of the Denver & Rio Grande Western and its predecessors into a lopsided focus, romanticizing the San Juan narrow gauge routes which were part of steam’s last stand in the Rockies; and omitting much of the standard gauge history of the railroad from their records. The Denver & Rio Grande Western Railway, the Rio Grande Western and almost anything west of Grand Junction became after-thoughts; and if you pick up any Rio Grande book from the mid-20th century, I dare you to try and find more than five or ten pages about anything beyond the state-line that says anything more meaningful than “Oh yeah I guess Utah had Soldier Summit.”
Even the children’s stories of Reverend Awdry set about a romantic notion of the steam era, and while he vividly captured the emotions of rail enthusiasts watching British steam come to a close; he perhaps accidentally caused thousands of railfans who were introduced to the hobby through his Thomas stories to harbor a resentment towards the new, towards change. Don’t believe me? Look at the comments under any article about battery locomotives or hydrogen locomotives. A Stadler FLIRT running on hydrogen power just ran 1700 miles without refueling on the Pueblo test-track, but reactions from commenters online continue to be angry cries of the “Gadgetbahn” and how such technology is a waste when overhead catenary already exists. The notion that soon diesels might yield to strange battery and hydrogen engines, even if not fully proven yet; seems to awaken a fear in railfans who seem poised to witness another technological shift in locomotive power soon that will rival the change from steam to diesel in the last century. I chuckle at the thought of a future 2060’s equivalent to Rev. Awdry, writing stories for children mourning the romantic loss of the diesel locomotive and creating a fanciful freelanced railroad where diesels can still roam free thanks to the kind heart of a stuffy British businessman.
Historian Carl W. Condit noted the impact of these attitudes on the railfan community, “I referred earlier to this paradoxical combination of love for facts and a propensity for erroneous assertions. The reason, I think is that the buff’s infatuation with the accumulation of exact and detailed information convinces him that he possesses knowledge when he does not.” Oh, how many times have I felt the fury of watching someone go off on a tirade with facts I know are inherently untrue, insist on maintaining falsehoods which have no foundation in reality! Oh, how many times have I been shut up by somebody more skilled than me in the railfan world, people with real world experience calling out my own fanaticism from being someone sitting on the sidelines, leaving egg on my face for espousing false ideas I had fervently defended! It turns out that my engineering degree was not an instant achievement of unlocking “all knowledge that has and ever has been” and oftentimes I find myself reflecting that I am the very creature Condit warns about, enough knowledge to know some truth and enough to stubbornly stand by falsehoods, my face red, tears streaming out of my eyes and sweat on my brow as I continue to stand by a false observation. The creature Condit warns about is also my enemy, and I watch in frustration as others dig in and hold onto falsehoods, I exist in a state of duality knowing the people in this hobby who frustrate me the most seem to hold a mirror up to myself.
I worry about those confident in their thoughts though who refuse to learn. I am only 30 so maybe complaining about "them kids" only prematurely ages me further, but there are many railfan conversations I have seen shutdown by the smug image of "Thug Yoda" with 'Mucho Texto' as it's caption. I feel an early 2000's desire to tell somebody in the voice of former First Lady Laura Bush to "GO READ A BOOK FOR ONCE" instead of relying on TikTok reels and shorts for all their world view, but that suggestion to read a book seems self contradictory with my own knowledge that the railfan literary canon is flawed at it's core. Still, I fear a generation that rather than searching for new information under self initiative is content to have it spoon fed to them. I praise the cohort of talented railfan video makers who are trying to make knowledge accessible to all, but I worry for their own sanity in the process. I would recommend some rather frank discussions from Steam Locomotives in Profile on the matter on how working for the YouTube content machine is taxing on mental health, and the greater need for people to take care of their own being while trying to endeavor to make history and art.
Now a new dangerous aspect has entered the railfan world, the rise of artificial data generation. I am not perfectly AI-less, Adobe Photoshop’s AI assisted upscaling capability is one of my favorite tools and I have used it on almost all my rail photos (including the one attached to this essay) since it was first introduced. But I have also seen a rise of poorly AI colorized photos, the ChatGPT writing on railroad history, the image that the railfan world already so poorly unawares of its own true history will soon be stuck in a cycle of bias-affirming AI garbage. Even the AI tools in Photoshop which I rely so heavily on are in a bundle, sure I have only used the upscaling feature to shove more pixels into my images; but it sits in a suite next to generative abilities that in a click of a button could expand an image with a false reality; create landscapes and trains that don’t exist in an instant. It is frightening and fascinating, a Pandora’s Box sitting right at my fingertips, a nuclear football that if I were but to play with it could create a fantasy around the reality my camera hopes to capture. I do not know how the railfan community will weather this, especially as the algorithm demands creators churn out content; more content. Truth must yield to money creating content. It’s like Orwell’s 1984 but somehow stupider; the Ministry of Truth isn’t some intelligent conspiracy but a stupid profit searching snake eating its own tail, a machine that can’t begin to understand its own purpose but runs without opposition because of the profits it manages to generate for those at the top. Yes, we’re still the peons beneath Big Brother here; but Big Brother is blatantly stupid and emotionless and yet we collectively yield to it; while the tech giants reap the profits.
For my issues with Beebe’s pompous false realities, he carries with him a human element of emotion I can understand. His love of the fine things of life, his impeccable dress and rigid ideas of photographic composition are emotionally driven. The tragic death of Charles Clegg after years of mourning his partner’s own passing; cries for sympathetic understanding from modern day critics. I can cry foul about the myths and lies perpetuated by Beebe’s pen, but I can’t fault his desire to see the romanticism of the rails. Sure, I may consider myself now to be more of the “school of Richard Steinheimer” than that of Beebe’s camera lens, but even as a poster child of the “tractive-force railfans” I am seeking with my own photos to capture a romantic image of the railroad (even I have to note the faults in some of the captions in Steinheimer’s books, mistakes by him and David P. Morgan in trying to use words to give justice to the imagery). I travel hundreds or thousands of miles to see steam locomotives at preserved railroads, to mourn alongside Awdry for the loss of a motive power that ceased to be mainstream before my own parents were born, and am fascinated by the vivid imagery of steam evoked in the words of William Gould (perhaps it is only appropriate that William Gould’s son shares my same academic degree and alma-matter, a reminder of how the emotional love of the steam engine can drive men in the mad pursuit of engineering mastery). A human emotion drives us all, even in our clashes and disagreements. The algorithm and the AI lack this emotion, and letting it touch the railfan community could rob us of the heart of the hobby.
So, we sit at a strange crossroads. A broken foundation of half-truth railfan literature guides us as our collective canon, while a mindless machine regurgitates it back at us. Emotions run high, and everyone (myself included) wants nothing more than to prove we’re right and we’ve won some sort of moral and intellectual high-ground. The railfan hobby is hostile and self-destructive. It is also welcoming, and home to many great people I call friends. It is a hobby which attracts outsiders and losers, and is a place where many of us have been able to share in our collective interest despite disparate backgrounds. Do our conflicts threaten to destroy that, or is it merely part of the same passion which drove us here to begin with?
I wish I had easy solutions to hard problems, but all I can say to each other is to take care. Mind your own health and emotions; and also try and consider the other person on the side of the screen. But never lose that crazy passion, the emotion which burns at the heart of this absurd hobby. Be humble and open to correction, but never let critics or the machine destroy the fire that burns inside us. Even if you disagree with every word I said, I hope that this rant inspires you to continue healthy discourse on the nature of this hobby.
Oh the train photo is at Bauer Utah, the same autorack train I posted earlier, for anyone still wondering.