The Train Appreciation Thread!! !

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Love trains and have always lived near a railway and travelled on trains, but my tastes tend to be towards older machinery, especially steam.

Traction engines I also love. Who wouldn't?

Lately I've been getting interested in steam cars also. Jay Leno has a whole series of videos on the steam cars in his collection (Whites, Stanleys, Dobles - the Dobles are impressive machines!). It's easy to see how they fell out of favour, but kudos to the enthusiasts for preserving those that are still around.

I'm obsessed with trains and have been since I was child, but sadly I've only taken the train twice in my life, once when I was around 12 years old and the second time last year. I'd love to one day go on a cross-country train ride on Amtrak.

Love the old steam locomotives.. Watching the mechanisms work and the size of them , can be fascinating to me .

I never took a train. Wasn't allowed to. Always had to leave them on the track!
But I have been on many trains as it was part of my job.

Always liked trains and have always had small ones as far back as I was old enough to hold them.

I used to memorize the movements of walschaerts valve gear on my Dads (Now mine) Hornby Dublo 3-rail locomotives. I could picture the movrments in my mind when I had not seen them running for about five years as I remember memorizing them from when I was four when I was nine years of age.

Recently I have been enjoying looking at pictures of trams that used to run in these parts.

Trams can be very entertaining ..loved to ride when i can ,,even the short ones that go almost straight up the side of a hill.

I have never been on a tram. I wanted to go on one once when I saw them but the guy I was looking after was not interested in them and did not want to go on.

Was on Angeles flight tram in LosAngeles Calif. And another one at Universal Studios , in the same city .
Was great fun both times almost 20 years apart on those rides .

Nice.

I like trains and railroads. Rail transportation really gets short shrift here in America, which is sad because traveling by rail is actually safer and less polluting than driving. Rail really doesn't get the respect it deserves, no thanks to "car culture". Not that having your own car is necessarily a bad thing, just the opposite. But short-changing rail "because cars" is not good and will set us all up for problems in the future. Personally, I wish the US would nationalize its railways and make them more like the Interstates. It's been done in other countries with considerable success. Also, we ought to have some kind of nationwide high-speed rail network that's cheaper than flying and faster and safer than driving. A "third way" as it were.

Have to definitely agree with the above thoughts .

We cant go back to the glory days of American train travel when the railroads all used the Pullman Company to take care of their passengers in luxury. But definitely we should revive rail travel. For the environment. To reduce oil consumption. And because no hijacker has ever caused a train to fly into a skyscraper.

Definitely!

Furthermore, cars, or rather this situation that every family (now every person) needs to have their own private car, has been enormously destructive of communities. I'm in Australia, which in spite of the 'outback' image, is incredibly urban, with most of the population concentrated in a few large cities. Newer suburbs are being constructed which are just giant housing estates and you need a car in order to go the mega-mall in order to shop. There are almost no local specialist shops anymore - milliners, hardware stores, bookshops, bicycle shops, etc., but just huge franchises that you have to drive to get to. And all this when we're supposed to be worried about climate change. I can't see how yet another consumer product (electric cars) is going to solve anything.

I don't know if anyone's been following the talk about 15 minute cities, where everything you need for day-to-day operation is within walking distance (just like it used to be before cars). In such a model, trains would play a vital role, taking up the slack where longer journeys are necessary.

(I'm in Australia, and our national train system could be improved. To begin with, each state has a different gauge for their local networks. It's possible to travel by train between cities. I've done it and enjoyed it immensely, but flying is often cheaper.)

This has turned into a bit of an anti-car rant, but this is something I've been thinking about a lot lately as I see the way the suburbs I grew up in destroyed for the purpose of 'development', and the general dissolution of any sense of neighbourhood.

can get what you are saying about neighbourhoods, happpening in the USA too. Then when you get these little insular communities set up .. it is rife with corruption of local monopolies .. So if you are treated poorly and you do not have adequate transportation . You are stuck , and whatever place it is that may have abused you . you better just get used to taking it . And if your disabled and cant get around well, your stuck again .Worse they had light rail service here and took it all down.. In some places you can still see the tracks that Parralelled the roads. Along the sides of the lower hills. Called the inter Urban rail service . It was actually said the bus services got rid of our Light rail .Then back to the ever offensive car.. Its ridiculous the big car companies still have a stranglehold on the US gov. you have nt been able to get a real economy car imported here unless your extremely wealthy , but they have no use for them. In the 1920s Ford actually had a tractor that ran on a vapour carburetor
60 to 100 mpg. and then no Kei cars were allowed to be imported unless under special circumstances..small twin cylinder cars and mini trucks . kinda makes you wonder who is really destroying the planet for us.
But have also in the distant past been on a actually a steam Power narrow Guage logging Train converted to passenger , it was such a lovely experience.

Notice those flat black metal plates on either side of the "nose" of the locomotive that look like blinders on a horse?

Why did some old steam locomotives have that feature? You would think that those things would trap air like in a cup at the front and increase drag- and slow the train down.