CAN I PARK HERE?

Over the years I have traveled many places thanks to corporate and military obligations.

While not intentionally seeking out rail operations or history, I did manage to run into things sometimes by happenstance, other times by a necessity to get from point A to B. They offer many great memories. Looking back It was times of enjoyment, sometimes grief, but mostly enjoyment. These memories go back when I was a child and looking out a bedroom window, counting box cars and oil cars and gondolas, all pulled but a steam locomotive. Yes it was THAT long ago, but I'm not THAT old! But yet things and times change, sometimes faster than we want to allow. Before we know it, the memory is just that, a memory as the event has now vanished. For some its a daily humdrum of hoping a train or subway ad join the masses to rush to and from work. For them its druggery. Oh! To have time to sit and enjoy an hour not to have to worry about steering a car and avoiding the maniacs of the blacktop highway speeding to get to??? Such is/was the days of travel by train.

Once a necessity even to get another town or to the beach. Today we do it by car and blacktop highways. Tomorrow who knows, will it be a new form of maglev, solar or nuclear that will drive our transportation systems. Will there still be planes? Maybe there will be personal ufo's! Jetson's here we come!!

So during future posts I will present some of my experiences, hoping that I might influence you to seek out such remaining destinations, possibly at an earlier age than I, and do it for the enjoyment of a mode of transportation that may someday be a memory in your mind as it is mine. So take the sojourne. Engage in a time when the world went slower, achievements were harder but satisfaction was a daily reward for our hard earned efforts. Inventions were a daily word, discoveries abounded right around the corner, new horizons were in easy reach.

Never the less, the railroad has survived, evolved and became a safer, speedier and more efficient way of moving man and goods in large quantities...

So enjoy these short sojourns, may they whet the appetite to remember when and relive a past era... and perhaps discover the future. Will it remain in our lives? Is it doomed to fade to the past? Funny as we get older, we seek out that what we enjoyed from the past... What is it about riding the rails, the clickity clack of wheels, the smooth ride, the sound of a horn or whistle, the chug of steam, the rolling of large wheels in control of huge power? Will the trains of tomorrow offer such a sensory feast?

So park yourself and enjoy.... All aboard!