Railroading

It´s better not to allow me talk about it, as I´m likely going to keep talking on forever. And that´s a menace! ;)

 In a nutshell, that´s the best description of my fascination for anything that moves on steel rails. Most of all, however, it´s the American counterparts to ÖBB, PKP Cargo, Freightliner UK etc I´m taken with.
 

Size may indeed make a difference here - 150 cars each laden with two 40-ft-containers stacked on top of one another and 4 x 4400 HP diesel power "on the point" make the ground tremble - , but even more, America was where railroads became the means of transport of the 19th and 20th centuries. And in the USA and Canada the "Class I Railroads", as they are called, keep acting that way up until today, moving some 40% of the volume of cargo on the other shore of the big pond.

People keep asking me, if I wouldn´t once like to become a locomotive engineer. The one and only possible answer to that question is: Yeah, it would be cool of course, but if, i would only wanna do it in the U.S, and over there it´s a job as hard as steel.

And in reality watching from the outside rather than the inside gives you a more convenient view of it all: 12 hours on duty, no fixed working schedule and too often creeping through the middle of nowhere for hundreds of miles. 19400 HP may seem a lot, but that´s not a normal rating. An average freight train may maybe make some 50 MPH (80 KPH). It´s quite a lonely job in the end - nothing I´d want to do. Even if I voluntarily do it on the computer - but doing it that way, you can stop whenever it´s getting boring ;)