I read posts about subjects at xxxx road and yyyyy street and I don’t have a clue as to what town, city, or state its in. The topic could be easier to get interested in if I knew more about where it was.
You have hit on the primary cause railroads and the public fail to communicate. The public speaks street & hundred block…railroads speak milepost. As a practical matter, the only streets railroads know about are the ones that cross their tracks.
When the public calls in a emergency on the 99 hundred block of a street the parallels the tracks and further qualifies it at being at the Quickee Mart…they have identified NOTHING to the railroad.
YES! YES! YES! I heartily agree!
Silly story to illustrate…
Several years ago, when my son lived in Princeton, New Jersey and I was planning a trip to go visit him, on some web forums there were several stories about the “Brooklyn Roundhouse”. Since my son and I are railfans, I thought maybe we could make a short extension to my long trip from Iowa to go to Brooklyn, N.Y. to see this Roundhouse. We set aside a couple of days for this excursion, it should be just a short 1/2 day drive and maybe one overnight stay at a motel.
I began to look for the address of the “Brooklyn Roundhouse”. None of the web references to it gave a street address or any sort of contact information, so I studied maps of Brooklyn and I looked at (early) Google-Earth images… I followed Rail lines on the maps and satelite images, trying to find where this Roundhouse would be in Brooklyn.
Daing! They have this building really well hidden! I could find no evidence of any Roundhouse in (or even NEAR) Brooklyn!
I finally PM’d one of the people that had posted comments about the Brooklyn Roundhouse and asked where it was. He responded saying to “come into the area off of SE Holgate Blvd.”. So using DeLorme Street Atlas, I searched for that street… There is no “Holgate Blvd” (or Street, Avenue or any other “road”) in Brooklyn, or anywhere near it!
In a follow-up reply he stated; “That will be a long trip from Princeton to Portland!”
WHAT? Why would I go to Portland, Maine to get to Brooklyn, New York? This guy must not know geography!
It was only then that I realized that the “BROOKLYN Roundhouse” is not in Brooklyn New York, on the east coast of the U.S.A. near the Atlantic ocean, but rather in “Portland, OREGON” on the west coast of the U.S.A.
It is interesting how names suddenly appear, not once but twice or more times, in a short space of time.
Few people, even with a small knowledge of American place names, will not have heard of Brooklyn - and may have even been offered the bridge there for a bargain price. [(-D]
However, recently (on the RailChannel maybe) I came across the name Brooklyn - not New York, but in Portland OR. Well that’s twice. There will, most likely, be a third occasion. [;)]
For a while, there was a great webcam at the Brooklyn yard which showed some nice action, including the Amtrak Talgo trainsets flying by. Unfortunately, a few years ago, it shut down “for maintenance” over New Years and never came back up. Too bad, because it was quite entertaining, especially at night.
Brooklyn is also a area of Baltimore, MD
The various media websites aren’t too bad since the masthead or lead stories will often tip you off as to where they call home. As far as place names, it can be absolutely impossible. Burnham Yard is in Burnham IL (CSS) and Denver CO (D&RGW). Wrightwood is a station stop on the Metra Southwest Service (79th & Kedzie) and on the CTA Brown Line (3000 North west of Halsted). CTA has five different Rapid Transit stops at Western Avenue, two of them on the Blue Line. Bryn Mawr is a station stop on Metra Electric (71st & Jeffrey) and on the Red Line (5600 North). And this is just in Chicago.
I’m probably one of the biggest offenders in this regard. I know that there are probably a few other places that have the same name as my usual haunts (Lombard, Elmhurst), but I post often enough, and my geographic information (under my avatar) will give you the idea that I don’t mean Montana, Georgia, or the Streets of San Francisco when I mention “Lombard”.
I strongly suspect that there’s only one Proviso, just like there’s probably only one North Platte when it comes to railroading (I know, there’s also a river by that name). Or Cajon. Or Tehachapi. Altoona…we got one of those in Wisconsin, actually named after the “real” one in Pennsylvania! But if anyone asks me about how to get to, or what can be seen near, Altoona, the Wisconsin burg (near Eau Claire) is going to be deprived of a few tourists.
Oh, and Hegewisch Paul: to me, Bryn Mawr is the UP/CP junction west of O’Hare in Bensenville.
I have been living in Portland for 13 years and just found about the Brooklyn Roundhouse, being named for the neighborhood of Brooklyn… I have never ever heard of the that neighborhood here… but then again, that have been what it was called 100 years ago.
My second assignment on the railroad was as a single track operator/flagman in Western Iowa. While getting ready for work after taking the call, I thought of a question so I called back the crew caller. I don’t remember what the question was, but I know I said something about Grand Junction, meaning the one in Iowa. I didn’t realize right away, but I had reached the Denver crew caller and he thought I was talking about the Grand Junction in Colorado. It soon became clear I had the wrong person, we both got a laugh out of it and he transferred me to the right caller.
A few years ago the van company used at Fremont, NE had a driver shortage. They brought up some of their Kansas City based drivers. One of these was told to go to Mercer, the first control point east of town on the Omaha subdivision. He didn’t know about that Mercer, he thought they meant the one in Missouri on the Des Moines to KC line so that’s where he went.
Brooklyn, IA on the Rock Island, now the IAIS, once had a roundhouse, too. It’s been gone now for about 90 some years.
Jeff