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UP social media campaign promotes photo safety
Join the discussion on the following article:
UP social media campaign promotes photo safety
Thank you UP for doing this, this is a crazy epedemic in my area. I actually have pictures of a girl laying on the tracks between the rails getting her seniors pictures made. Ten minutes after they were finished two trains met on the same spot she was laying. Oh by the way parents and photographer thought nothing was wrong with and that I needed to mind my own business.
Every Union Pacific freight car covered with graffiti, and there are thousands, sends the message to the public that trespassing is accepted. If UP and the railroad industry were really concerned there would not be a railroad industry covered with graffiti.
We are entering our third decade of seeing the nations rails defaced by a legion of unchallenged and freely trespassing vandals. This fad of portraits on the rails is in its second year. Why is there a campaign against this but not spray painting freight cars? Do tagger’s lives not matter?! (sarcasm)
The difference, Mr. Sarcasm, is that photographers and parents do not know that federal and state trespassing laws prevent their activities, and UP is trying to educate them.
I can’t imagine that you would extend the same benefit of the doubt to someone who enters railroad property with the intent of committing a property crime. They may not know they are trespassing, but they know that what they are doing is wrong… Whole different class of people.
I, too, am 100% with UP on this. It’s one thing for unknowing teens to do this on their own, but professional photographers should know better. But… Danger and illegality aside, isn’t it fascinating that the rails still hold a kind of romance for young people, even though many of us think today’s railroads are all but invisible to the general public?