Just saw a couple of threads from 2013 and even older like the one on the New York Westchester and Boston WTH[}:)]
Because individuals post to them. Duh!
Because like Count Dracula, “You can’t keep a good man down!”
Perhaps someday this thread will come back. Who knows?
Occasionally people will go exploring back through the threads, or perhaps do a search and the search engine pops up with one of those old threads.
When done for a good reason, I’ve never understood why it’s frowned upon at some forums.
For an example of what I personally deem a good reason, say that we have an old thread about saving a particular historic locomotive and years later that hope finally has came to fruition. Fully acceptable in my book to bump that old thread with the good news about the locomotive finding a good home in preservation.
When you get some idiot bumping a 20 year old thread just to respond that they don’t have an answer for the question asked by the thread creator, it’s obviously not a good reason. But I can’t say that I’ve ever noticed that type of problem around here.
Railroading has a glorious past. Sometimes hashing over old subjects is more interesting that current ones. And every once in a while, you can hit the lottery. From time to time software updates will unlock topics that were previously locked, opening a whole new realm of possibilities. [(-D]
Sometimes just listening to some members loathing “how did this old zombie come back to life?” is worth the price of admission, all by itself.
And sometimes old topics take on new relevance.
For example, suppose 12-15 years ago you made an observation about railroads deferring maintenance so that they could instead divert the money to geedy stockholders. And some of the “old heads” chastised you, insisting that could never happen, because trains would be coming off the rails.
Then fast forward and you see the same old heads grousing about PSR and misguided fiscal priority…some stories you just couldn’t write any better, even if you were Bernie Taupin. [swg]
That’s setting the bar low.
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You are new here. Why do you object to old threads?
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Perhaps the topics in old threads are more interesting than some current ones?
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“New”. Using that term very loosely.
I’m not real big on fiction, my first thought was to say “Ian Fleming” but was concerned I might get a “who”? in response
edit: (I subsequently changed it, just for you. )
Maybe Dr Frankenstein has become a railfan?
I’ve never made a serious study on this, but I get the impression that old threads frequently are awakened by fairly new members. My guess is that they are more likely to explore back through time while old-timers tend to have a lot of that history stored away in the back of their minds and are more involved in recent topics.
You wouldn’t be thinking of TCIF (sp?) and the CSX by any chance??? ISTR that the attempted takeover was thwarted by the beginnings of the 2008 financial brouhaha, with a couple members stating (early 2008) that OPM (other people’s money)was becoming scarce.
I always revive old threads when I can. If it is somebody else’s old thred, it keeps me from thinking I have a new idea, when it’s been said and done already. If it’s my old thread, it keeps me from just repeating myself. A thread isn’t “dead” if it’s still available for reading.
Might be a similar exercise that drives people to go to cemetaries, and look for epitapaths that are funny, sad or truthful?
Ye-gads! It’s worse than we thought! In the last 10 weeks there have been 4 old posts resurrected on this forum alone! One of them, about thin flanges is only a year old, and has been on-and-off active for that year. Another is the Saluda Grade reopening thread that lives on like a zombie and never really dies. If we discount those 2, that leaves us with 2 resurrected threads over 10 weeks. If this keeps up for a year, we could have 10-11 old threads blotting out all the new and exciting threads. Oh My! [:-,]
Murphy, Might I suggest that if they offend you and you don’t want to read them, you just pass them by?
I won’t say that the discussion(s) did not involve Children’s, at least tangentially. But what I’m thinking of was spawned in the “CSX Paint Your Bridge” era …but then grew to include neglect of infrastructure in general, as well as rationalization of under utilized assets…as part of a grander overall strategy to prioritize dividends over maintenance expenditures.
The counter argument was a “why would they do that? it would be like shooting themselves in the foot”. So 15 years later, how many toes do we have left? [:o)]
