Milwaukee Road Coast Division

[JPCrosby]

Treading lightly, I am exploring the revival of Brian Ambrose's Thread: "MILW 156, 4/27/77." Treading lightly lest I jinx the revival or irritate followers of the Ballard Terminal Railroad.

The attached pix is of Engine 475 tied on to a couple of elderly flats that were used as barge idlers. Thus the shot is at Pier 27, Seattle. The X rated car adjacent is in a short cut of outfit cars that always seemed to be parked on that storage track.email welcome at this link

John Crosby
Seattle

[JPCrosby]

Quite a menagerie in the yards in those days.

John Crosby
Seattle

[JPCrosby]

plenty of goats . . .

[JPCrosby]

But in the end, only the bankers mattered.

[Tuscor]

I would not mind restarting the MILW 156 East thread but not so sure that there would be the interest in it generated as before John. I did save all of the pics I had taken onto a disk less than a month before the site crashed so I do have them all available. But if it is just you and I are interested in resuming it again I think we had better wait a little bit longer to see if more people return.

I think a lot of the people who contributed to it are no longer here. By the way, the goat shots are great!

Brian Ambrose

[Bob]

Originally Posted by JPCrosby

Treading lightly, I am exploring the revival of Brian Ambrose's Thread: "MILW 156, 4/27/77." Treading lightly lest I jinx the revival or irritate followers of the Ballard Terminal Railroad.

Well hopefully you won't jinx the forum's revival, but it seems to be behaving so far so we should be OK. As ABC mentioned, the original thread was the first thing I thought of when the database crashed...

As for irritating Ballard Terminal folks, I don't know why the MILW thread would do that. I'm sure one or two of them may not agree with your opinions on some matters, such as the bike trail, but that doesn't mean you can't post your photos or share you opinions.

As for folks leaving, yes, a few have left and some may never return. Most have though, and we also are getting lots of new members too. In fact, crash or no crash, that's the way most forums (and jobs and clubs and organizations) work, a slow but steady turnover of people until one day you realize that much of the original crew is gone, for whatever reasons.

[Bob]

PS - Try out our new feature, the ability to upload more than one file to a post.

[JPCrosby]

Brian, Alexander, Bob:

I recognize that restarting a thread based on the accidental photographic encounters of Brian and I - and I am still astounded by this, absent the Internet, Brian and I would have never met - and then using that as a base to expand to a photographic discussion of the Milwaukee Road, is limited, and perhaps the crash gave us a graceful way to sign off the thread. So having just taken my evening bike ride around Lake Union (counter clockwise), usually when I do my thinking, I propose this thread be enlarged to discuss North American railroad topics rooted in the decade of the seventies and eighties. I have read that rail fans tend to be either older heads who were teenagers or older in those years, or high school kids today. There seems to be a missing generation. So let's tell these younger folks what it was like as we saw it, and even before that period. I, for one, have a difficult time keeping on a given topic, so if I talked about riding the Pacific Electric from Long Beach to L.A. in 1955 at age ten, then that would be ok. Should the name be changed, or does this all happen under the Milwaukee handle?

John

[JPCrosby]

The railroad has always been the center of the hobo lifestyle. Presumably hobos have been around since 1835. They should not be confused with the homeless. I did not observe homelessness at today's levels until the mid '80'. My theory is that modern homelessness was caused by federal regulators who permitted the savings and loan industry to make commercial real estate loans. This resulted in the overbuilding of office space at the expense of tearing out the old flop houses with the result that the working poor could no longer afford a place to stay. It also resulted with the collapse of the savings and loan industry and the fleecing of federal taxpayers.

But the dudes in this pix are all life style. They ain't worried about any taxpayers.

John Crosby
Seattle

[JPCrosby]

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