Re: PC: RE: warning - Consider the other side

[Jerry Jordak <jer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

EMDSD80MAC -AT- aol.com wrote:

> I'm really lucky in that I have bought a townhouse on the Framingham 
> Secondary track. In Fact the whole Walpole Wye stuff is within my 
> constant view. I have gone out and intorduced myself to the trrinmen who 
> work here and feel confident that they "know me" but, I still wouldn't 
> just walk around the property without first saying hello to someone. 
> With my walkie-Talkie on...I hear "He's OK - I Know him" Thei I feel 
> safe.   ED

(From a listmaster perspective, we're really starting to get off-topic, but 
I'll let it go for a little while longer because its interesting. Having 
said that, I'll relate a story about RR police and the radio from this 
month...)

Friday, October 5, in Altoona, the night before Railfest. It was around 
midnight, and some friends and I were taking night photos of ALTO Tower. We 
were across the tracks from the tower, near that parking lot where they 
usually park the trailers. Apparently, we must have unknowningly been on NS 
property or close enough to it, because the tower operator must have called 
us in, because after we were there about 20 minutes of shooting, we were 
driving out when a white Suburban tried to pull into the same driveway we 
were coming out of. After a brief awkward pause, we smiled, waved, and 
drove out. We heard on the scanner "They're just leaving now." The other 
guy (who we figured out by this point was an NS policeman) looped his truck 
and followed us a couple blocks.

Anyway, we ended up both stopped at red lights, about a block apart. The 
white Suburban was clearly in our rearview mirror. About that point we 
heard the NS policeman say over the radio "I just lost them in traffic."

Must have figured we were railfans and we were OK. I'm sure the PA railroad 
   plate on the back of our van didn't hurt either... :-)

Speaking of Altoona Railfest and RR police, I noticed while riding the 
second excursion over Horse Shoe Curve on Sunday that there were a lot of 
locations on the hill, like at Benny for instance, where there were local 
policemen there along with the railfans. The policemen were letting the 
railfans shoot away, and weren't chasing them away. I wonder if NS figured 
with everything going on (especially the Pennsy E's) that people were going 
to go to all the forbidden spots anyway, and that they might as well just 
have police on location to make sure nobody did anything stupid.

-JWJ