Here we go again.

One of my favorite political comments was made by Democratic presidential candidate Paul Tsongas, who said "no goose, no golden egg". That was short for, "as a liberal Massachusetts Democrat, I have little use for business, but I understand that the health of our economy depends on having businesses continue to function".

In the document so helpfully provided by Mr. Cowles we find the following words: "... by preserving, as a living museum for future generations, a mode of transportation that helped in the development and promotion of the territories and states ..."

Note that this says a mode of transportation ... we are talking about steam trains in general, not the Rio Grande in particular. If they had meant to focus only on the Rio Grande, those words would have been replaced by "a company". Furthermore, they would have had to replace the territories and states by "a few territories and/or states". These words also talk about a living museum ...in other words, actually running trains. Running a steam train costs a lot of money, which is where the words from Mr. Tsongas come in. The railroad will get some money from the states, and grants, and from those who charter it to ride or to photograph from a diesel train just ahead of it, but most of the money is going to come from regular tourists. Attracting those tourists and their money requires something called marketing.

Some years ago, my daughters (who were truly poor then, not the "poverty" they feel now as twenty-somethings trying to get started in the world) bought me a VHS tape called "Chased by a Steam Train". They had no idea who Greg Scholl is, so their discussion probably went something like "Daddy likes steam trains; in fact, this may be the one he took us on". That does not mean you should have packaged the tape in a plain white box with your name in tiny letters on the back (the place where we expect to see "Made in China"). No, as a businessman, your hope should be that someone else would see the box on my coffee table and say "I wonder if I would like anything else of his?" The tender of a CATS locomotive functions like the box containing your tape. Most people may not care what is says, but seeing it (or pictures of it), brings free advertising to the attention of those who might be totally missed by other forms of advertising.