Bill has touched on a subject that I had intended to write a long essay about. The title was to be "R.I.P. The Fantrip".
Fan trips don't run anymore. "Photographer' Specials" are what is operated today. There is a big difference in how such a trip is run and what the participants expect. Long ago, all of us were simply thrilled that the stuff still ran - at all. I wasn't too many years in the past that the Rio Grande had their sights on tearing the entire thing up and scrapping it all before our very eyes. The Rio Grande was evil. When we painted a freight car we were just as likely to letter it "C&TS" because the Rio Grande was evil.
The people who rode fan trips rode them for the joy of it all. One got to ride a train full of fellow enthusiasts. It was as much a social event as anything else. One brought his camera along to document the event, not to take the perfect picture that defies time and space (aka a "phraudograph"). One got to see some equipment not normally run on the road. We had fun, that was the entire point of the exercise. Because we did not yet have loop at Osier we ran to Big Horn and back. That was a 90 mile round trip, 8 hours of running time. Figuring a hour to get out of town and an hour to tie up, that left 2 hours for "fun" out on the road. If the trip organizers where on the ball, and most of them were, we could pull off a runby for a crowd of 100 or so in 20 minutes, Including turning the train at Big Horn as one of the runbys, we could pull of about 6 photo stops. These were "one shot" runbys. No multiple angles of the same location. Get off, back the train up, make a Loud and Proud show, load everyone back onboard and off we go again. It was a different world.
The John Craft charters in 1992 was the turning point. It was during the operation of these trains that it occurred to me that the vast majority of the participants could not care less about riding a freight train over the railroad. There were photographs to be taken, damn it!. If they could have been teleported from one runby site to the next they would have been much happier. We started to do mulitiple runbys at each location. For the crew, it was starting to look seem like a movie shoot. "Back 'em up 497, they want to do this for a fourth time. There was a cloud that snuck into the shot and put the back half of the train the shadow...." Ugh.
It is not just the fan trip that has died. The wonder of all of it has disappeared. I remember going to Knott's in 1971 and seeing a REAL RGS locomotive - alive and running! It had a goofy paint job and a fake diamond stack, but it was a REAL RGS LOCOMOTIVE. How cool was that! K-28's with diamond stacks didn't bother me. 470's still slugged out on Hermosa Hill 7 days a week all summer. A guess we have all grown up, our expectations of gotten higher, we have matured, and in my opinion, have gotten more elitist, and for those who are showing interest in the hobby frequently get shut out because of expense involved. Model railroading is the same way. One used to be able to get Athearn locomotives and cars, a circle of track and an MRC power supply and be running trains for less than $40. None of that exists anymore. DCC is the thing, no more $20 Athearn F-7's out there. It is now a big investment.
I am not going to comment on the current pricing structure of running charters as I do not know what the RR's use to determine this. Back in my day, I figured what the basic cost of the trains operation was, and doubled to come to the charter fee. The costs were: crew, coal, supplies (oil, grease, etc.), hostling time, switching, train preparation and supervision. As such, certain times of the year it was much cheaper to run a train that at other times. When it got busy, crew costs went up as frequently the crews had to work their off-days, creating overtime. No one thought of how much it cost every day to run an engine in terms of how much the next major overhaul was going to cost. That was simply part of doing business and was figured into the overall budget. A "1472 Inspection" requires a complete tear down of the boiler. We used to do that when the boiler was reflued anyway. The required repairs would have been accomplished anyway. Running gear over hauls are done independent of a 1472 Inspection. They were done as a part of doing business. The big difference is making the UT measurements, and sending off to a Mechanical engineer-type for the calculations.
In someways, dangling the 1472 inspection out there as a reason to raise fees is simply a money grab for the company. The reality in Chama is a locomotive gets comparable miles now as it did before the present regulations were enacted.
End of Old Guy's Rant..... Back to your regular programming.
