Re: Hold on there, Taylor

What Steam Crew was I with? Well... I've worked for UP since 1978 and taken the 3985 and 844 for a number of trips across the continent, so I'll let you figure it out.
The reason that UP has such a distaste for any heritage program but their own is because they have no control of it. As I said, you can't drive your street car at Daytona, likewise any old steamer can't run on the UP. Why? Because if ANYTHING happens from a skinned knee to a boiler explosion, you know who the lawyers will come running to, and it's not the operator, it's the deep pockets, aka Union Pacific.
Remember when Bill Holtman was president of the SP and how much steam he let them run? The sum total was zero.
This is why UP runs its locomotives and no other, because if anything happens it is totally in-house from locomotives to cars to track to crews. And the crew issue... How many excursion "Engineers" are FRA certified for main line operation? Damn few I would suspect.
The Railfan Community got really pissed a few years back when UP raised the price of insurance for their excursions to 2.5 million. They were outraged.. "How can you do this to us?" They cried. What they didn't realize was that the 2.5 million was UP's deductable on their corporate insurance policy, and UP would have picked up all of the rest of the costs should have a disaster occurred. The deductable was all that they were asking the Railfan Groups to cover.
Oh, Oregon... I guess that our branch line to Bend didn't count, neither did the OSL or OWR&N or our 50% ownership of the Camas Prairie. Our presence in Oregon and Washington goes back further than our presence in California.
If you look at your history you will see that the Oregon Short Line was Harriman's main vehicle for his financial dealings. The OSL was the investment vehicle for buying the SP in the early 1900's and in 1918 the OSL owned more stock in the New York Central than the Vanderbilt Family.
The Oregon-Washington Railway and Navigation Company was Henry Villard's first attempt at a transcon, before the NP... But I guess that we don't have much presence in Oregon. Hinkle, Albina, Portland. I guess that the trains that I run with HK or PD symbols (and there are a lot) don't go where they say they do.
Besides, what would have your beloved SV been without our interchange? (Or our equipment... the ex U&N stuff).
Rick