The transparency of the airline industry is hardly a fair comparison.

Your right that the public knows the different types of planes, and it's because it matters to them. They are going to be in the thing and the speed, noise level, seat arrangement, etc. all have a real affect on the passengers.

The planes fly in a public controlled space with assistance by government air traffic control. We should hope that ATC knows what the flight number is and where is is headed. When a plane crash lands due to a recognized defect or it happens on a runway it is easy or obvious to suggest what part of the plane was giving them problems.

The management and control of airlines is impeccable, no question.

This is different than a train where the time-warp continuum is in effect. The part of the train where the problem occurred could be a full 3-8 minutes behind the locomotive. The head end has little way to know what happened "back there".

Freight trains are more like a UPS package. You can find out the last place it "was" but more research is required to find out much more. Once in the pipeline things just sort of work their way through the system.

Because the system works so well most of the time, better management or information is not required and would be a waste of resources. When something does go wrong or something unusual happens it takes time to figure out why and lots of phone calls, emails, computer lookups etc. must take place. All of this takes time and money, and unless necessary ain't gonna happen.

I think it's safe to say that with the internet, often time the railfans have a better idea of what is going on then management. Management manages for the ordinary, railfans look for thrive off of the extraordinary. If their is something weird or strange on the tracks the railfans are all over it.

MofW is like a like the evil stepchild of the RR, you try and spend as little time recognizing it as possible. In an ideal world it would not even exist. Trying to find information on their activities or movements is almost impossible to go back a recreate. Hell most days their activities come as a total surprise to most in operations anyway.

Jerry