Speaking as both a railfan and a journalist, I agree with about 95 percent of what Justin Franz said in his opinion piece, and I thought the piece was wonderful overall. I'm known in my newsroom as the "train expert," and I've had to tweak my colleagues' stories occasionally so they don't say "chuffed" or "locomotive driver," or call Union Pacific a "train company," and so on. And I cringe when I see language like that in stories about trains in other newspapers or on TV. But it's true that, unless you report almost exclusively on transportation (few of us do, certainly not me), reporters just don't have that knowledge, and aren't going to "look it up on the Internet" in advance should a major train story land in their lap sometime in the future. If there's a major derailment at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday and we have to get a story online ASAP and ready for print by 8 p.m., there isn't much time to bone up on the jargon of the rail industry. I think that for stories like that NWP tank car mess -- the TV report was not only one-sided, it was ignorant -- you should take longer to get facts straight. That story wasn't a we-need-it-in-five-minutes scenario. Based on comments I've seen elsewhere on this discussion board, some not so long ago, it's clear some people have little understanding of modern journalism. The beast, indeed, must be fed, be it TV, newspapers or radio. The deadline scramble, with varying levels of information from rail companies at varying degrees of timeliness, can result in mistakes, sometimes goofy looking ones. But "non-deadline" pieces, like that NWP tank car flap, deserve better coverage than they often get, and that often means just asking a few more carefully considered questions (and getting all sides).