ex-BN --
There is the new-ish "Railroaders' Nostalgia" forum,
which you would like. It is only for railroaders
to share their stories, and those are great. "TAW" --
Thomas A. Wite, a former BN dispatcher, has posted
some absolutely fascinating stories. Those are worth
the TO fee and trouble just by themselves, as are the
other posts in that forum. But that forum is not very
active -- there is usually only one post per day,
sometimes not even that. The "Nostalgia & History" forum
has is very active, with a lot of posts every day, and
has a lot of great and fascinating photos, and sometimes
some discussions of The Way It Was, mostly by rails and
knowledgeable fans, but not always.

To me, some of the photos alone are more than worth the
TO fee -- but I know that is not what you said you are
interested in.

In short, I think TO is way, way more than worth the
fee and the trouble.

I was a TO member from almost the beginning, when,
like this site, you didn't even need to register
to post there and could use any screen name you
wanted to and could change it as often as you
wanted to. Stayed, then got The Boot -- 86'd -- a few
years ago for -- in a comment -- criticizing TO's
(=Todd's) "Opt out" default of showing a member's home
city on the old Member Info page, instead of it being
"Opt in". I wrote that was just like current bank
practices. Yes, TO (Todd or his moderators) do 86
people over little things like that. And you don't get
any of your unused membership refunded, which is no big
deal, as the $36 a year membership fee is too small to
make that a problem for most folks.

I applied to rejoin TO a while after getting The Boot --
and, to my surprise, was allowed to rejoin! I had thought
that once you got The Boot, you would never be allowed to
rejoin, but that is not true. And I am hardly one of Todd's
favorites.

An friend got The Boot for merely posting he thought PVs were
much more trouble for Amtrak than they were worth. Really!

And if you get The Boot, you can no longer access your PMs --
Private Messages. So you would not be able to read what anyone
said to you -- messages of support, or whatever. That is sad.
But that's the way TO is set up.

Threads are almost always locked when the discussion talks about
politics too much -- and "too much" is entire;ly up to the mods.
"Locking" a thread means the moderator has deleted "Reply To This
Message" from the bottom of each post, leaving only "Private Reply".
But no one can have an intelligent discussion about -- for instance -
Amtrak without discussing the milieu it exists in, most of which is
political. In spite of that, there have been some very interesting
discussions in the past few years.

Flaming is not allowed, nor is using foul or crude language.
I like that.

I have found that TO's moderators are somewhat less likely to lock
threads than they used to be. I like that. And there have been some
very interesting discussions recently because of that.

ex-BN ---
If you decide to rejoin TO, please post some of your stories in the
"Railroaders' Nostalgia" forum.

Margaret