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sometimes I just birdwatch in places to listen in on anti-electric sentiment in the wild and it takes everything in my power to not well acktually everyone into oblivion and tell them their fav is unironically evil incarnate and their double standards are SO revealing of how society handwaves away the sheer scale of destruction fossil fuels really cause

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industries: we need a better term for “master-slave” controls for machinery

trains in the US: COW-CALF! COW-CALF! COW-CALF!

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Train drivers going “oh yeah electrics like the ALP-46 will rocket off on you if you aren’t really careful with them” is hilarious, as is admitting they too have no idea how electric trains work beyond “pan go up motors go brrr when it breaks it’s usually just replacing a motor. Or the dastardly 30s-era catenary”

also love seeing reddit comments from employees of freight railroads going “I don’t know what an Arrow III or M7 is and I’m afraid to ask” because those absolutely sound like missiles vs commuter EMUs out of context

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I heard someone use ���lithium lickers” for people fixated on the idea of battery trains vs actually electrifying. And that’s going up there with “bionic duckweed” for ridiculously specific rail electrification-related insults. Even better is the coiner saying “they all talk about lithium salts so I imagine them as goats at a salt lick” which is way funnier than being a variant of bootlicker like I was expecting.

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I love having absolutely no stake in fandom discourse. I have zero interest in M/F shipping with Wembleyball regardless of orientation because I like pairing her with other shitty girlbosses too much. I don’t ship Rusty with anything besides a barge to Misty Island. It would be a net benefit to both shows because he fits the Thomas world so much better and literally anything is better than the Logging Locos.

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weird realization: catenary inspection and repair vehicles are basically priests to electric trains with how they have elaborate animistic beliefs about the power grid and those are the guys who directly interact with and access the state of it. Ironically a lot of the “priests” wouldn’t even be electric, which is really interesting to think about (resembles how multiple religions forbid their members from doing things but outsiders can do it for them)

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nonrep ideas: representing pantographs with weird metal Arthur Brown crowns (with fake arcing vs fire) . You get some really, really weird ones the older you go and even modern ones have surprisingly varied “head” and horn shapes

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I love when outsiders to the show just into general trains pick up on “yeah electric trains have always kind of defied engine/coach and passenger/freight binaries with how prevalent EMUs are and combine cars were. People denying that they existed in the past fits how that’s done to X human group too”

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me roughly a year ago: haha i will call my blog buffelectratruther because electric engines are actually cartoonishly OP and should look like superheroes

me now: I will die on the hill that media misrepresentation of technology and regulation is a huge cause of the nightmares beyond comprehension happening in the US. Trains are a particularly glaring example since so few people have direct technical experience with them, and being “a stupid kids show not REALLY about trains” isn’t an excuse to get things offensively backwards because decades of that has absolutely contributed to MASSIVE widespread Anglosphere dismissal of rail electrification.

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I love that people who work on trains are the opposite of AI cultists. It doesn’t matter how much you love the train and think it has a soul. It WILL kill you without second thought like a horse.

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It’s funny and surreal to encounter more typical railfans who are more into dining car china and conductor buttons and romantic notions when all I can think is “design for maintainability” and layers and layers of train politics and economics

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One of those things I can’t stand in media anymore is steam engines sitting in tunnels or travelling through long ones with no mention of how that is like running a car in a closed garage. That kind of kills people and was common irl and a major reason why electric trains for heavy rail became a thing. It was the cause of the deadliest rail accident ever.

Something fun I learned is that a Swiss company makes these machines that circulate hot water through steam engines so they can stay warm without running an actual fire in preservation settings (which means you can keep them in enclosed garages to protect them from the elements). Switzerland makes a surprising amount of really niche parts for steam preservation in general.

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Learning that Elvis’s Black Star was actually released as Flaming Star is funny because it sounds notably worse vs the original. But also ends up fitting electric trains better that way, heat is the ultimate source of suffering for them and their ultimate “evil” figure. Heat represents inherent inefficiency, aging, physical damage to electrical equipment from it, and later comes to stand for global warming and the heat death of the universe. Cars are demons you reincarnate to as some kind of punishment, because they’re inefficient, short-lived, destructive, and perceived to be in constant pain.

Has the funny added effect that electric trains find the sun and other stars horrifying and some kind of distant, powerful evil. The underground world has always been their home and idea of a safe, positive realm vs the heavens. They came out of caves and subways over a century ago and still retain ties to that.

Aversion to heat is a weird cultural thing for them that definitely clashes with both biological beings and combustion trains. Historically, it’s a noted thing that electric trains can have a relative advantage in extreme cold if the wires stay clear since they don’t burn anything and being colder just helps motor performance

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Diesel and diesel-heavy bimodes are rapidly becoming distinctly fat in my mind because they have to carry their own fuel everywhere. Lighter ones are “stereotypical middle aged guy with an active job who’s wiry but also packing a gut” larger ones are “deceptively agile fat football players”

Krupp is just big due to being a weird earlyish true bimode, which was very hard to physically fit in one loco until the 2010s and the ALP-45s are still 70+ feet long. They’re close enough stat-wise to the F69PHACs to be feasible for “cross country chauffeur” work

I’m the rare and elusive electric-centric train writer and lol it’s alien dealing with engine stuff and fuel capacity instead of thinking about power grid conditions and maintaining contact with a wire (and where they physically do/would exist)

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once the steam engine at the museum gets running again and I have more “personality” from other stuff I will probably make a character just to parody it

“has a pet crab, for whatever reason”, “elder millennial who pretends to be actually elderly and looks like a Chinese version of that one photo of Mykal as Poppa”, “has an unusual and small size in X thing and needs to custom order it from Europe” and “has a sibling down in Davy Jones’ Locker” are quite the trait combo

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It’s hilarious and awful to imagine that Greaseball is “played” by original Control’s uncle making fun of how horrible his employer is (and the kid just finding it fun) and Girlball is played by his British daughter/niece/etc who’s just a foamer who likes the idea of US freight railroads being there because “clag! thrash! big freight! diesel go brrr and kick the choo choos grandpa says I should like!” ignoring the whole “notoriously awful working conditions and being the reason passenger service sucks so much in the US” aspect

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Is Krupp thicc or just wearing oversized clothes?

If only there was someone notorious for both who prominantly sampled Kraftwerk, who conveniently is also bi and a free excuse to shoot him with the Yuri Beam

Anyways now I really need to explore this direction because “scary German robot is actually just a nod to how ridiculously popular Kraftwerk is in hip-hop” is a great concept (and something the performers were probably in on because of just HOW popular Kraftwerk was even in the 80s)