My mom just made me go see _Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron_. They destroyed a steam engine, which sort of spoiled the movie.

My great-grandfather worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad; somewhere, we have tickets for Franklin D Roosevelt's funeral train.

Trains were kind of a big deal when I was a kid in Colorado--there are quite a few antique engines still in operation for tourists, and some good museums. My college (Grinnell College, in central Iowa) had a train track running through campus--one semester, hopper cars would carry corn in one direction, and the next semester, Cargill Foods tankers would bring corn syrup back. Funny.

I always liked "Railroading on the Great Divide". I wrote a song when I was in high school about George Root, an engineer who drove his train through a wildfire in Hinckley, Minnesota, in 1894, to save his passengers. It's not a great song--I keep meaning to go back and see if I can fix it up.