Interesting train facts. I remember a snatch of H.L. Mencken writing about the difference between American and English usage: I found this quote:

On higher levels the language of the Americans is more decorous, but even there it is a genuinely living speech, taking in loan-words with vast hospitality and incessantly manufacturing neologisms of its own. The argot of sport enriches it almost daily. It runs to brilliantly vivid tropes. It is disdainful of grammatical pruderies. In the face of a new situation the American shows a far greater linguistic resourcefulness and daring than the Englishman. Movie is obviously better than cinema, just as cow-catcher is better than plough and job-holder is better than public-servant. The English seldom devise anything as pungent as rubber-neck, ticket-scalper, lame-duck, pork-barrel, boot-legger or steam-roller (in its political sense). Such exhilarating novelties are produced in the United States every day, and large numbers of them come into universal use, and gradually take on literary dignity. They are opposed violently, but they prevail. The visiting Englishman finds them very difficult. They puzzle him even more than do American peculiarities of pronunciation.

I quote this because I grew up with the term cow-catcher and it never occurred to me to parse out its obvious meaning and simultaneous humor. While I respect Mencken's writing I don't agree with his conclusion that Americans have a superior ability in making up new words and phrases.

On a more somber note, when I was a lot newer to Anchorage we had some heavy snow winters and the Anchorage-Fairbanks run was catching (and killing) many moose who were using the cleared railroad paths as a way to expedite their journeys through the snow. For a time there were daily tallies of up to 80 moose taken out by one run of the train. For whatever reason, diesels do not seem to have been served with cow-catchers, and it is doubtful they would have been harmless to the moose.