Cat's whiskers! - Trains Magazine

QUOTE: Originally posted by M.W. Hemphill

Got it. Model railroading does a lot of that, i.e., invent labels for things in the prototype world so it can discriminate between things visually. Model railroading has an almost entirely visual relationship to the object, whereas real railroading has an almost entirely functional relationship to the object. The epitome of this are the "Phase" descriptions model railroaders apply to GP9s, GP30s, etc., which have zero correlation to anything that matters to a railroad, which couldn't care less if there are two small grills on one GP9 and one big one on another. The flip side of that is that the differences that matter to railroaders are impossible for modelers to capture -- there's no way you can effectively model automatic transistion vs. manual, or a larger aux generator in a GP9, or a EM2000 control vs. the static card controls, or even more simply, a D27 traction motor vs. a D77: they're in the same case.

I don't have any problem with model railroaders inventing these labels if it makes sense for them, but I think they might want to be more careful with it. At best, taking the model railroad language into the real railroad world results in some hilariously incoherent conversations -- like this one! I suggest that the more that model railroaders invent their own language, the more they will isolate themselves from the railroad objects they are modeling, and the less they will understand of it.