Welcome!
If you’re not familiar with it, “Tales from the River” is a bulletin board humor column I wrote during my railroad career from 1994 to 2019. The River referred to is Cornrail’s (Now CS&M’s) River Line between Selkirk Yard (near Albany, NY) and Northern New Jersey.
If you are familiar with “Tales from the River” you’re probably wondering; “What took you so long?” I had a lot of work to do in preparation for this website, and to be honest, I didn’t even start until after the pandemic.
The first fifty-eight issues were written on an early version of Microsoft Word which was incompatible with later versions, so I had to reformat most of them and completely re-write others. Some of you who possess precious original copies might notice that some issues have been changed.
In addition, I’ve edited some to eliminate as many copyright issues as possible. Getting permissions is a difficult chore, one I haven’t had much success with so far. Many of the items were from periodicals or companies that haven't existed in decades.
Finally, many of the names have been changed to protect the innocent (namely me!) After all, these are companies that extort licensing fees from model train manufacturers.
You’ll also notice that some issues are missing. There are several reasons for this. Besides the format and copyright issues mentioned above, I’ve omitted some issues that didn’t cover railroad subjects, such as politics or the Dallas Cowboys. Other issues have not stood up well and one even got lost. I suffered a computer crash years ago and lost issue 103. ( If anyone out there has a copy of “Operation T.Y.P.” please let me know!)
-Issues 1-61, 1994-1999
-Issues 62-132, 1999-2019
-Stories of some of my more interesting trips; I'm still working on these.
-Gems culled from bulletin boards over the years.
-Non-humorous historical issues on railroad history.
Below is a copy of the "Railroader-English Dictionary" for those not familiar with the terminology of railroaders. I will expand on this later, but it is one of the issues that currently exists only on paper.
The issues are 200 DPI .PNG scans of the original Word documents. They are in black and white where possible to keep the file size as low as possible. However,some are in greyscale or even color when neccessary.
LEGAL STUFF
“Tales from the River” is a work of satire. While inspired by real events, nothing in it is to be taken as factual.