This is a rough transcript.
I appreciate that introduction. If you have questions about me, I just hope I know the answers to them. How about that?
I do appreciate the opportunity to be here and talk about railroads, and particularly oddities on railroads…
There are … so many unique happenings that took place on railroads. And we tend to focus on a lot of the well-known happenings of railroads, when they came, when they were built, why they were built. But I like to find the really unique and the weird and the interesting, because I think that’s what really draws people into a presentation.
And when I’m done with this presentation, you can tell me if I was right and what I was thinking, that’s what really attracted people. So I just have a brief presentation here. I’m gonna go through some slides, share some anecdotes, share some stories. Hope you, hopefully you’ll find them interesting. And then what I’ll do is I’d love to take some questions at the end. I always promise an answer. I just can’t promise it’s going to be an accurate answer. How about that?
…I have written several books, and I do have copies for sale. This is one that I’ve written about the Atlanta Northern Railway, which I’ll just quickly tell you, is a very interesting one, because that went from Atlanta to Marietta. So, for all the people who say Cobb County’s never had a mass transit system, I can tell you they’re wrong, because we used to have one. And how great would that be today, to be able to take a train from Atlanta to Marietta, or Marietta to Atlanta?
So I was thinking about oddities, and this presentation originated from a talk that I gave a few months ago. I guess it was December that I gave this talk at the Georgia Archives. And I started thinking about what is an oddity. It sounds simple enough, but how do you define an oddity?
And what I like to do is I like to start at the words that I’m going to use and talk about, and go back and find the definition, and it’s an odd person or trait, which, to me, didn’t really seem super helpful, because if I’m looking up oddity, and it just told me, tells me it’s an odd person or trait. I thought I was talking about me, so I don’t know, but it’s also the quality or state of being odd, which, again, really didn’t help me define what odd means.
So I put this slide on there, and I’m not really sure what you’re supposed to take away from it, but I did start by looking up the definition of odd, and I’ve given a lot of presentations about railroads and railroad history, and what I found is that there are really two aspects that people are most interested in. It’s usually about a railroad they know about, either it goes by their house, or they have a familial connection to it, or they’re otherwise some way familiar with the particular railroad.
Or it’s these stories that are unexpected, unanticipated. Maybe that’s really what odd is.