Random Bollocks From A Semi-Retired Foamer!

## BOTANY RAILWAY LINE ##

Well it was supposed to be - But I wasn't in the mood!

Hello and welcome back to our regular archive section. Well, I call it the archive section, but it is more a way for me to bollock on about the old days and share a heap of old photos that most self absorbed gunzels would not give a toss about otherwise.

Actually given the less than fruity response, they probably don’t give a rat’s nad, no matter how it is dressed, being to busy trying to out do each other, trying to get published their photo of some of the last remaining things of interest .


Lets face it, I don’t have to be half tanked on rum to notice that there is very little left to fry the man nuggets and get the average railfan excited. It has been well over a decade since the last droplets of good ol railway interest was screwed out of the country more completely than a tourist does a young Thai in Bangkok.


In the meantime we have had the internet forced down our throat like a, well best we don’t go there, and this has certainly changed the railfan scene greatly. No more need to sit line side in wait of a possible good catch (gunzels realise I am not talking women), no more need for the personal railfan grapevine and no more need to actually have to go and meet railfans in person.

Yes it has been a great boon for railway information, but at the cost of bringing the great unwashed masses to the fore, allowing them to mix with the normal rail fan population, so much so that all the old guys have long since disappeared.
So where has the old gang gone, David Henderson, Peter Bubb, The brothers Booth and Henry, just to name a few. What about the guy that spoke to his umbrella, or the one in the black jacket for whom bathing was obviously a waste of time. Then there was the one on tours who used to carry a large stereo with him to listen to, or good ol Phil Longly, star of at least one magazine article and member of the Honda precision stunt team.

Then there were the trains. Back then you could chase electrics without being considered the mentally deficient you would be today. W, S, H and M sets were the order of the day, lovely old single deck trains of a much earlier era making the time between the all important freights even more entertaining.
Now days, should you be caught photographing a Tangara or, heaven forbid, one of those stomach evacuating Millenniums, you are looked at with a sort of contempt reserved for Denis Ferguson.

Then there were the locomotives, locomotives from a time when we took time to design them, not just put barf on to a computer screen and send it out on the rails. Then there was the liveries that came prior to that god awful Freightcorp Blue dung, that lovely Indian Red livery, not to mention the old VR and QR versions of blue. Even the Mustard Pot of South Australia was more attractive, despite it being the colour of my daughters morning diaper.

Then there are the gunzel magazines today.
I was recently horrified to hear from someone who had received a letter from a major publication suggesting that their photos may be more usable if more time was spent changing them, or more correctly, removing things like errant poles, badly located trees, unfortunate shadows.
In reality, one dosen’t need to really use any photographic forethought on the day anymore, just get whatever and change it when you get home. The time saved not thinking could be otherwise spent cruising Railpage for things to whinge and gripe about.

Why don’t we take this one step further? Come on guys, lets break out the photoshop, lets paste older shots of trains in a completely different location?.
Think of it - the possibilities are endless.
Sure that old shot of NR52 and AN1 coming through Henty was a terrific shot, even if there was a pesky tree behind it, but imagine it on the front of train rolling out of Cairns, easily achieved by lifting someone else’s Cairns shot off the net. Chuck in a few palm trees, a lovely clear sky, a drunken teenager on the game, and there you have a perfect cover shot.
Then from one photo you can be published twice.

But men, and in many cases that’s a term I use loosely, lets not just stop there, all those rumours that the 86 were to be sold to Europe, well why not let your magazine of contribution choice have the scoop shot of one hauling a load of weed through Sweden?

To hell with reality now days, reality is just so yesterday - lets piss it off.
Oh bring back the good ol days, those lineside social outings, being able to take prints/slides and send them in to magazines as taken, the needing to meet people personally to call them friends, the less bitchy pre-internet hobby and the vastly less prevalent bottom grabbing incidents than seem to occur in 2009.

This is just a personal thought or two that you probably didn‘t want to hear and will now go off and forget. I shall send it into Railway Power and Motive Digest to see if the rants of us forgotten railfan generation can get published. :-)

Now please go have a wash and check out some girlie mags - you know - girlie mags. GIRLIE MAGS, with girls in them for peets sake. A GIRL!!!!!!! The ones that look a lot like us but have different lumpy bits and are far softer to touch, assuming you can without being arrested.

Oh for goodness sake, here is an example of some girls The Colonel prepared for us earlier. "It seems they were manually checking each others tonsils and for quite some time" said a rather excited Colonel at the time.

This was supposed to be a display of 80s and 90s Botany line photos but it has got out of control. Perhaps tomorrow.
Cheers

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