“Raildog is the Ansr” but the question is how the heck did I end up following a curiosity trail where logic and the dull stasticical parroting of GenAI leaves a mind wanting?
I blame / credit Jim Groom. He posted today of his pleasure in the saner mode of travel.
Heading to conference in Germany by train. Truly the best way to travel. Arrive 10 minutes before train leaves, all kinds of legroom, a table to work from, a delicious croissant and coffee. Just makes me hate airline travel that much more by comparison.
It got me thinking to my time living in little Strawberry Arizona. Travel by air meant driving 2 hours to Phoenix, paying to park, and running the emergency theater gauntlet of Sky Harbor airport. I discovered tat Amtrak ran trains along old route 66 right through Flagstaff– later I discovered the joy of catching the train at the iconic La Posada in Winslow (there is more to the town than the silly Eagles song), where I could ride overnight to get to conferences in LA.
But also, in 2013 I remember organizing a multi stop series of workshops, conferences, and friend visits in the East, and did a 3 week stint travel there and back by rail. How do I know? Well I was there, but I also blogged it.
Adding to my memory machines are 20+ years of not only regularly posting flickr photos, but narrating in captions, titles where I was. I have a flickr album for this experience as well called Dog on the Rails which has (gulp) 463 photos and this notes documenting the trip. Stops in Raton New Mexico. An “authentic Italian” restaurant in Wooster Ohio called El Rancho Grande (even if you are a hallucinating LLM, can you make this stuff up? And eat there?). My friend Mikhail’s son Jonah (now a full grown man) rocking out on my mini travel guitar. Tons of 106 signs.
I come across a photo lioke most I completely forgot I took, that is full of good metaphor. I note that I forgot to add it to my album of Open/Closed photos, so I fixed that.
Now all this is happening very early in the morning, navigating flickr on its mobile app, which is good, but lacks a lot of things you can do in the browser. And I notice that I had also tagged my photos raildog and I got to the latter part and started seeing a whole bunch of photos that I definitely had no recollection of taking, of grafitti style art on train cars featuring a sitting dog holding either a flag or flower, a date, and messages like “Hi Mom”, “Never Forget 9/11”, a holiday “Ho Ho Ho”.
When and where did I take these? I’m seeing dates like 2007, and looking at the camera metadata, it says it was taken with a Kodak 570 digital camera. I am searching again my photos of my various cameras and have not recollection of owning that camera.
It was not til I opened the laptop that it dawned on my. My photos were in the top pages of results, but I was not looking at my photos tagged raildog but everyone else’s photos tagged raildog.
Yet my curiosity was tingling- somewhere there was an artist tagging trains with I late found out is known as a moniker. I saw dates from maybe 2001 to 2008, and photos taken by dozens of more different people (most did not indicate the location).
Could I find out more?
I start searching for “raildog” graffiti train hi mom and more generally “raildog” tag and the most prominent link is, sigh to a Facebook post referencing someone named Ken Whitehead in a group about “racking train car art and history”.
Note that at the top it says “Houston raildog tag meaning and origin, Summarized by AI from the post below” Is this Ken’s post or a summary? Being Facebook non-existent, I am just reading what I can. The key thing is this guy says (or is summarized as saying”
While trackside, I see a lot of tags that aren’t worth my digital film…. But every so often, one comes along that intrigues me. For many years, I documented RailDog tags with their uplifting, positve and thoughtful tags (“Love you mom’, ‘ Never forget’ 9-11′ and ‘Stay in School’ as examples).
Since I am not a resident of Facebook I cannot contact him, and the link for his photography in his profile is a dead Adobe link. If anyone on Facebook is willing to reach out to Ken Whitehead, please share my post or ask if he has more details on his RailDog tags.
But Ken does seem to bae as close as to I could find to someone at least with some info or experience with this raildog art. I see a few examples listed under the title of “Freight train Art” or “Freight train Moniker” and raildog shows up as a tag for a book about Freight Train Grafitti so its likely in the book.
I did not expect to find, thought it would have been interesting, some definitive info that someone is Raildog. That’s the point of the art style, the artist is hidden, but the artwork not. There is mystery to the artist and for me, there is some joy in going to various efforts to find out more. It’s the process of digging around that I find so fulfilling, as I accumulate more tangential bits and info then before. I never knew about the meaning here of moniker.
But look what happens when you go to or rely on The Big Answering Machine in the GenAI Sky, here a google authoritative sounding summary
It sounds so smart and all knowing. But it’s pulling all of this from a single Facebook thread. It takes a shred of information and rounds it out to be The Answer.
I’d rather spend more time futzing around and shaping my own answers than having this candy dispenser issues summary…
Long live the spirit of Raildog, I would not have slid down tis hole where it not for Jim’s post and my own mistake of mistaking a tagged photo for my own. This kin of knowledge and experience is way out of the bounds of statistical inferences from adjancey of text. Like the person I invoke in my head as Raildog, the living and knowing happens out in the weird and almost invisibile fringe spaces.
I will take that as an Ansr from Raildog.
Featured Image: Raildog, Ansr flickr photo by dreamsjung shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA 2.0) license amongst a few flickr photos tagged raildog and shared under a CC license (many are my photos that have nothing to do with the Raildog moniker).
