Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomcam | Hacker News Reader

What is it about guys and trains? I reflexively upvoted before even reading the article, and after reading the article, I realize it is a pretty standard narrow gauge railroad. Don’t care! Would vote again if I could!

View on HN

I think it's nerds and trains, rather than guys and trains. I know at least one woman who is pretty excited about trains too, and she is a colossal dork.

EDIT: and what it is about nerds and trains is that trains are wicked sweet.

>I think it's nerds and trains, rather than guys and trains. I know at least one woman who is pretty excited about trains too, and she is a colossal dork.

>EDIT: and what it is about nerds and trains is that trains are wicked sweet.

I do believe you've hit the nail on the head with that question. Or, in this case, the rail.

You mean the railspike?

Well put :)

I went to several remote places just to ride a weird train. For instance the Pilatus Bahn in Switzerland is a must-see. Or "Le train à vapeur de la baie de Somme". If it's a steam locomotive, its appeal is greater; if it's ancient and weird, the draw is indomitable.

You'll have to visit New Hampshire, USA. They have the first mountain-climbing cog railway. It's the second steepest. Some of the trains still burn coal, including one built in 1875.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Washington_Cog_Railway

The question is why is the connection between men and trains relatively strong? OP never implied liking trains was restricted to men.

Rephrasing to "nerds" doesn't change anything.

Trains are a complicated problem space where a lot of impressive large-scale and small-scale engineering has been done over the course more than a century, but where you can still explain how stuff actually works at the layperson level. On top of that a fair amount of laypeople will interact with and even depend on a train on a fairly regular basis, in a way that is not necessarily true of other problem spaces; railroads have been romanticized in media for decades in a way that few other technologies have been.

> railroads have been romanticized in media for decades in a way that few other technologies have been.

Cars, space travel, boats, aircraft, all manner of transportation has been romanticized as much or even more than trains.

And all of those also have a lot of nerds who like those things.

Except for cars, those who obsess about cars are considered the antithesis of a nerd.

Since when? I work at a games studio, you couldn't imagine more dorky people than those who work here, and yet there's several serious petrolheads here, we go to car meets, one dude rents a barn to keep all of his rare US-imports and to work on them in his spare time.....

I don't understand(and rather dislike) the notion that if you are a nerd/into computers, you have to automatically dislike cars.

Wrong, anybody who obsesses about anything is a nerd by definition.

Obsession about muscle buildup strategies at the gym has rarely been associated with rhe term “nerd“. Those people can be quite nerdy, and even connect well with regular nerds if they find common ground, but isn't the mainstream accepted term “jocks“?

Depends on which problem space around cars we're talking about. Are we talking about the vehicles themselves? Then those aren't referred to by nerds in colloquial usage.

That being said, there are a lot of nerds who obsess about things like highway systems, road planning and the like. There's also the electric car space, the AV space, etc.

Absolutely true: the first hackers community literally grew around model trains.

https://www.wired.com/2014/11/the-tech-model-railroad-club/

Trains are like an information network you can see in action.

For me it's this. I am actually pretty indifferent to trains. But i am fascinated by railways.

Yes, this. I was really into model railroading when I was a child, and had a faily elaborate layout in the attic. What appealed to me the most, I think, was being able to sit at the controls, flipping switches on a big control panel, and manipulate the locomotives and switches way over in the next "town" (on the other side of the room).

Years later, when I first started using the internet, I found myself sitting in Atlanta, editing a text file on a server in California. And I immediately recognized that same sensation, of "control from a distance." And, well... here I am.

Yeah, I was going to say. I know two women who are really into trains. One is my wife, who was devastated at the news that her father, who is an engineer, was not 'that' kind of engineer. The other is the office manager at my former workplace, whose garage was like a magical model train emporium, much to her husband's chagrin. Her husband was a salesperson, she was a total geek.

Trains (toy) were my first conceptual introduction to programming.

The pieces of track are the instruction set. The layout is the program. Running the train is the execution.

Could it be German and trains? I haven't known a country that is so into trains besides Germany. Actually, engineering in general is pretty high all the German guy's interest.

Britain as well, we love trains.

Japenese, Swiss

I would say that the Japanese are the most "into" trains by a fairly wide margin. They permeate everyday life and popular culture there in a way which is hard to appreciate unless you actually go there. The Yamanote line is probably the most romanticised railway line in the world, appearing in countless shows, both animated and live action, and Shinjuku station is the most popular transport hub in the world, of any type, by far. It has over 200 exits (!) and is arguably the heart of Tokyo.

So yeah. Germans love trains, it's true. Japanese love trains and do so in that overboard way which is at once both cool and kind of scary...

Which begs the question, could train obsession be a substitute for not obsessing about military hardware?

On the other hand, I don't know enough about Japan, are they really obsessed about trains or do they just happen to be really really good at trains and use them a lot? They might be just pragmatic about them (quite the opposite of obsessed) and a high presence in daily life would naturally be reflected in pop culture.

Coincidentally, Germany also has the world's largest model train exhibit, which even has a fully functional airport (with functional departure board, of course) and a full day/night cycle. You can watch a short tour of it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACkmg3Y64_s

I love miniature train exhibits - and Miniatur Wunderland looks incredible.

Um .. most of Europe? Australians? Melbourne has the largest tram system in the world, and every over half the capitols (all except Hobart, ACT and Darwin) have train networks of varying sizes.

As others mentioned, the Japanese have insanely popular train networks, and the Swiss have incredibly conveniently train networks despite their smaller cities. I think both countries have Germany beat. :)

Switzerland, which has one if not the most dense rail networks in the world at 126 m per km².

>Each island house has its own wagon — some used to be wind-powered, using sails, but today they run on diesel.

Is that pretty standard?

It's a unique situation in Germany, and one that works for a small community where everyone knows everyone else.

The cars are not only privately owned, but handmade with wood and motorcycle parts.

There are a couple of safety rules, which are enforced by a permit you get from the mayor of the Hallig (island), and if you break the rules too often, it gets revoked. Which has happened only one time so far, apparently.

With the ones powered by sails, it sounded to me like something out of a Studio Ghibli film.

Could similar reasons br behind why men seem to love trains at a much higher rate than women do and also why men are over-represented in software development?

Totally true! Something about trains of pretty much all kinds. Must be something genetic :D

I don't think this is restricted to the male population tbh

OP never implied was.

shh

I don't understand either how this got to the top of hn. I recently spent a weekend on the peninsula of Nordstrand and didn't even realize this was there... and it's nothing special in that area really. E.g. Sylt is connected to the mainland via a car train which I found much more exciting when I was younger (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autozugverkehr_Nieb%C3%BCll%E2...) [german]

Reply on news.ycombinator.com