Hacker News Reader

Comment by twic | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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.

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“?

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.

>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 :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com