Thanks for all the comments and questions. Let me attempt to tackle a few of them.
"Railroading" refers to the practice of operating a railroad (or railway, if you will). The jotting down of names and numbers is "trainspotting," which we call "railfanning." Many of the Metra locomotives are named (primarily for Illinois politicians or for towns and counties along the right of way, e.g. 170 "Village of Winnetka."
The timekeeping does matter. Burlington used to ask train crews to explain any delay exceeding thirty seconds. The intermodal train is too tall and too heavy for European track structure, and it is gutsy of the dispatcher to run it through the beginning of the dinky parade in that way.
The weight of the rail is in fact stamped into the rail, but I pay that even less attention than I paid to the names and numbers on the diesels. It's probably 132 pounds to the yard. (The U.S. is unlikely ever to go metric as the yards and miles are literally part of our geography. Anywhere from Pennsylvania west you are likely to encounter what we call "mile roads" (that "Eight Mile" movie about Detroit invokes such a road) surveyed in the late 1700s to map what we then called the Northwest Territories, now Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Stephen Karlson ATTITUDE is a nine letter word. BOATSPEED.
