The Railfan Experience - When the Real World comes calling

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When the Real World comes calling

a scene from my "Real World" audition video:
chasing trains on the T&P near Sierra Blanca, TX.

It's too bad that my age (33) precludes me from being a cast member of MTV's Real World, because I've got an idea for an audition video that would would make me a shoo-in.

Simply put, film or video of myself as a railfan "in action" (chasing and photographing trains), set to music, would make great television.

Imagine a sequence where I'm driving a long, lonely desert highway, pacing a mile-long stack train moving at track speed. The landscape flows past outside my truck's side windows, and the yellow center lines of the highway flash by in a blur as I inch closer to the train's locomotives.

Or how about a scene where I'm passively standing on a scenic hillside, waiting for just the right moment to click the shutter as a slow moving coal drag grinds upgrade?

And think of the motion involved and the feeling of excitement present in a high-speed urban chase... imagine film of a crazed foamer in hot, dedicated pursuit of a train with a rare locomotive... dodging and weaving through traffic, running stop signs, and bailing out of the car just in the nick of time to set up a tripod and camera and "get the shot" ...

As for the music? Well, it's gotta fit my interpretation of the mood of the location I'm shooting. If I'm on the Sunset Route in far west Texas, I'll play Mazzy Star. If I'm in the Texas Panhandle or southern Oklahoma, it'll be Hank Williams. The Rockies in Colorado? Grateful Dead. Downtown Dallas? Gotta be Pantera. Visiting a large city in the northeast? Beastie Boys. And so on.

Trains, photography, and great tunes... what better way to show what I'm about? I'd be a shoo-in, I tell ya...

Once I make it onto the show, I've got some ideas there as well.

How cool would it be to bail out on the 7 strangers' crisis of the moment by grabbing my cameras and slamming the door behind me as I head out to the tracks with the MTV film crew hot on my heels? The scene would unfold like this here: "Beth broke my guitar after I called her a b*tch for lying about cleaning the bathroom!" "Screw you guys, I'm going foaming!!" (Now that's some must-see tv, bay-beee!!!)

And instead of sending me and my roomies on a trip to Fiji where we stay drunk for a week, or a letting us gallivant around Europe showing everyone how obnoxious Americans can be, I say send us all on a camping trip to Tehachapi! And turn those 18-year-old hotties loose on the floor of the Fort Worth train show and let 'em fend for themselves. ("Hey baby, wanna see my DDA40X?") For our work assignment, let us take over the management of UP's Houston terminal operations for six weeks. When we give it back at the conclusion of the show, they'll hardly recognize the place.

Oh, wait a minute... what's that? It'll never happen? That's right -- it won't! It's all just a dream, because at 33, I'm way too old to be considered as a cast member of the show. Everyone knows that reality ends at age 25 anyway. It's all downhill from there.

But if the Real World should ever come calling... I'll be ready.

the Real World - The Railfan Experience

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