Wanker of the year, railroad edition
If I was doing a Wanker Of The Year award for railroads, it would be a pretty dull award. There just aren't enough railroads left to be horrified about, and at least over the past few years one railroad has been pretty consistantly the worst. That railroad is, of course, the Union Pacific, and the reason I feel compelled to mention it is not because of their special Abu Ghraib locomotive painted in honor of the pretend boss of ex-board member Dick "asshole" Cheney. No, as offensive as that might be, it's pretty much par for the course for an Evil Party super deluxe team leader company.
Instead, the wanker award for the Union Pacific is because of their goddamn licensing of every symbol of the Union Pacific and the railroads it has absorbed over the years. So if you want to actually model a western railroad which has UP (or a hundred or so other railroads), the fucking railroad is now demanding licensing fees for the "privilege" of using their name. What sort of licensing fees? Well, if you want to buy a prepainted Roundhouse Athearn (name to be determined later) RS-3 in a dozen western railroad names, you get to pay US$5.00 to the stupid railroad for the privilege of doing so.
If I was trying to model the stinking yellow elephant of the west, I'd be a pretty unhappy camper over this turn of events. In the old days, the railroads paid a pretty penny for the sort of good publicity you could get for having every single model railroad in North America having little model boxcars, flatcars, hopper cars, tank cars, and whatnot labelled Union Pacific, but apparently now that they've got a regional monopoly and a close personal friend as dictator of the United States, the public can be damned.
Sometime in the future, after the smoke has cleared from the second American Revolution, there'll be a big honking antitrust lawsuit that has Union Pacific written all over it. And all the goodwill the Union Pacific might have had will be whittled away in dribs and drabs of US$5.00 royalty cheques.