Railway Museum Volunteer Cannot Stop Correcting Visitors Who Call the Locomotive a 'Train'

Railway museum volunteer and retired locomotive engineer Harold Consist has been placed on a 'soft advisory' by museum management after his relentless correction of visitors who refer to the museum's preserved 4-8-4 steam locomotive as 'a train' rather than 'a locomotive' caused a seven-year-old visitor to cry. 'A train is the entire consist,' Harold explained, seemingly unable to stop himself. 'The locomotive, the tender, the cars, the caboose — that's a train. What we have here is a locomotive. Specifically, a Northern-type 4-8-4 with a four-wheel leading truck, eight driving wheels, and a four-wheel trailing truck. Calling this a train is like calling a horse a parade.' The incident that prompted the advisory occurred when a family of four entered the museum's engine house and the youngest child pointed at the locomotive and said 'look at the big train, Mommy.' Harold, who was stationed nearby, immediately intervened. 'I said, actually, young man, that's not a train, it's a locomotive,' Harold recounted. 'Then I explained the difference. I may have gone into wheel arrangements. The child started crying around the time I got to the firebox dimensions.' Museum director Sandra Tender has asked Harold to 'adopt a more welcoming approach to terminological imprecision.' 'Our visitors are not railroad professionals,' Tender said. 'They're families. They're tourists. They see a big machine with wheels on rails and they call it a train. That's fine. That's normal. Harold needs to understand that correctness and kindness are not mutually exclusive, and that when they conflict, kindness should win.' Harold has disputed this directive. 'If a child points at a cat and says dog, you correct them,' he argued. 'This is the same principle. Taxonomic accuracy begins in childhood.' Harold has been reassigned from the engine house to the gift shop, where the opportunities for terminological correction are 'reduced but not eliminated,' as he recently informed a customer that the souvenir they were purchasing was 'technically a die-cast model of a locomotive, not a toy train.'