The romance of riding the rails

There's just something romantic about an old steam locomotive plugging along, those plumes of steam and smoke trailing behind it.

At least one commuter-rail train out of South Station brought those days back to life around 4 this afternoon, an alert e-mailer informs us:

[It was] belching humongous amounts of black smoke. Tons of black smoke. You'd have thought the darn thing was running on coal. Instead of stopping on past the platform or heading into the Red Line yard, I believe the train continued on its way towards JFK/UMass. The plume was very dramatic and ran the length of the post office building
and extended even behind the giant ventilation building on the south side. Folks on the street were gawking just like folks in office buildings.