Last year I posted old pictures I took at Jamestown.
http://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-458800-1.html

1967-68 I had two cameras - a Kodak Instamatic 100 and a Kodak Duaflex; the latter was a 620 box camera my Dad originally used to take baby pictures of me. The shutter on the Instamatic died in 1969 a few days before I graduated from college; I mourned its loss, but that forced me to use graduation money to purchase my first 35mm camera. Before that, the highest shutter speed available to me was 1/100, so I really appreciated the capability that is known as "shuttter priority" mode today.

I took the image below the following year, when my brother and I rode both to and from Chicago on GTW passenger trains. I shows that car you're talking about, but it also has the motion blur I was stuck with at the time.

and here is an Instamatic view of that car

How far are you from Ely, NV?

How you are you from Jamestown, CA?

Each of them has a railroad museum.

I didn't store original for a good reason - zooming in would reveal ugliness - that is why I need to do the whole thing from scratch ... but thank you for the kind words.

Every year my wife and I go to Pt Pelee NP on the north shore of Lake Erie. Often we walk the several kilometers from the Visitor Center to the Point, seeing various things along the way. One year, just as we arrived at the Point, we saw a guy dragging a wooden tripod down the short path from the shuttle stop. He spent a few minutes taking perfect pictures, then dragged the tripod back to where he had come from. I find our mobility to be much more pleasing.

Skipping most of the long back story ... in the summer of 1967 I was a college student when my Dad arranged for me to ride into Chicago with a colleague who had a meeting there. I took this {with a box camera} looking south from the famous Roosevelt Street bridges towards the Burlington's commuter coach yard. When I returned to Purdue University in the Fall, I took my summer's pictures with me for the first meeting of the year of the Purdue RR Club; at the end of the operating session, my pictures were gone - and the negatives were with them! - never to be seen by me again! Yes, I was devastated. It turned out that two pictures weren't in the envelop - this one {because I had sat on it while it was sitting on my bed, so it was creased}, and a badly under-exposed picture of a transfer caboose. When I got my first scanner, this print was one of the first things I scanned. Some day I need to locate the two negatives and see if I can do a better job with them

I've heard the word 'database' used to describe LightRoom. Is it a true 'database', which keeps extra files to make searches faster? If so, moving stuff on your own would confuse it.

"Obsolete" normally translates "supplier no longer updates it". It might continue to work fine. It might work 95% and fail strangely 5% of the time. It might fail all the time. It may seem to work OK, but provide a security "hole" that allows knowledgeable hacker to get to your images or "tunnel" to some other material in the computer. If you enjoy playing "Russian Roulette" ...

Zoom lens with longest reach .... intermediate lengths will be needed as well.

I expect MILCs from Canikon to have controls that more more intuitive, more use of wheel, buttons, etc, and less use of menus. I know that controls on my Pentax MILC are almost identical to controls on my Pentax DSLR.

Sometimes compression is what would happen if you wrote the note "make 110 dots this color" instead of writing
"make dot this color"
"make dot this color"
and do this another 108 times

Often compression is totally unnoticed.

Instead of going all the way into the Berkshires, for this trip or for another one, you might consider the boat / steam train trip that starts in Essex CT.

The main disadvantage of prime is that perspective and crop are chained together.

I use the operating system to create and fill folders.

I use gimp to crop, adjust levels, etc.

What makes you say "more accurate"?? The method used by MILC is essentially the same way we do it when manual focusing; it is consistent, and will not suffer from "back focus" or "front focus" issues.