Another thought along these lines: It's good to be aware of history. It's bad to be enslaved by it, and I think some of these people are enslaved by this mistaken impression that the best is in the past, the present is terrible, and everything is always getting worse all the time. This attitude of course isn't just in the railfan community; it's everywhere. I think a lot of the flaws in our current political discourse in mainstream society includes some continuing sense of a pining for a past that never existed.

(I never could get into That 70's Show, for instance. I lived through it once, and didn't especially enjoy most of it.)