What Track Is Your Personal Brand Running On?
Four personal branding lessons about connection, thought leadership, distinctive identity, and perspective from the America 250 Locomotive Celebration.
“There isn’t a train I would not take, no matter where it’s going.”
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
I love St. Vincent Millay’s sense of adventure. As a traveler, I’m with her.
As a strategist? I might want to know where the train is going.
Trains have always been part of my landscape.
I grew up in Danville, Illinois, an industrial and coal-mining city where the Chicago & Eastern Illinois Railroad operated its main shops on the east side of town. Freight trains were simply part of life.
Later, my family lived in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, another community shaped by the railroad. When the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad arrived in 1849, the center of business activity eventually shifted south toward the station at Main Street and Crescent Boulevard, where downtown Glen Ellyn remains centered today.
So when my husband Bruce and I heard about the America 250 Locomotive Celebration at the North Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer, North Carolina, we knew we wanted to go.
Only this time, I brought both my camera and my creative strategist’s brain.
A Once-in-a-Generation Gathering
The North Carolina Transportation Museum occupies the former Southern Railway Spencer Shops, which opened in 1896 as a major steam locomotive repair facility.
Its centerpiece is the 37-bay Bob Julian Roundhouse, the largest operating roundhouse in North America. For the America 250 Locomotive Celebration, more than 30 locomotives, freight cars, and cabooses from Class I, short-line, regional, and passenger railroads gathered in Spencer.
One of the stars was Santa Fe 5704, restored in its red, white, and blue 1976 Bicentennial paint scheme. It traveled roughly 2,300 miles from Southern California. Track at the museum, where it normally resides, even had to be temporarily reconnected to get the locomotive out and onto the national rail network.
Thousands of people came to see this gathering, including visitors from Australia, Canada, and England.
What impressed me most as a photographer were the dedicated rail fans and fellow photographers lining the grounds.
Telephoto lenses. Tripods. Multiple cameras. Specialized gear. Some waited around the turntable for hours, watching trains spin around to capture exactly the right light and angle. Others had special night-photography passes for even more dramatic images.
These weren’t people casually noticing a train. They cared enough to travel, wait, photograph, record, discuss, and document them.
As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about personal branding, reputation, and visibility, I couldn’t help noticing that.
Waiting for What’s Around the Bend
We spent several hours walking around in classic North Carolina summer weather: high heat, bright sunshine, and hothouse humidity.
Eventually, we started heading back toward the car. On the way, we climbed an overpass where a group of photographers had gathered. Their cameras told us something was about to happen.
Then we heard it. A freight horn echoed in the distance.
Everyone went silent. Someone whispered: “SHHHH! It’s coming!”
Another fan turned to a friend and asked: “Should I take video or pictures?”
That was my question, too. I took both. Because why not?
And then the locomotive came around the bend.
There was something surprisingly thrilling about standing on that overpass with a group of strangers, all waiting for a piece of living history to round the curve.
Standing there, I realized I wasn’t only looking at trains. I was looking at some of the same principles that make personal brands work. Thanks to the North Carolina Transportation Museum for hosting this amazing event and to all the volunteers and railroads who turned out to celebrate trains.
1. Eliminate Incompatible Gauges in Your Brand Ecosystem
In the early days of American railroading, competing companies didn’t always build their tracks to the same gauge.
A train running on one system couldn’t necessarily continue onto another. Freight and passengers sometimes had to be transferred before continuing their journeys.
Think about your professional presence.
Does your LinkedIn profile tell one story while your website tells another?
Does your keynote position you around one idea while your podcast focuses on something completely different?
Does the way people introduce you match what you want to be known for?
Many experienced leaders have built impressive individual tracks that don’t connect.
The goal of personal branding isn’t to make every channel identical. It’s to make the ecosystem interoperable.
When your LinkedIn presence, website, speaking, content, podcast, relationships, and real-world reputation reinforce one another, your ideas and your reputation can travel farther with less friction.
2. Give Your Ideas Something Strong Enough to Carry Them
Thought leadership is about more than content, its’ about having something worth carrying forward.
For experienced leaders and experts, that substance comes from lived experience, a distinctive point of view, useful data, proprietary frameworks, informed opinions, and ideas you’ve earned the right to talk about.
That’s also why I don’t use *personal branding*, *thought leadership*, *visibility*, and *reputation* interchangeably.
I see them as different parts of the same system:
Personal brand = recognition.
Thought leadership = substance.
Visibility = distribution.
Reputation = what accumulates.
Your personal brand helps people recognize what you stand for. Your thought leadership gives them a reason to keep paying attention.
Visibility helps those ideas reach the right people. And over time, what people experience, remember, and say about you becomes your reputation.
That’s considerably more powerful than simply posting more often.
3. Give People Something to Recognize—and Follow
One of the most striking sights in Spencer was seeing locomotives from different railroads gathered side by side.
BNSF Railway. Canadian National. CPKC. CSX. Norfolk Southern. Union Pacific. Regional and short-line railroads.
They’d come together for a shared national milestone without surrendering their individual identities.
You could still tell who was who. That’s an important lesson for experienced leaders.
Strong personal brands don’t have to blend in to collaborate.
Distinctive positioning makes collaboration more interesting because everyone brings something identifiable to the table.
But recognition is only the beginning. The rail fans in Spencer demonstrated something much deeper.
They knew these locomotives. They followed them. They photographed them. They talked about them. Some traveled extraordinary distances to see them.
Your goal probably isn’t to have people waiting beside railroad tracks with telephoto lenses for you to appear. But there is a serious question underneath that image:
Have you built a body of work people recognize and want to follow?
That’s where personal branding begins to move beyond visibility and toward advocacy, recommendation, and reputation.
4. Sometimes the Best Perspective Comes From Changing Your Angle
That moment on the overpass almost didn’t happen. We could have rushed back to our air-conditioned car.
Instead, we climbed the bridge, joined the train-spotters, and waited. Five minutes later, we heard the horn.
Sometimes changing where you stand changes what you see. As a photographer, I know that instinctively.
Move a few feet. Get higher. Get lower. Change the lens. Wait for the light. The subject may not have changed at all.
Your perspective has. The same can be true of personal branding.
Sometimes the answer is stepping far enough away from your existing professional story to see what’s already there:
The expertise you’ve accumulated.
The ideas people associate with you.
The experiences that distinguish you.
The relationships you’ve built.
The work people already recommend you for.
Visibility isn’t about making the most noise. It’s about becoming recognizable for something that matters, consistently enough that the right people notice when you show up.
What Track Is Your Personal Brand Running On?
As we move toward the final quarter of the year, these are the questions I’m thinking about:
Are the different parts of your personal brand reinforcing the same reputation?
Are your ideas substantial enough to carry forward?
What do people recognize you for before you ever step into the room?
And perhaps the biggest question: Is all of that momentum taking you where you actually want to go?
St. Vincent Millay may have been willing to take any train, no matter where it was going.
As a traveler, I understand the temptation. As a personal branding strategist, I recommend checking the destination.
See the America 250 Locomotive Celebration Through My Lens
I photographed the locomotives, details, people, and moments that caught my eye throughout our day in Spencer. View my complete America 250 Locomotive Celebration photo collection on Flickr.
About Barbara Rozgonyi
Barbara Rozgonyi is a Fractional CMO, keynote speaker, and personal branding strategist who helps experienced leaders, speakers, and organizations close the gap between their real-world value and market recognition. As the creator of the 5D WIRED PR Framework™ and host of the Brighter Presence™ podcast, Barbara engineers high-impact visibility ecosystems that make leaders easier to recognize, remember, recommend, and choose. Discover her strategic frameworks at wiredPRworks.com and explore her visual perspectives at BarbaraRozgonyi.com.
