Whatever happened to "railroad diagrams" like this one?

I always liked these, maybe because I learned Pascal at an early age. David Geary and I use them in our Core JSF book, but, truth be told, that was my pet thing, and David found them weird.

I just wrote up a description of the @OrderBy annotation in the Java Persistence Architecture, and I ran across the following description in the spec:

orderby_list::= orderby_item [,orderby_item]*
orderby_item::= property_or_field_name [ASC | DESC]

This describes what you can have in the value attribute, e.g.

@OrderBy(value="name, score DESC")

I have no problem reading BNF, but I wasn't so sure about Elvis. I thought a railroad diagram would be easier to understand:

I wasted a whole day tweaking Violet to draw railroad diagrams after a Google search turned up this Haskell based tool and this LaTeX based tool, and nothing else.

Are the days of the railroad over, or do railroad diagrams still have their place? Do you have any recommendations for drawing tools?