freight schedules or scanners

[rtesta]

All, new here, normally brouse on the mrr forums. but maybe someone can help me with catching trains.

i live in orage co NY which is in the SE part of the state. nys&w runs through my town from the sparta cutoff in sparta nj. my problem is that most trains run through at night 10-12pm and i need five minutes to get to the rails. cant convince the wife to sit down there for 2 hours with a less than 50% success rate.

how can i get some lead time as to when traains will be comming thru on a given day. i assume freight scchedules are loose and likely not public domain, ive also thought of investing in a scanner, but i dont know iff it will work and get me the info i need (what if the crew aint talking?) to hop in the car .

if a sanner is a good option, what brand/specs? how do i get the local frequencies?

regards, bobt

[Anonymous]

A scanner is useful, but it has to be considered in context. They are not cheap to buy and can be amazingly difficult to program for the uninitiated (of whom I still count myself) -- this seems to be especially true of those Megahertz ranges from 159 to 161 set aside for US/Canada railroading, as opposed to the public-service bands and weather bands below and above the railroad bands.

A scanner might be wonderful, but please you have to remember that engineers don't much like to hear themselves talk. You're not going to get, "Well, it looks like we'll be in Port Jervis pretty soon," though I wi***hey did!! You might get dispatch signals from Lord-knows where and defective-equipment robots sounding off on the condition of the train wheels that have just passed over it (that technology is what did in cabooses.) It can all seem wildly "out of context" in the beginning.

My best advice would be to hang around fellow railfans or, if you can't make local contact, join a RR society in another town. You're new, but you already respect the language and I'm sure you'll soon discover that most of us LOVE to travel, especially to trainsites, even if we have to use the private auto to do so!

Also, if there are model railway exhibits you are familiar with, a lot of those guys like to keep up with the "big stuff". And best of all, if you know where the crew changes, you might catch them in a very generous mood. In our region people often speak with train crews that change at the division point of Fort Madison, Iowa. It's easy because the train crews also use the Amtrak passenger depot. From such people you can learn where the defective-equipment detectors are, who is giving orders to what train where, possibly how closely a train duplicates the time it went by yesterday and the time it will go by tomorrow (I'm trying very hard not to say "sticks to schedule" because, well, another thing good to know is whether the line is on Centralized Traffic Control (CTC) , the block system (ABS) or some other routine to keep trains from crashing into one another and not all systems require sticking to a TIMETABLE per se).

On some lines train dispatch will be from a computerized center regions away and on other lines you might be able to pick up the phone and say, "How's number six running today?" When I was a kid I made sure the local RR people in Virginia knew me, so they knew I wasn't just messing around. And of course, vigilance regarding security is the order of the day, so I don't think people will be as forthcoming unless they know you or know of you.

Railroad engineers may not like to hear themselves talk any more than is necessary when their train is in motion. When they're off duty, though, I doubt you'll find any dearth of talkers with tales to tell! Short story long, pretty soon you'll need a scanner (and there are a couple of live topics right now talking about entry-level models). But more than that, and before all that, use your wits, your phone, your patience, the Internet, your library, your own no doubt considerable charm and find out about the basic technology and culture of rail in your own vicinity -- THEN you'll know what frequencies to program into your scanner and most of all, what those brief bursts of sentences mean!

Now, are any of you out there familiar with this gentleman's home road??

Good luck, Allen Smalling ([e-mail])

[rtesta]

Allan, thank you for your reply and all your effort , it will be a good start. i'll also follow the advice on linking with the model builders which is my first area of interest. Regretfully, time constraints make me a loner - but that will have to change.

best regards, bobt

[TheS.P.caboose]

A scanner, IMO, is a must. If you're not sure of the frequency the railroad broadcasts on, enter 457.9375 which is the end-of-train device.