When and where did you become a rail fan?
I was reading the threads yet again this morning and paused for a moment and asked myself a question that keeps reappearing..why am I doing this? What is this quasi OCD like fascination with railroads? Is it genetic?.is it an experience? I had a conversation with a fellow railfan at IRM..he had an interesting theory..he said it was like a virus that is caught from enviromental factors..boys, in particular, in preteen years are particularly susceptible...
Was there one particular experience where you got "the bug"...
http://davesrailpix.com/cnsm/htm/cnsm212.htm
Mine was exposure at the Mundelein Station of the CNSM...conversations with motormen...linemen...sitting on that bench on layover....they had alot of patience with me...watching the steeplecabs in four unit MU do a flying switch...can of pop and an after school occupation...
Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.
For me, the bug hit when I was 13. At the time, I lived in Flagstaff (Foxglen) and was out riding my bike around and wound up on old Route 66 (where it splits from what was then 'Santa Fe Blvd') on the east side of town. While riding east on this stretch of old 66, which runs behind the Flagstaff Mall and parallel to the now-BNSF transcon, I caught a train that was waiting at the signal at the crossover west of the Country Club/I-40 overpass. Looking at the blue and yellow paint on the SD40-2 locomotive and listening to the turbo whine on the idling locomotive is pretty much what ignited it. My entire life I've always been fascinated with machines, and this here was a BIG one!
Watching the village of East Troy M-15 pull the trains past both of my grandparents houses and my own. Beginning a relationship with that railroad when I was 10 years old. The first piece of railroad equipment I ever operated was CNS&M # 411
For me it was watching an EL freight cross a high trestle in Belfast, NY while driving with my parents. I couldn't have been more than 5 years old at the time but the image seared itself into my brain. Seeing an LA&L steam locomotive sitting dead on a siding in Livonia, NY (I think?) also comes to mind.
--Reed
My first exposure to the "Railfan DNA Virus", if you want to call it that, occurred during the summer of 1962 when my family was vacationing out in the Black Hills of South Dakota. We had close friends who were cattle ranchers in the Centennial Valley of Spearfish in the Black Hills and for six years they were our next door neighbors in Sioux Falls. We were visiting these friends of ours in the Black Hills when we decided to take a ride on the Black Hills Central Railroad, which to many people is simply known as the "1880 Train."
The Black Hills Central, which had it's beginnings in 1958, operates over a small, ten mile portion of the old CB&Q Black Hills highline, which ran from Edgemont to Deadwood. In 1962 when I had my first experience with the Black Hills Central, there was a point on the railroad line halfway between Hill City and Keystone known as "Oblivion", and at Oblivion the Black Hills Central had a pretty good start on an outdoor railroad museum.
While I do not remember specifically what was at this outdoor railroad museum at Oblivion, I do remember my Dad helping me climb into the cab of a steam locomotive that was on display, and I have since then in the last few years learned that it was probably an ex-Chicago & Northwestern 4-6-0, and my Dad had shot some 8mm footage of me in the cab of this locomotive with his Bell & Howell movie camera. The thing about this experience that I have never forgotten is that the upholstery of both the engineer's and fireman's seats were slashed with a knife and the stuffing was comming out of it, and idiots had tossed beer bottles and other garbage into the firebox. I was old enough to know this is wrong, and I am still saddened by it all. We were never able to find the footage of the film that my Dad had shot on this particular trip with the Black Hills Central. I am guessing that I was about 7 years old at the time, and this trip on the Black Hills Central is where I was bitten by the "bug".
Rick Mills, who has written a number of books about railroading in this state and the Black Hills in particular, told me that this one C&NW 4-6-0 is now in the hands of the Forney Museum of Transportation in Denver, Colorado.
CANADIANPACIFIC2816
Two "events" if you will.
The Illinois Central had a branch line that ran from Mattoon to Evansville that was 150 feet from our house. My mother, would take me outside to watch the trains pass by. She would read the names on the boxcars to me. I also practiced counting. To this day, I always count cars when stopped by a train. Watching the daily trains became a habit. Whatever I would be doing, I would stop and go outside and watch the train, counting cars.
Then, in 1972 I was at the local newstand and was attracted to the May, 1972 issue of Trains, which featured a painting of a blonde bombshell detraining the Super Chief at Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal with the then (1940's) paperatzi (sp) noting her arrival. Just who was the star? The actress or the ob-car? For me it was love at first sight. Picked up the magazine and have read each one since....nearly 35 years.
BTW, for you Erie Lackawanna fans, there is an excellent George W. Hilton article "The View of the viaduct from in front of the diner." Pretty good stuff, think I will re-read it tonight.
ed
Two events for me also --
The first came in 1971 when my dad (a former Pennsy employee) took my brother and me to see the Erie Lackawanna Hillburn Yard in Suffern NY and the Woodbine Yard in Spring Valley NY. Tucked in the Woodbine Yard I saw EL E8A 823, and it was just such a beautiful engine I was awestruck. We went home and I went into the attic in search of anything my dad had saved from his Pennsy days. But what I found were two large boxes of magazines. One was TRAINS. The other was RAILROAD. I sat and read every page of every copy of those over the next year.
The second came about 1976 when riding my bike by the Oradell NJ train station with some friends. The bells starting ringing and the gate came down, and I rode my bike back to watch the U34CH pull in to the depot. It was chugging, just like the steam engines I had occasionally seen when watching excursions with my dad... and I just was struck by the enormity of the locomotive and the sounds it made, and the puffs of smoke that came out of it. While I have pictures I took of trains that go all the way back to 1970, that day at Oradell gave me such a case of railfan-itis that it's still going today. Within a week of that incident, I was riding my bike up and down all the local Conrail lines, grabbing pictures of everything I saw.
According to my parents, the bug bit me while I was still a toddler. Since no houses had yet been built on the next block, there was an unobstructed view from our back yard of the C&WI main (Erie, Monon, C&O, Wabash) and a clear view of the embankment upon which the South Shore crossed over the C&WI and NKP main lines. Just to make sure, Dad's mother lived across the street from the PRR Bernice Cutoff.
My dear aunt many years later opined that I never outgrew trains, and that's about what happened.
Paul:That was quite a spot to grow up watching trains. What was your favorite (train or memory)?
wallyworld wrote:he said it was like a virus that is caught from enviromental factors..boys, in particular, in preteen years are particularly susceptible...
he said it was like a virus that is caught from enviromental factors..boys, in particular, in preteen years are particularly susceptible...
I would beg to differ! Trust me women are just as susceptible to becoming Foamers as men are.Personally I am not sure exactly how I got into this whole obsession since I live on a trainless island and no one in my family has ever worked for the railroad or had an interest in trains. Actually I think all of my relatives think that I am quite crazy. I do know it probably stemmed from a general interest in the history of the western U.S. and mining, of which railroads played an iatrical part. I do know one thing however- it is definitely contagious. My parents have gone from thinking that trains were just a couple month jaunt that I would lose interest in to picking up my subscription to Trains from the post office so that they can hog it for a week before I get my hands on it. One thing is definitely true though. If you are talking on these forums all hope is lost because you are definitely infected and there is no cure.
The night I was born, my Dad was hand-firing a steam engine.
I am just glad he wasn't drinking in a bar.
She who has no signature! cinscocom-tmw
Interesting Subject !
I got the virus when I was 2-3 yrs old according to my mother. She bought me a train for Christmas..I have never stopped playing with them nor stopped watching them since ! I wanted to be an engineer since I was about 5 but never realized that dream. I guess I was at the wrong place in time to do that,When I first started applying to RR's there were no openings for trainmen..I think the people who got there before me never retired or so it seemed..I did work for a short time as a track laborer but had a falling out with a crooked roadmaster,let the RR and never looked back...I still have the virus ! Danny
....Guess the simple answer for me would be as someone above said....From early as a small child I was fasinated with machinery, the larger the better, and in my childhood I'd say the largest would have been steam engines. So somehow the whole combination of what is railroading became of high interest to me.
I also happen to be very interested in the track structures probably as much as the actual machines that run on them. The engineering part that is involved to create the routes to cross mountains and the result being beautiful graceful curves of track structures and maintaining such gentle grades in doing so. {In most cases}.
Later years in Interstate road building {decades later}, finds many Interstate routes established close to decades old rail routes. So guess the RR surveyors were really on the ball with the rail routes.
Quentin
MP173 wrote: Paul:That was quite a spot to grow up watching trains. What was your favorite (train or memory)?ed
I remember my only steam locomotives in regular service (NKP Berkshires), all sorts of interesting stuff on South Shore back to steeplecabs and their SW1, Monon BL2's, Erie/EL and NKP PA's, C&O freights (often with F7's) tying up Burnham Ave interminably while they switched out a large block at Burnham Yard, EL's "Lake Cities", Monon's "Thoroughbred" with one half-empty coach behind the mail & express, NKP NW2's with the birdcage over the end platform switching the Ford assembly plant, and others too numerous.
I can't remember a time when I wasn't a railfan. We, too, had an unobstructed view of the local main line from about a half mile away, and I went through elementary school thinking that all engines looked like BL2s and all freight trains had two cabooses.
Well, not quite. I was a precocious reader, and my parents had bought me some pretty mature railroad books (with photographs, not drawings of engines with smiley faces), so I knew about steam engines and other diesels (particularly Es and Fs, since they were in the publicity shots).
The odd thing was, I was scared of trains close-up until I was about nine years old. When I was six I set a new land speed record getting away from a CN steam locomotive that popped while sitting below the lookout point at Bayview Junction.
Several pivotal experiences: seeing my first copy of Trains when I was 10 or 11; riding my bike around the city the following year and actually discovering that the GTW still ran trains into town (I thought they'd left when steam disappeared); making a train trip to Chicago and beyond with a bunch of friends when I was in college (first experiences with a diner and a dome car); and driving to Chicago with my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend and discovering that the CNW was hiring.
Carl
Railroader Emeritus (practiced railroading for 46 years--and in 2010 I finally got it right!)
CAACSCOCOM--I don't want to behave improperly, so I just won't behave at all. (SM)
Some good stories on this post. Its fascinating to read the memories and experiences of others.
I have always been around trains and the people who work the railroads. My uncle was an engineer for L&N out of Mobile, AL way back in the days of steam and early diesels. My father worked maintenance of way for Southern Railway his entire life. I could sit and listen to them talk shop and tell stories for hours on end. What I wouldn't give to do that again, one more time. My father served in a railway operating company during World War 2 in North Africa, Italy, France, and into Germany. He would tell stories of how they would clear bombed out bridges and track and span a river in 48 hours, of rail yards in Germany totally destroyed and put back into operation in days.
The "virus" really infected me when I got to go with my father out onto the rails. If he was close to home, he would sometimes take me to watch them replace ties, tamp down ballast, and all the other operations. I remember getting to see them use thermite welding to join rail at night in Mississippi...what a show! Or watching them go into the hole to let the Southern Crescent thunder by on its way to New Orleans. If it was near Mardi Gras time, it would sometimes have five gleaming E8s up front and three or four official cars on the rear end. Just thinking of it makes me smell EMD burnt diesel, creosote, and hot steel. I can remember trips on my father's employee pass to Washington D.C. Union Station, to New Orleans, and Atlanta. Of standing in New Orleans waiting to board the Crescent with Illinois Central's incomparable City of New Orleans sitting on the adjacent track and a L&N slant nose E6 chanting nearby.
I have always loved to read and I can remember the day I first saw a copy of Trains, it was at the passenger depot in Meridian, Mississippi as we were getting ready to head north on the Crescent. To me, it was a gift from heaven! A magazine that was devoted to trains!!
G Mack
I guess I got taken home from the hospital a couple of days after being born, so I suppose I've been a railfan since the first week in December, 1958!! My house in Richfield MN faced Pleasant Ave West, the other side of the street was the Minneapolis Northfield and Southern "high line" to south Minneapolis. (The other side of the tracks was a cornfield until 1971.) That, coupled with the top local kids' show being "Lunch with Casey (Jones)" I didn't have much choice but to love trains. My favorite engines were no.15, the BIG Baldwin DRS-6-6-1500 and the FM H-10-44 / H-12-44's.
Unfortunately I was about 8 years too late to see steam on that line...oddly enough, that line first saw "oil electric" freight engines c.1908.
For sure when I was about fifteen months old. My grandfather who was a section hand for the L&N in Bonnieville, Ky came home from work one afternoon carrying his lunch pail in one hand and me in the other. Seems my mom and grandmother had left me playing outside next to the door and I went down the tracks chasing the afternoon local (#3 or #4 too young to read a compass not sure if I was going north or south). He had me in the cabs of work trains before I was 2 and my favorite memories are of days spent beside the "Main Line" from Louisville to Nashville on warm summer days smelling creasote and watching the endless parades of black and cream F, geeps, RS3, and FA and blue and cream E units leading trains through Bonnieville.
Dale
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