Care to Join Some Local Railfans?
Pick a peaceful day, grab a drink and a camera … and go watch a train. That’s what many railfans do
By John Addyman
It was one of those few days this May that turned out sunny and warm.
On quiet Division Street in Palmyra, four cars were parked off the road, well-spaced from each other, resting on the grassy area between the macadam and the railroad tracks. Two men had left their car and were standing in front of it, looking roughly west. Each man holding a camera.
Steve DeMay knew why they were all there. From the front seat of the second car in the line, he settled into his seat. He had a good view of what was coming and a pleasant smile creased his face. He was doing exactly what he loves to do.
And then we all heard it: the sound that raises DeMay’s heartbeat and broadens his smile.
It was a warning blast. Unmistakable. Strong and sharp.
Seconds later, DeMay had moved up on his seat as the locomotive came around the bend, through the trees and the horn went off again, but this time in sets of short beep-beep beep-beeps.
The first blast had warned anyone approaching the crossroads. The short double-beeps were an acknowledgement by the engineer for the railfans assembled — six guys waiting there to see a train go by.
“I just enjoy trains,” DeMay said, shaking his head. “I like the sound of them. I like to see if I can come up with recognizing an oddball engine going down the road.”
Translation: DeMay is a railfan who loves diesel engines, and he’s always looking for the new or different engine that might happen by on this stretch of the railroad.
What’s a railfan?
Someone who loves trains. Like many other railfans, DeMay likes to take pictures of trains. In a bedroom in his house in Palmyra, he has stuffed bookcases with binders of photos of trains he’s taken himself. Open the closet and you’ll see stacks and stacks of boxes of slides of trains. Look at two of the walls and he’s got the surfaces covered with train models.
Railfans like to take trips on trains for the fun of it — even happily boarding dull commuter trains. They like to receive gifts of trains or train things. They read about trains. They spend hours looking at videos of trains online. The buy scanners or phone apps to track trains or listen to train crews.
They make pilgrimages to places like the Station Inn, a hotel in Cresson, Pennsylvania, with a wide, wide front porch with cozy overstuffed chairs all looking at — train tracks! The famous Horseshoe Curve is right there in front of the porch.
But those are the “normal” railfans. Some go a lot deeper into train stuff: the train crews call those folks “foamers” — as in, so excited they foam at the mouth.
Are there a lot of these railfans out there?
You bet your caboose there are.
On the day DeMay spent an hour on Division Street, there were six guys watching trains. All reasonable people, all sane, all smiling and grateful that three trains went past in 20 minutes’ time.
DeMay knew them all, had seen them before. One guy had a special scanner to alert him to the arrival of a train. Don Allen, who had driven to Palmyra from Binghamton, was shooting video and monitoring a westbound Amtrak passenger train on his cellphone app. Richard A. Allen Sr., from Cortland and in the car with Don, was shooting single-frame photography. He’s a conductor on the Cooperstown & Charlotte Valley Railroad after a career as an engineer for the Delaware & Hudson Railway. Richard has also authored “Trackside Around Binghamton, 1960-76,” a book chock-a-block with photos of trains from half a century ago.
“I’ve spent 50 years watching trains,” DeMay said. “It started out when my family had a farm and my dad used to take me over to Manchester to load hay and straw into boxcars. We were right next to the Lehigh Valley locomotive facility there. There was a roundhouse and a turntable there [where locomotives could come in, get fixed and repositioned on the turntable to return to service]. I began watching trains on the Lehigh Valley line in Manchester in the early 1970s.
“When I started, I would sit along the tracks for a long time, sometimes for hours on end. When I first started doing it, not many people would stop and talk. But as I got older, you see older people and they definitely want to talk.
“I started attending a couple of railroad shows around here. I got to know some people and went around with those guys to different places where we took pictures of locomotive facilities.
“One time I was sitting in Lyons by the old Iroquois Hotel and it was colder than the Dickens, almost down to zero. There was a signal for an eastbound train. I see two guys up on the bridge and I thought to myself, ‘They’re going to freeze.’”
Those might have been foamers…hmmm.
DeMay said as the years went by, he found places to do his train-watching in Lyons, Palmyra and Newark.
“When I had a couple of days off and my wife was working, I’d go to Binghamton. I met Tom Kelly in Newark. They called him ‘The Train Man.’ We’d talk about the motive power on the front end of a locomotive, sometimes the type of train. He and his wife moved to Newcastle, Pennsylvania. My wife and I started to visit them down there. Tom and I would go to Pittsburgh Junction to observe the trains. We just sat there by the side of the road.
“When I had vacation, we’d go to the Kellys for five to seven days: his wife and my wife just loved to be together; Tom and I loved being over at the tracks. We would talk about his job, I would talk about my job, then we’d talk about trains. There was always news on different railroad stuff. We’d comment about different trains on different railroads.”
Like many other railfans, DeMay had a yen for a career as an engineer. “The problem was, I didn’t want to be away from home for a long time, engineers have a very tough work schedule.”
DeMay had a career as a machine operator, working for companies large and small in the area. He appreciates what technology has done for railfans of today.
On virtualrailfan.com, for instance, you can find live feeds of some of the busiest train tracks in our part of the world, with cameras in 47 locations and 22 states.
TrainOrders.com advertises itself as the “largest railroad site on the internet” with discussion groups, an image library and 200 gigabyte of content including a mechanism to find other railfans nearby. RailFan.net has links to many, many railfan items including message boards, railfan sites and vintage newspapers.
It isn’t hard to do a deep dive into train lore.
Do you like freight trains? There are more than 700 freight rail companies in America, each with special identifications and color schemes and locomotives. Short-line and regional railroads operate here in Western New York, like the Kodak Park Railroad. Railfans can get into commuter and rapid-transit trains and study the backyards of America as the rail cars ply urban to suburban routes. There are scenic railroads like the Cooperstown & Charlotte Railway and the Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum.
Daniel Orr and Greg Marling put together their book, “Trackside Around Rochester, 1970-1980,” a book that is out of print and rare, which shows how lively and diverse railroading was then.
“I like sitting here [on Division Street]. This is basically where I’ve been in the last few years,” DeMay said.
A stroke has slowed him down some, but his years of watching trains has given him an encyclopedia of knowledge about them. He can appreciate a CSX freight moving by in a lot more ways than the rest of us. He loves catching a glimpse of a Norfolk Southern “heritage” locomotive, specially painted like a train of 50 years ago.
And he’s accumulated so much to share.
“I have thousands of pictures at home,” he said. “In fact, my wife has tried to sell them a number of times. I used to have meetings and slide shows in my house where several older guys would come — now only one is still alive. I also did a slide show for Railpace Newsmagazine.
For decades, DeMay has had a goal for time off.
“A lot of times when I was done with work, all I wanted to do was grab a camera, walk along the tracks, sit in peace and quiet in the car and take photos of trains.”
People wonder what a peaceful retirement is like. Every day DeMay wakes up, there are still trains to be watched, alone or with company…he’s got something to do.