Yeah, right!

The snag of a lifetime. (Photo by BobbaLew.)

I’ll let Trains Magazine editor Jim Wrinn say it for me:
“These and other experiences reminded me that while we ponder railroading’s hiring spree as traffic rebounds from a miserable recession, as we fret about the impact and implementation of positive train control, and as we continue to watch dreams of fast trains battered, the simple pleasure of watching a train is still a powerful sensory experience with the ability to recharge the soul and mind.”
(My underlining.)

It’s true. Trains Magazine is always talking about the problems besetting railroading, but Wrinn had taken a vacation, back home to North Carolina, and ended up trackside.
I’m a railfan, and have been all my life.


Where it all began. (Photo by Robert Long©.)

It all began at age-two (I’m now 67) in 1946 when my father took me down by the railroad tracks in the Revolutionary-War town of Haddonfield (“HAH-din-field;” as in “hah”) in south Jersey just south of the suburb where we lived.
By 1946 it was Pennsylvania-Reading (“RED-ing;” not “READ-ing”) Seashore Lines (PRSL), on the old Camden & Atlantic through Haddonfield.
Camden & Atlantic, which served and developed Atlantic City, was eventually folded into the Pennsylvania Railroad, and was Pennsy’s line from Philadelphia and Camden to various south Jersey seashore points.
(A competing railroad to Atlantic City, the Atlantic City Railroad, was also built, and eventually taken over by Reading Lines.)
“Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines” is an amalgamation of Pennsylvania and Reading railroad-lines in south Jersey to counter the fact the two railroads had too much parallel track. It was promulgated in 1933. It serviced mainly the Jersey seashore from Philadelphia.
I was thrilled!
PRSL was still using steam-locomotives, so what I saw was steam-powered trains like in the picture.
The picture is also at the exact location from which we watched trains.
We took a short street just east of Haddonfield station, and ended up looking down into a cut (so pictured).
Westbound trains to Camden or Philadelphia would whistle for the road-crossings in Haddonfield.
But of course, my father said they were whistling for me.
We’d wave, and often the trainmen waved back. —They are required to by law. If a child waves, you are required to respond.
The location was also next to where an old branch switched off, the Philadelphia, Marlton & Medford, long abandoned.
A wye was nearby, back in the woods where ya couldn’t see it, and PRSL was running accommodations from Haddonfield into Camden.
Most of PRSL’s trains went to Philadelphia over a Delaware-river bridge and a spur west of Haddonfield Pennsy built in 1896.
PRSL had to continue accommodations out from Camden (across the river from Philadelphia, previously accessible by ferry-boat). Their engines reversed on the wye.
There also was a water-tower adjacent — you can see a standpipe in the picture.
Engines would stop and fill their tenders from the standpipe.
A surfeit of action, and I loved it. I was terrified of thunderstorms, but could stand right next to a gigantic throbbing, panting steam-locomotive.
I was lucky enough as a teenager to witness the greatest railroad-locomotive of all time, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s electrified GG1 (“Jee-Jee-ONE;” I only say that because a friend was mispronouncing it “Jee-Jee-Eye”).
Every time I saw one it was doing 90 mph or more.


This thing is doin’ at least 90! (Photo by BobbaLew.)


STAND BACK! (Photo by BobbaLew.)


GG1 #4896, the only one I’ve been through. (Photo by BobbaLew.)

Once I was in tiny Claymont commuter station in northern DE waiting for a GG1 express.
There were four tracks, and I thought expresses were on the inside tracks.
No, the approaching train was on the outside track, perhaps 10 feet from where I had my arm hooked around a light-standard. (A similar light-standard is in the picture.)
The train thundered by at 90-plus, and almost sucked me into it. Had I not had my arm hooked around that light-standard, it woulda killed me.
My wife didn’t know I was such a railfan when we married.
But it quickly became apparent.
Within months we took a long vacation-trip which included the Mt. Washington Cog Railway, and also my first visit to world-famous Horseshoe Curve.
Horseshoe Curve (the “mighty Curve”), west of Altoona (“al-TUNE-uh;” as in the name “Al”), PA, is by far the BEST railfan spot I have ever been to.
Horseshoe Curve is now a national historic site. It was a trick used by the Pennsylvania Railroad to get over the Allegheny mountains without steep grades. The railroad was looped around a valley to climb the mountains without steep grades.
Horseshoe Curve was opened in 1854, and is still in use.
The viewing-area is smack in the apex of the Curve; and trains are willy-nilly. Up-close-and personal. —I’ve been there hundreds of times, since it’s only about five hours away.


Atop Mt. Washington. (Photo by BobbaLew.)


At Horseshoe Curve in 1968. (That’s an SD-45 up front.) (Photo by BobbaLew.)


Penn-Central descends the Curve in 1969. (Photo by BobbaLew.)


A six-axle Alco Century is helping hold back the train. (Photo by BobbaLew.)


From the Curve parking-lot. (Photo by BobbaLew.)

“I wanna know why every vacation seems to involve trains?” my wife asks.
She went along with my railfanning, and I’ve seen wives that don’t.
They castigate their railfan husbands as if they’re some kind of nut.
“Beats chasing women,” I always say. I been chasing trains all my life.
Together we’ve stood atop bridges, along embankments, often in frigid weather, waiting for trains.


U-boat leads a long freight through an S-curve east of Lyons, NY. (Photo by BobbaLew.)


What was once a PRSL Budd RDC, in Ocean City, NJ. (Photo by BobbaLew.)


Eastbound Erie-Lackawanna local freight comes off the trestle east of Fillmore, NY. (The railroad and trestle are both now gone.) (Photo by BobbaLew.)


Old New York Central E-unit leads a Penn-Central passenger train through the snow east of Rochester. (Photo by BobbaLew.)


Boomin’-and-‘zoomin’ on the Lehigh Valley. (The Valley was abandoned and torn up; this line to Buffalo is now a bike-path.) (Photo by BobbaLew.)


A Penn-Central Alco RS-3 works a local on the Rochester Bypass (previously West Shore). (Photo by BobbaLew.)


Penn-Central E-33s in Wilmington, DE. (Photo by BobbaLew.)


A Penn-Central freight charges east through Henrietta (south of Rochester) on the Rochester Bypass. (Photo by BobbaLew.)


Reading locomotives tied up in Wilmington. (Photo by BobbaLew.)

Railfanning has taken my wife and I places normal people never see, particularly railfan pilgrimage spots like Cajon (“ka-HONE;” not “Cajun”) Pass and Tehachapi (“tuh-HATCH-uh-peee”) Loop in California, Helmstetters Curve in Maryland, and the massive Tunkhannock Viaduct (“tunk-HANN-ick”).
(I’ve also been to Starrucca Viaduct, another railfan pilgrimage stop.)


Helmstetters Curve on the old Western Maryland. (WM is defunct, and the curve is now Western Maryland Scenic, a tourist line, and used to be two tracks.) (Photo by E.M. Bell.)


The massive Tunkhannock Viaduct (a railroad, and privately built). (Photo by BobbaLew.)

I remember backing our huge Ford E250 van up a gravel fireroad out in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming, hoping I didn’t get stuck.
It was Union Pacific’s famous Sherman Hill, its crossing of the Continental Divide at 8,013 feet in barren Wyoming.
I also remember driving our semi-crippled Volkswagen Rabbit on its battery (no charging-system) to Saluda (“suh-LEWD-uh”) Grade in North Carolina, the steepest mainline railroad-grade in the country at 4.7 to 5.1 percent (that’s 5.1 feet up for every 100 feet forward — trains have to divide in thirds to maintain adhesion).
Just ram the railroad straight up into the mountains. Land wasn’t available to make it easier.
At the top of the grade in Saluda the railroad dropped like a rollercoaster.
I also remember driving the interstate through Cumberland, MD, returning from Cass Scenic Railroad State Park (“kass”), a pilgrimage-spot every railfan should visit, and I heard a steam-locomotive hooter whistle.
SCREECH! We immediately charged off the interstate into deepest, darkest Cumberland. That was a steam-locomotive, and I gotta find it. (We did; it was Western Maryland Scenic’s #734.)


The approaching train will turn right, and eventually attain the top track. (Photo by Leon Batman.)

And the road in the Tehachapis is so torturous the best you can do is 25 mph.
Tehachapi was the railroad’s climb from the San Joaquin (“wah-KEEN”) Valley up into the High Desert. The Tehachapi mountains are at the foot of the San Joaquin.
The railroad required a loop over itself: Tehachapi Loop. The grade averages 2.5 percent, and involves lots of twisting curvature and tunnels.
I’ve had little success photographically at Tehachapi; Cajon I’ve done better.


Stackers pass approaching the summit of Cajon (a third track has since been added). (Photo by BobbaLew.)

Cajon was the Santa Fe (”fay”) Railroad’s descent from the High Desert into Los Angeles basin — or climb back out.
It’s now Burlington-Northern Santa Fe (BNSF).
There is a pass in the mountains east of the basin: Cajon Pass.
Now that so much is imported into this country from the Far East, Cajon Pass is incredibly busy.
In fact, the railroad just had to add another track. Cajon had become a bottleneck.
After my stroke my return to reality (that is, that my perception of reality, which was rather thin, was actually the real world) was made apparent by railroading.
My wife was driving the Schuylkill Expressway (“skoo-kul”) in Philadelphia, on our way to my brother’s in northern Delaware. I wasn’t cleared to drive yet.
Schuylkill Expressway passed 30th St. Station, the old Pennsy station in Philadelphia.
There it was, just like old times, that massive tangle of overhead wiring that’s the catenary (“kat-in-AIR-eee;” called that because the wire is suspended on a catenary of cables) into 30th St. Station.
30th St. is on the old New York City to Washington DC Pennsy electrified line, now Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor.
And in northern DE my brother took me to Claymont station, modernized, but it still had the tunnel under the tracks.
We used the tunnel to get to the eastern platform, and here it came, approaching us at 90+ mph.
An Amtrak express, and the AEM-7’s pantograph (“pant-uh-GRAFF”) was bouncing off the catenary just like a GG1.
With giant flashes of lightning, just like old times.
Yes, this was indeed the real world.
So is it any wonder I get such pleasure out of chasing trains with my friend Phil Faudi (“FOW-dee;” as in “wow”)?
I’ve written up Phil so many times, I’d just be boring constant readers to do it again.
If you need to know about Phil, click this link. Phil is described early on.
“Watching a train is still a powerful sensory experience,” so with Phil it’s railfan overload.
We’re doing Norfolk Southern’s Pittsburgh Division, which goes though Altoona, and it’s fairly busy, since it’s one of two major railroads from the heartland interior to the east-coast megalopolis.
Phil maximizes train-count. My first tour, a slow day, we got 20 trains.
One time we got 30 trains over a nine-hour day.


Stackers pass west of Altoona at famous Brickyard Crossing. (Photo by BobbaLew.)


Norfolk Southern’s Executive Business Train passes train 36A. (This is the first picture I got with Phil.) (Photo by BobbaLew.)


That’s Alto (“al-toe;” as in the name “Al”) Tower to the right. (Photo by BobbaLew.)


What I call a “double,” two front-ends. (Photo by BobbaLew.)

And here are two of my own (without Phil):


The restored Levin E-units crest the summit of the Alleghenies in Gallitzin (“guh-LIT-zin;” as in “give”), west of Altoona. (Photo by BobbaLew.)


By far the BEST railfan spot I have ever been to. (Photo by BobbaLew.)

• I had a stroke October 26, 1993, from which I pretty much recovered.