Feather River Express 2: Foamers and Chasers

Part of the frustration with passenger train travel in the United States is because freight trains have the right-of-way on nearly all of the lines, causing inevitable delays in every itinerary.



The Feather River Express excursion was scheduled to arrive at the small Sierra town of Portola at 4:30 PM on Saturday, with the 600+ passengers being transported an hour's drive to the southeast for an overnight stay in Reno.



After innumerable stops in the middle of nowhere waiting for freight trains to pass by, the Express actually pulled into Portola four hours late on Saturday. A couple of the the buses had left for other duties, stranding a few dozen passengers in Portola overnight.



Besides getting into Reno very late, there was the Daylight Savings changeover to contend with, so it was a very sleep-deprived group that assembled for the return trip to Sacramento and the Bay Area.



As usual, it was the younger passengers who seemed the most affected...



...while many of the more elderly in the group...



...were looking like a million bucks.



Most of the passengers were train geeks...



...who were obsessed with the minutiae of train travel.



My first question to any stranger on the train was whether or not they were train geeks, and most of them admitted that they were a bit obsessed...



...though they all had stories of compatriots who were even more obsessed for which there was a special name. They were called "foamers," as in "foaming at the mouth."



One gent in the smoking car was wearing a sweatshirt that read "I've spent most of my Time & Money on Trains. The rest I've just wasted."



Though most of the "foamers" were male...



...there were exceptions to the rule, such as the female engineer Lynn, above...



...who had married the Livermore native, above, with a wedding on the Niles Canyon Railway two years earlier.



As we went through the many tunnels carved into the canyon...



...there was narration over the speaker system that was blessedly brief and informative, delivered by the central gent above in a great, gravelly voice.



When somebody asked Henry Luna, one of the hosts, if the organizers were all model train freaks, he replied that they were actually more interested in the real thing. "There's a club for everything, though," he continued. "There's a club for people who collect ticket stubs, a club for schedule collectors, a club for just about anything you can think of."



My favorite new category was something called "chasers," people who obsessively travel to remote places to take pictures of rare trains in their natural settings. This Feather River excursion had attracted a few legendary "chasers," including the person above, who had driven all the way to Portola and back along Highway 70 to capture this moment.



It sounded a bit like bird-watchers venturing into remote locations trying to see a particular group of birds in the wild, such as the bald eagle sitting on top of the tree in the photo above. The fact that there is a wholly unknown human subculture that includes legendary "chasers" makes me unreasonably happy, as if discovering an entirely new species.