TrainDad

Jonathan is not yet 3 years old. The rail­roads think he might be a terrorist.

Okay, that’s a lit­tle strong: they think I might be a ter­ror­ist, and I’m using him as “cover.” Sev­eral times we’ve been at a train sta­tion, out­side a yard, or at a road cross­ing and rail­road police have watched us closely. A few times they’ve come up and talked to us; always with kind, gen­tle con­ver­sa­tion, but nonethe­less prob­ing, try­ing to fig­ure out if we’re as inno­cent as we look.

Read­ing around, I find that we’ve had it much eas­ier than some. “Rail­fans” with­out kids are given more scrutiny, and those who make a hobby of pho­tograph­ing trains are given the most scrutiny of all. There are many in that last cat­e­gory; just con­sider rail­fan web­sites with 700,000 pho­tos or 168,000 pho­tos. Some of those pho­tog­ra­phers have seen it cross from scrutiny to “harrassment.”

The pho­tog­ra­phers have often won­dered why it isn’t obvi­ous that they are inno­cent rail fans; I’ve won­dered why it isn’t obvi­ous that I’m with Jonathan, and he loves trains, and we’re just out for an inno­cent bit of train-watching. I decided to see if I could find out what was behind it, and I found answers.

Con­sider:

• Rail attacks are more numer­ous and deadly than those on air­ports and airplanes.
• Rail ter­ror­ism is so easy, you can find how-to instruc­tions on YouTube.
• A typ­i­cal tank car can hold 90,000 gal­lons of chlo­rine; if released, esti­mates say the lethal cloud would drift from 5 to 15 miles, depend­ing on atmos­pheric con­di­tions. In a pop­u­lated city, this would mean a death toll rang­ing from a few hun­dred to a million.
• Access to tank cars is so easy that 13-year-olds can cre­ate graf­fiti mas­ter­pieces on them. More seri­ously, a reporter walked into 48 chem­i­cal plant rail­road yards and found free access to cars with toxic chem­i­cals in each of them.

I’ll make it sim­ple: rail­roads carry weapons of mass destruc­tion and leave them acces­si­ble to 13-year-olds.

This is the inher­ent form of rail­roads; it is not pos­si­ble to elim­i­nate access. Not pos­si­ble — look at the argu­ment over secur­ing the U.S.–Mexico bor­der. That bor­der is only 1951 miles long; but Amer­i­can rail­roads oper­ate on 120,000 miles of active track, not includ­ing yards, sid­ings, or even par­al­lel track. To deal with real­ity, we must accept that rail­road secu­rity can­not hap­pen by elim­i­nat­ing access. Secu­rity must be formed through other methods.

Top on the list of other secu­rity meth­ods is iden­ti­fy­ing what a threat looks like, and watch­ing for it. The graf­fiti artist couldn’t fig­ure out how to release the con­tents of his “can­vas” if he wanted to; he’s not a sig­nif­i­cant threat. Unfor­tu­nately, the world has seen enough ter­ror­ism that we have a long list of real threat char­ac­ter­is­tics to watch for. High on that list, for exam­ple, is pho­tog­ra­phy. Pho­to­graphic recon­nais­sance is one of the first steps of almost every suc­cess­ful ter­ror­ist attack on infra­struc­ture. Pho­tographs can be used for devel­op­ment of 3D mod­els and for deter­min­ing GPS coor­di­nates, which can in turn be used for train­ing attack­ers. As it hap­pens, rail­fans love pho­tograph­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties: most pic­tures are taken at road cross­ings, bridges, or other points of weak­ness. I find it hard to fault the rail­roads for being sen­si­tive in this area.

What pho­tog­ra­phers seem to find fault with, how­ever, is not so much the secu­rity against them as it is the lack of appar­ent secu­rity in other areas. Yet that can be deceiv­ing. In my “real job” I’ve done a tiny bit of work on a few security-related projects, and even in these small-time sit­u­a­tions the peo­ple involved don’t want their secu­rity mea­sures to be obvi­ous. I’ve helped find ways to hide video cam­eras, license-plate cam­eras, laser prox­im­ity sen­sors and infrared detec­tors. If secu­rity mea­sures are obvi­ous, then they are known — and when known, they can be avoided. In real­ity the rail­road secu­rity mea­sures imple­mented since 2001 have been extensive.

One way to mea­sure the lev­els of “hid­den” secu­rity is by check­ing the reviews of those with access to the infor­ma­tion. Greg Feith, a for­mer acci­dent inves­ti­ga­tor for the NTSB, has said that the avi­a­tion indus­try should “take a les­son” from the rail indus­try secu­rity imple­men­ta­tion. In 2003, the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion of Rail­roads received the 2003 James S. Cogswell Award for Indus­trial Secu­rity; of 11,000 eli­gi­ble orga­ni­za­tions, only 15 awards were given.

We can also look at the for­mal secu­rity struc­ture at a higher level for clues to how seri­ous they are about secu­rity at a lower level. Here we find things such as a DOD-certified Oper­a­tions Cen­ter mon­i­tor­ing and eval­u­at­ing secret intel­li­gence on poten­tial threats; the Rail­way Alert Net­work (RAN), for rapid com­mu­ni­ca­tion through­out the indus­try; and ST-ISAC, the Sur­face Trans­porta­tion Infor­ma­tion Shar­ing and Analy­sis Cen­ter, oper­at­ing with the gov­ern­ment at the Top Secret level to col­lect, ana­lyze, and dis­sem­i­nate infor­ma­tion on threats.

There is also strong finan­cial incen­tive for the rail­roads to focus on sig­nif­i­cant secu­rity mea­sures. For exam­ple, the Union Pacific freight load con­sists of very roughly 5% dan­ger­ous chem­i­cals, but 50% of their insur­ance costs are just cov­er­ing those loads. A sin­gle inci­dent could effec­tively destroy a com­pany, financially.

Look­ing at the indus­try from this per­spec­tive, I find no fault with a rail­road police­man ask­ing me a few questions.

Make your life eas­ier, and the lives of numer­ous oth­ers, by fol­low­ing a few sim­ple rules. Don’t tres­pass; stay behind fences; kindly and quickly relo­cate when asked. Keep your dis­tance and don’t give cause for alarm.

It’s not much to ask from an indus­try that gives so much to us.

My son, Jonathan, has adorably said this since last Sep­tem­ber when he rode “George,” a mini train near our house. When every­one is on train and ready to go, the con­duc­tor calls out “All aboard!“Jonathan has now devel­oped a new appli­ca­tion of the term. A wait­ress at a local eatery tick­led him in his high chair, and he loved it. She came back sev­eral times to tickle a bit more. As she would walk away, he started yelling “All Aboard!” as a way to tell her “tickle me more, please!” The next morn­ing, he called “All Aboard!” over and over with me at break­fast to let me know I should tickle his feet some more. He is down there now, yelling it. Bet­ter go tickle!

This is the first ever Train­Dad photo con­test. The rules are easy: sub­mit pic­tures of chil­dren with trains. Noth­ing spe­cific — toy trains, real trains, any kind of trains. For that mat­ter, any kind of kids!

Awards will be given: free Fisher-Price Geo­T­rax merchandise!

Any­one may enter, and you may enter as many times as you like. The con­test will end at mid­night on Fri­day, July 20.
Go on — sub­mit a pic­ture, vote on the oth­ers, and best of luck! Okay, I feel like an idiot; when I posted this, I didn’t link to the con­test page!

This is the last part of a series.

What it really comes down to is this: with the Thomas sets, I get the feel­ing that the man­u­fac­tur­ers are using the Thomas brand to sell prod­uct. Noth­ing wrong with that; but with Geo­T­rax, the man­u­fac­turer doesn’t have that brand, so they have to make a supe­rior prod­uct that will sell on its own. And supe­rior it is, in a myr­iad of ways:

1. Fan­tas­tic track. This stuff is really sturdy and easy to use!
   • It’s super-easy to hook together, even for the youngest chil­dren. I’ve seen a 1-year-old do it.
   • Once hooked, it holds together well enough that you can lit­er­ally slide a lay­out across car­pet with­out it falling apart.
   • But when the time comes to recon­fig­ure or put it away, they pop apart eas­ily when you want them to.
   • It holds up to being stepped on, even on car­pet, with­out break­ing or dis­con­nect­ing (usually!).
   • The switches are easy to oper­ate, slide out of place less fre­quently (caus­ing fewer derail­ments), and look more realistic.
   • It’s real rail — train wheels really ride on flanges.
   • It’s pre­ci­sion made to min­i­mize derail­ments, and often can re-rail auto­mat­i­cally when they do happen.
   • It all inter­con­nects — all types, all bridges, all build­ings. This is not like the Tomy set where the road pieces are com­pletely sep­a­rate from the rail pieces.
2. Clever engi­neer­ing.
   • Pow­ered toys can also be hand-pushed (with­out strip­ping gears), even while turned on. Brilliant!
   • Gear-driven on uphills. This allows an engine to pull a long line of cars with­out the wheels slip­ping. Brilliant!
   • the same gear also dri­ves action on many build­ings — turn­ing a crane, load­ing a pipe, rotat­ing the turntable on the round­house. Bril­liant!
3. Well-thought-out and kid-tested.
   • Huge on/off but­ton right on top of the engines.
   • Sim­ple, effec­tive cou­pling sys­tem is easy to use. Yes­ter­day I saw my son uncou­ple a Tomy — he held the engine and shook it really hard until the cars flew off.
   • Easy-access bat­tery com­part­ments. Have you seen the ridicu­lous bat­tery extrac­tion on a Tomy Thomas?
4. Grows with the child.
   • From the sim­plest cir­cle of track to phe­nom­e­nally com­plex lay­outs designed in CAD and sold on eBay (make sure you watch the ani­mated build to see just how crazy it gets!), there’s no end to what you can do. Give teens a box of Geo­T­rax, and they love it. Moms admit addic­tion to it. It has end­less appeal.
   • From the sim­plest build­ings oper­a­ble by a 2-year-old to the crazy round­house that took me 10 min­utes to fig­ure out, there is a range of prod­ucts with a range of skill levels.
   • From sim­ple, easy-connecting hills to 19-foot-tall towers.
   • Still fun for big kids… really big kids, like, um, dads…
5. Excel­lent build qual­ity. Every piece is amaz­ing. Sturdy, durable, precise.
6. Cost. Any given piece costs less than a com­pa­ra­ble piece in any of the Thomas sets. The cheap­est items in the line are eas­ily found for $2.99, and they always include extras — in that exam­ple, you get a train engine, a gon­dola car, a crate, and a sec­tion of track. Beat that, Tommy!
7. Options.
   • Vehi­cle options like crazy:
     • unpow­ered, unpow­ered with lights and sound, pow­ered (which typ­i­cally come as part of a set), remote con­trol with forward/stop, remote con­trol with reverse.
     • not just trains: con­struc­tion equip­ment, fire, ambu­lance and police, air­planes and heli­copters, ships and snow­plows.
8. Yes, remote con­trol.
9. Sound effects. All of the remote-operated vehi­cles have digitally-recorded sounds from their real-life coun­ter­parts; you can play them at will.
10. Ele­va­tion! Multi-deck heights like nobody’s busi­ness! And don’t tell me you can do this with Tomy. I’ve seen the YouTube videos of peo­ple try­ing, but they don’t compare.
11. Speed! One of the sur­pris­ing bonuses I wasn’t expect­ing was the way trains hur­tle down hills. It’s excit­ing and unex­pected, and adds a whole new ele­ment of fun. For big kids and adults, a lot of the appeal is in try­ing to see how far you can push the enve­lope with­out the trains fly­ing com­pletely out of control.
12. Any toy that gets blogged on Wired must be cool.
13. And then gets a Wired writeup on hack­ing it. Even cooler.
14. New stuff added reg­u­larly. They are always improv­ing the prod­uct, and new releases are highly antic­i­pated. This year, for exam­ple, they are intro­duc­ing peo­ple — small, cleverly-designed fig­ures than fit into engines and other cars.

But when it all comes down to it, my son thinks it’s just more fun — and that’s good enough for me.

As you watch the train thun­der past the cross­ing gates, you turn to your son and yell, “hey, that was a new Evo­lu­tion loco­mo­tive behind those SD70s!” He stares at you, eyes full of admi­ra­tion and worship.

Okay, maybe not, but learn­ing how to iden­tify the major loco­mo­tives will make your railroad-watching more enjoy­able by help­ing you know what you are look­ing at. It’s actu­ally quite a chal­lenge; the var­i­ous types look remark­ably sim­i­lar. I’ll give you some short­cuts that will enable you to iden­tify the most com­mon engines, at least by fam­ily. To keep it short, I’m lim­it­ing the dis­cus­sion to major freight-carrying engines.

There are two pri­mary man­u­fac­tur­ers of loco­mo­tives today. The largest is EMD — Electro-Motive Diesel, for­merly a divi­sion of Gen­eral Motors. Right behind them is Gen­eral Elec­tric. Your first step is to fig­ure out whether your engine is a GE or an EMD.

Tip 1: Look for a tri­an­gle on the nose. Every GE loco­mo­tive (well, every one made in the last 20 years) has a diag­o­nally slanted panel not found on any EMD. As a double-check, look for a large “bread box” smoke­stack stick­ing up on top, nearer the back. Only GE uses them. I’ve out­lined both areas in the pic­ture to the right. Don’t be con­fused by the pic­ture. That’s a Nor­folk South­ern engine, but it doesn’t mean NS only uses GE engines — every rail­road line has a wide assort­ment of dif­fer­ent engines. Any­way, now that you know whether it’s a GE or an EMD…

Tip 2: If it’s a GE engine, call it a “Dash.” GE has made Dash-7s, Dash-8s, and Dash-9s. They all look remark­ably sim­i­lar. The Dash-7 is the one to hate, because it doesn’t fol­low the rule — it doesn’t have the tri­an­gle front. But it does have one won­der­ful detail:

Tip 3: If it has an arched cab roof, it’s a Dash-7. These are rare, since the last ones were made 20+ years ago. Enjoy it if you see one. Actu­ally, these look very much like an older style of GE engines, known as “U-boats.” They really don’t look much like the other Dash styles at all.

Tip 4: If there’s one big intake under the radi­a­tor flare, it’s a Dash-8. All of these loco­mo­tives have a huge, flared radi­a­tor “hat brim” that sticks out on top at the roof, at the back, above the rear wheels. The Dash-9s and their ultra-powerful cousins (the AC4400CW and AC6000CW) all have the intake grill divided into two or more pan­els. They will be about the same size and shape; they just will have dividers.

Unfor­tu­nately, the Dash-9’s, their cousins, and GE’s lat­est and great­est Evo­lu­tion series all look very much alike, and I don’t have easy, one-step iden­ti­fiers to help you tell them apart. (If you have a tip, add it to the com­ments below.)

That’s a good start for GE engines, but what about EMD?

Tip 5: If it’s an EMD with 8 wheels, call it a “Jeep.” A lit­tle back­ground: EMD loco­mo­tives are named with two let­ters and two num­bers. Their 8-wheeled engines all use the for­mat GPnn (“Gen­eral Pur­pose”). For exam­ple, the GP38 is a very com­mon engine. Their 12-wheeled engines often use the for­mat SDnn (“Spe­cial Duty”). To tell the most com­mon Geeps apart, look at the fans on top, clumped together at the back:

• The GP35 has two “tow­ers” with a smaller, rounded fan between;
• The GP38 just has two towers;
• The GP40 has three towers.

By “tower” I’m refer­ring to a round raised “wok” sit­ting on the roof, right at the back. You can see one in the next pic­ture.
Tip 6: If it’s an SD with a back deck you could hold a party on, call it an SD40. For bonus points, call it an SD40-2. It’s worth not­ing that the front deck is also over-sized. If you look at the pic­ture, you’ll see that the deck had to be extended to cover an entire wheel’s extra length. By the way, here’s a free­bie: notice that it doesn’t have a flared radi­a­tor stick­ing out of the roof like the GE engines. That’s not true about most SDs. About that radiator…

Tip 7: If the radi­a­tor flare on an SD has three pan­els, it’s an SD90 — called an SD90MAC. The three squares on the side are air intakes, and only the SD90MAC has three of them. So what hap­pened to the SD series between the 40 and the 90? Well, that’s a lit­tle more dif­fi­cult. There are two fam­i­lies of note: the SD60 and the SD70. If you can ignore all the fans and smoke­stacks and stuff on top of the roof…

Tip 8: If the body/roof line is straight, it’s an SD60; if it dips in the mid­dle, it’s an SD70 (but not if the radi­a­tor has three pan­els! Why does it have to be so con­fus­ing?). There are numer­ous vari­ants of SD60s and SD70s, but they should all con­form to this basic ID test.

Tip 9: Cheat. Some rail­roads — Nor­folk South­ern, for one — write the model num­ber on the cab wall, usu­ally under the engine num­ber. Wow, that should be tip num­ber 1!

Tip 10: Get a field guide. There’s one that’s very small (it’s meant to fit in a pocket) and easy enough to use that you can make iden­ti­fi­ca­tions on the fly. It’s the Field Guide to Trains of North Amer­ica from the Peter­son Field Guide series, and I rec­om­mend it highly. It cov­ers 150 dif­fer­ent types of loco­mo­tives used on 840 dif­fer­ent rail­roads as well as all rolling stock.

Have any other easy, fool­proof spot­ting ID meth­ods? Add them to the com­ments! This arti­cle has focused on North Amer­i­can loco­mo­tives; if any­one has tips for other locales, add them as well.

← Part 1

Scan­ners range in cost from under $100 to over $1000. The good news is that lis­ten­ing to rail­road radio doesn’t take any of the high-end fea­tures. You do need a scan­ner that is…

• easy to use
• either…
  • pre-programmed with rail­road chan­nels, or
  • pro­gram­ma­ble, with at least 65 channels

You don’t need…

• trunk­ing, dual trunking
• dig­i­tal
• more than 100 chan­nels (for rail­road use)

There are three basic ways to go…

1. Easy. The Uniden BC72XLT Bearcat scan­ner ($79.99) has the rail­road chan­nels pre-programmed. Right now there’s no eas­ier or cheaper way. As you pay more, you get addi­tional fea­tures — usu­ally more chan­nels can be pro­grammed, and then they start adding trunk­ing, dual trunk­ing, and dig­i­tal radio sys­tem recep­tion. None of these are needed to lis­ten to rail­road radio. As an aside, Radio Shack has always been a good place to buy scan­ners. Most of their radios are Uniden Bearcat or other main brand radios that have been rebranded under the Radio Shack name. Right now, though, the Uniden listed above is cheaper than any of Radio Shack’s cur­rent options.
2. Chal­leng­ing. If you are will­ing to pro­gram the radio your­self, you can get a few addi­tional ben­e­fits. For exam­ple, you could set up “banks” of chan­nels — say, just the rail­road chan­nels used in your local area. The advan­tage of this is that the radio doesn’t spend time scan­ning unused chan­nels, which could cause you to miss a call on another chan­nel. If you are inter­ested in lis­ten­ing to air­plane, police, or fire rail­road, a more advanced (and expen­sive) scan­ner is use­ful. I won’t go into more detail here, since that’s off my cur­rent topic.
3. Pow­er­ful. Scan­ners receive a very wide range of fre­quen­cies — much wider than needed for rail­road com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Unfor­tu­nately, that wide range can only be achieved by com­pro­mise; they aren’t very good at pick­ing up weak sig­nals. A radio built just to receive the par­tic­u­lar fre­quen­cies you need is much more pow­er­ful. One such radio that has a fan­tas­tic rep­u­ta­tion in the “rail­fan” com­mu­nity is the Yaesu VX-150 ($115) or it’s big brother, the VX-170 ($130.00). This is a trans­ceiver, mean­ing you could talk on it — but that requires an ama­teur radio oper­a­tor license. You can just use it to lis­ten, though, and many peo­ple do just that. You will hear rail­road “traf­fic” that nor­mal scan­ners won’t pick up. Unfor­tu­nately, they are a lit­tle harder to use. On the other hand, they are incred­i­bly well-built. If you do go this route, you should look into the option of buy­ing the cable and soft­ware that allows you to pro­gram the rail­road chan­nels via your com­puter, which is much easier.

In case you need to know, the radio chan­nels used by rail­roads are num­bered 02 through 97. Here is a com­plete list of the num­bers and asso­ci­ated fre­quen­cies.
Once you have a scan­ner, how do you use it to find trains? That’s where we’ll go in part 3… stay tuned!