TrainDad

← 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!

It seemed so inno­cent when it started. We saw a train on acci­dent, and my son fell in love; so we started look­ing for trains “on pur­pose.” Now we are hunt­ing them down when­ever we can find them. The most frus­trat­ing thing for all of us is a chase that ends with… nothing.

If you find your­self con­stantly “chas­ing trains” but not find­ing them, try lis­ten­ing to their radio com­mu­ni­ca­tions to find out where they are and where they are going. You do this with a “scan­ner” radio receiver—a hand-held radio that rapidly searches all of the rail­road radio chan­nels, and lets you hear any­one talk­ing on them.

It’s easy, inex­pen­sive, and (depend­ing on your cir­cum­stances) might dra­mat­i­cally increase your suc­cess rate. With this new series, I’ll give you all the details.

On to part 2…