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!