It's another Friday night at the Fullerton train station, which is full of the usual types: commuters with briefcases, people sprinting over a bridge because they found themselves on the wrong side of the tracks, families struggling with suitcases.
At one end, a group of men has gathered. Few ever pay them much mind, but the longer you look, the more they stick out, because they have been at the train station for a very long time, though they have nowhere to go.
They are members of a network of railroad fanatics -- hobbyists who study trains, photograph trains, videotape trains and ride trains, all with a fervor that makes birders, ham radio operators and the like seem like laggards.
Dropping in here helps one understand a confounding issue raised by the Sept. 12 Metrolink crash: why a group of teenagers had been exchanging text messages that day with engineer Robert M. Sanchez.
It turns out that the teens were fledging members of this network, a world that is virtually unknown except among the enthusiasts themselves and the engineers who offer them a tired wave at the station. But there are hundreds of thousands of them -- across the United States, in India, Australia, Zimbabwe -- hobbyists who are known, variously, as railfans, cranks, trainspotters and gunzels.
The most die-hard are known as foamers -- a term believed to have originated as an insult, used to describe people who get so excited at the sight of a train that they foam at the mouth.
Some refuse to use the word "foamer." (These are sensitive people and not without reason; in England, "trainspotting" is a euphemism for useless activity.) Others have appropriated the word for themselves, an exercise in a kind of geek pride.
Whatever they call themselves, they seem to speak in a foreign language -- of wigwags and hoggers, shooters and boomers, varnishes and highballs. Some speak elegantly of the rails' role in the development of the West. Many speak of trains with reverence, not as a means of transit but as a rolling metaphor. Train travel, they believe, fosters a sense of community and cooperation sorely missing in today's world -- certainly on the freeways of Southern California.
At its heart, the hobby has the simplest of foundations: the might and majesty of the machines themselves. The enthusiasts see what most do not: tons of steel ferrying businesspeople, toys from China, huge tanks of natural gas, all sharing the same space without incident -- except for those rare, terrible moments when the whole thing falls apart.
