Metrolink111: Is She A Foamer Two weeks ago, on a Friday after work, I showed up at the Fullerton train station at 6:45 pm and was greeted by Jose from the café with the exclamation: “you’re late!” Indeed I was late. I don’t like to go to the Fullerton train station any time past about 5:00 pm because if I take the bus home I have to leave fairly early, especially if I’m working the next day. But tonight I was waiting for a colleague from work who didn’t get off till 6:00 so because he takes the bus I told him I’d meet him down there and place his food order. The week before that he was with me and I introduced him to Larry and Dan and Doug. “Oh you’re bringing your boyfriend tonight,” said Larry. “No,” I responded. “No I took him to see my boyfriends!” You see we’ve come a long way since September 2008 when I was upset at the loss of Rob Sanchez, whose picture now hangs here to my left as I write these very words. You know he’s the Metrolink engineer who died in the Chatsworth train wreck, and if you’ve been following my story, you know what I think of him and what I think of what others think of him. From the very first time when I sat almost in tears at the train station to the night I sat in the cold with the ice-cream, and even to last night when my colleague and I had a gluttonous pasta feast at the Old spaghetti Factory located next to the tracks and across the parking lot, my journey through the Metrolink111 accident and the discovery of the Fullerton train station has progressed in increments from grief, to solace, to creative drive, to a social experience. It all leads to the question, you might ask, and the one that serves as the subtitle to this essay: Is she a foamer? What Is It Apparently in the word of railfanness if there is such a word there is a derogatory term used to describe people who stand feet from locomotives and shoot pictures, or perhaps even those who just simply go to places to watch passing trains. A rail executive in the 1960s is supposed to have said that people were more inclined to watch trains than ride them in the not so glorious days of passenger railroading. Now I mention the idea of the foamer because shortly after the Chatsworth rail accident an article came out in the L.A. Times explaining this phenomenon and how fans who knew Rob Sanchez went to the fullerton station to clear their heads. I mentioned this article in a previous essay somewhere but not in the context to which I now refer. The idea of the foamer is apparently not a good one though I don’t particularly find it repulsive. One of the major railroads has adopted this term as a source of usefulness, asking over excited fans to help check for anomalies on railroad tracks. Some people might think that the anomalies sit by the railroad tracks but then that’s just the product of my over active imagination, imagining that people actually notice me eating ice-cream in the cold. There are, however, at least at the fullerton station, some characters, and yes, perhaps even some foamers. Self Defense The central question however seems to be lately whether or not I personally am a foamer. This whole concept didn’t occur to me until today when I was at lunch with Gary who has sometimes picked me up from the station. Gary gets a big kick out of teasing me about whatever interest currently obsesses me. I mentioned that I was at the train station last night, Friday, and his response was to simply state: “Foamer.” No, I insisted, I’m not a foamer. I don’t take pictures of trains though I certainly want some pictures and no I don’t stand feet from locomotives, but maybe I do, and his response was that it’s all I did or talk about, so yes, I am a foamer. No, I said, smiling, insisting, I’m not a foamer. The social Experience So am I a foamer? Well, it could be that I’m starting to appear to be one. The last three Friday nights have seen me at the train station with Chris, a work colleague, another blind colleague who, he says, is interested in trains. He is a ham radio operator and has mentioned several times that when he lived in Riverside he did listen to train traffic on the radio. We have I must confess exchanged dozens of emails at work discussing trains or the Chatsworth wreck, or anything else. I’ll have to save them for the record. Chris found out that I was interested in the Chatsworth accident and that I was writing about it and asked to see my essays. When I presented the writing to him he asked if he could come with me sometime to the station. Of course, I said, and so for three weeks on Friday he’s been accompanying me there to watch trains and meet those that I have come to know there. So I guess this all begs the question of whether or not going to the station for the last six months fairly regularly and writing about the accident and wanting pictures of trains and introducing colleagues to the station makes me a foamer. I suppose it could. Chris and I got into a discussion last week by email at work about Rob’s radio transmissions on the day of the Chatsworth wreck. And you knew that had to come up because inevitably, it does. I told him that there was transmission just before approaching the Chatsworth station of his calling out a flashing yellow light, the precursor to the solid yellow which was missed and then the missing of the red which ultimately took Rob’s life and twenty-four other lives with his. Most people might say I’m a foamer when it comes to the engineer since I seem to have this inexplicable need to defend Rob Sanchez, as well as to meet a railroad engineer. I did actually meet a certified railroad engineer but it doesn’t seem to have lessened the need to meet another one. I’ll take two. In our discussions at work, my colleague and I often talk about what I’m going to do with the engineer. Flirt? Talk? Text? Date? It doesn’t seem to be the mature discussions of one who is upset by the Chatsworth train wreck, but maybe one needs to have a little fun to counteract the weighty accusations that keep coming out of that investigation and perhaps the humor is designed more to alleviate the idiocy that other people seem to show when it comes to that particular engineer. Calling rob a monster, a dirty criminal, asking how he got the job with metrolink are all questions that uninformed people ask. Other smarter ones might ask about safety methods, but the uninformed masses who have nothing to do but listen to talk radio all day ask very uninformed questions and it is for me simply annoying. Speak Up! So let me ask them a question? How are you making your house or rent payments? And let me ask them another question. Did you ever break company policy deliberately? Probably. So why would someone categorize this engineer as a monster when they’ve broken policy themselves? I know lives were lost and ultimately not properly detecting signals is usually the cause of accidents, and this one a particularly bad one. My heart aches for those who lost their families, I’m sure their nights and days have been long and difficult. People respond to grief in a variety of different ways one of which is to lose sleep, sometimes people have trouble sleeping at night after deaths, and so I can imagine that someone somewhere has lost some. My heart goes out to all of them. The Longest Night Speaking of sleep, in one of the excerpts from the text messages exchanged between Rob and his teenage friend, Rob lost sleep one of the nights after the train he was operating hit and killed a pedestrian when the man jumped in front of the train. I don’t think this is the kind of response that would issue from a “dirty criminal” “monster”. I wouldn’t classify it as such. Maybe it’s the action of an anxious man, an upset one, one who experiences things keenly, but not a monster. Hardly that. The word monster in the form it is used to describe Rob Sanchez implies deliberate intensions to cause death, and along with it callus reactions to death. This word fails to adequately explain the response of an engineer that was upset over hitting a pedestrian four days before he was killed in an accident. More than one engineer has hit more than one pedestrian and I’m sure the responses are just as varied as any, but in this case, this physical response and the affinity toward animals expressed by those who knew him hardly classifies Rob Sanchez as a monster. The Engineer Complex One of the ways in which my colleague and I seem to express dismay is to always say that I don’t want to give any engineers any guilt complexes so I’m doing everything in my power to stay off the tracks. Believe me Mr. or Mrs. Or Ms Engineer, I’m staying out of your way. It won’t be me who causes an engineer to lose sleep! Maybe the engineer complex showed up last week when we sat by the tracks talking to a man and his wife and baby. The engineer of the approaching freight laid on that horn four times, scaring the daylights out of more than one of us. “Look out,” says the woman whose name I don’t remember now, “he’s big!” “Why do you suppose he did that?” I asked. “Because he saw the baby,” she said. The baby was not that close to the tracks was he? We were all pretty close. It was another cause for the engineer complex! Don’t make me hit you! Stay out of my way! We were more than happy to do that. There’s probably a very nice person sitting up there in that cab who didn’t want to hit a two year-old baby. Kindness hasn’t completely deserted us. Five Seconds from Somewhere Then on the same night, two freight trains came through in opposite directions, giving us all cause for alarm and laughter. One freight train just about past us and then the second approached, the whistle barely audible, drowned out by the sound of the other cars passing. The one whose whistle was almost inaudible streaked through there, he had to be doing eighty, maybe, causing a wind blast and diffusing the wonderful smell of diesel fuel, and startling me. The dismay turned to enjoyment as I realized what was happening, the feeling shared by others who were also sitting or standing near the tracks. The passing of the two trains brought to mind the Chatsworth accident. According to the Chatsworth accident investigators, the two engineers could see each other for five seconds before impact. Five seconds! That’s barely long enough to say one word, then it’s steel on steel, one locomotive pushing the other back, trampling over the body of one very surprised engineer, shoving its way back into the first two passenger cars. Five seconds isn’t very long. No wonder that engineer who saw the baby laid on that horn four times. Five seconds is barely time for a breath and then it’s over, as matt Baum says. If you’re hit by a train, it’s over. We know that. And Rob had to know that. I’m convinced he did. He knew. Fullerton Friends On the night that the two freight trains passed each other on the tracks, something else happened. Four people appeared along with the four of us sitting by the tracks and we had to have conversation. It turned out that they were friends with my friend Olga and her kids, one of which I’ve written about on this website. Olga and her children attend the rock church and so we talked for a while about finances and God’s goodness and then they went on their way and I watched trains. Familiar Faces On another trip to the station, Wally appears, the talking rail fan. He talks about how he used the vacuum cleaner to get rid of a wasp’s nest, and he also talked about vacuuming up ants. Ok I told myself when he was telling me the story, I’m going to remember that. I don’t remember what else he talked about that night but I did remember that. I haven’t seen him at the station the last two times. I’m sure I’ll see him again. Staying Off the Railroad Tracks Last week while sitting by the tracks, Doug explained that there is a fence that separates the north from the south tracks and that you can’t walk over the tracks to the other side, something which I think is smart. I know in Santa Barbara you have to walk over the tracks to get to the street, something unfamiliar to me though at the Orange Metrolink station one must walk over the tracks as well. There are many places where one needs to traverse over railroad tracks but Fullerton isn’t one of them. At Fullerton it’s all about safety first. Bridging the Gap And if you don’t think that rail fans don’t stand on the bridge and watch trains as they travel under us? The bridge at the Fullerton train station is an enclosed area so a foamer/rail fan can stand on the bridge in the rain and watch trains. There’s no stopping a real rail fan I suppose. Last night, Chris was intrigued with the idea of feeling the exhaust and smelling the diesel fuel as the trains go under the bridge so we went there after dinner and watched trains for an hour. Ultimately I prefer to watch them from the north side of the tracks, but Fullerton is a very fan friendly place. You can watch them from the patio of the cafe, from the north or south side of the tracks, from the bridge, and even from the Old Spaghetti Factory across the parking lot. You Decide Finally, then there’s the Sunday trip. I found an old book on the Santa Fe railroad in Braille and so as a special treat I took myself down to the station last Sunday and read part of it. My father met me there and we proceeded to our family dinner. My nieces enjoyed a wooden whistle that I bought. I said I wasn’t going to show it to them, but I just couldn’t refuse. Famous last words! Auntie broke down and showed them the whistle. It was a two note whistle one that might remind you of a steam engine whistle. My father, his wife, my sister, her husband, and I cheered and laughed as two year-old Ashley and four year-old Kylee took turns blowing it. I wonder if they’ve lost it by now? I don’t know but now Shelley’s train obsession has entered the world of the nieces. So you decide. Listing all that I do and say and all the thinking and planning around trains that gets done, as I’m starting to plan my train trip across country, as I work on my railroad story, read more about the Chatsworth train accident and even listen to the hearing online, as I continue to spend more time and money at the Fullerton train station, maybe there is a ring of truth to what Gary said today. Nevertheless, no matter what one says, I’m going to enjoy my new obsession. It’s Rob’s legacy to me. I’ll let you contemplate the evidence and draw your own conclusion. Am I a foamer?
Copyright © 2009 Shelley J Alongi |