| Chairs, cameras, action!
By Patrick Gerard Healy GLOBE CORRESPONDENT Train spotters share passion AYER -- Wayne Slater needs to see trains every weekend. "It's like this," he says, with a maniacal look in his eye. "If I don't do this, I'm just not right in the middle of the week." His half-dozen companions erupt into laughter that suggests Slater is exaggerating, but that they also agree with him. They need to see the trains, too. They call themselves the Ayer Railfan Club, and for more than 20 summers they have been bringing their lawn chairs, cameras, and camaraderie to the parking lot of the MBTA commuter rail station in Ayer to watch the passing railcars. The members' backgrounds vary from firefighters to technology specialists, but what unites them is their appreciation of the railroad. They don't sit near the platform, but in between two parked cars in the lot, about 10 feet away from the track. Slater, who is a mechanic, comes from South Boston, but some come from hundreds of miles away, the farthest from North Woodstock, N.H. Fred Kearns, who comes to Ayer from Hudson, N.H., says members of the informal group range in age from 8 to 80. "I'm on the upper end of that scale," he says. Kearns, a retired Digital employee, has been coming to this spot since 1991, a few years after the group began meeting. "I started coming down here in about 1983," says MacLean Woodbury of Ayer, a retired express messenger for Railway Express. "It started with a couple of guys showing up on Saturday night or Sunday morning, and when I'd leave and they'd say, 'See you next week?' I'd say, 'OK.' " The group nowadays gets together mostly on Sundays between 8 a.m. and noon, and the number of participants always varies. "Sometimes there's a dozen of us, sometimes there's five," Kearns says. "It depends on the weather and people's family events." Woodbury says there are many reasons why they flock to Ayer. "I think the main reason is that a variety of power comes through there," he says. "You might see Norfolk Southern, Guilford, CSX, or Union Pacific. "Also, it's a nice place where you can sit in your car or bring a lawn chair and have no problems with trespassing." Although some might find the idea of sitting and watching loud locomotives pass by to be anything but relaxing, the aspect of unwinding is one of the main reasons rail fans cite for their interest. "It's a chance to get away from the roar of the TV or the lawnmower or what have you," says Dave Pierson, who rides his motorcycle from Maynard to Ayer on Sundays. His long gray beard waves with the wind as he looks down the tracks to see if anything is coming down the line. As a train approaches, Slater pulls out his camera and climbs onto an elevated dirt pile closer to the tracks to snap a few photos. "There's a little more to it than just sitting around watching trains," Woodbury says. "There's another aspect of watching with the camera. You take pictures and bring them the next week to compare with the others and sit and talk with other people that share your interest." Waving to the engineer, the group remarks on the different railroad cars on the train. It is an unscheduled freight train, traveling slowly down the tracks at Ayer's Y-shaped intersection. The group has time to compare the color schemes to other trains they have seen recently. Color schemes are often a big part of the discussion, as are what types of power the trains are using. "It's like how some people collect stamps," says John Carlson of Littleton. "People like to see one of everything in a series, and sometimes there will be one missing in the series, and that will be the one they're on the lookout for." Slater, who is a third-generation rail fan, says his father likes looking at the freight cars, and he likes the engines and the cabooses. He's been taking pictures of them since he was 7 years old. "I cut everybody's lawn three times over and painted the picnic tables to save up for my first 35-millimeter camera," he says. Carlson, who also sports a beard long enough to blow in the breeze, watches as Slater snaps some more photos. "I used to take pictures, but I had nothing to do with the photos afterwards," he says. "I just about wore out my Nikon camera. Now I do it for the camaraderie. It's really just like the way that people who like football get together and talk about it. We have trains." "We don't just talk about trains, either," Kearns pipes in with a smile. "We talk about scanners, rail transmissions, model trains, and bellows, too." Joking aside, the group's conversations prove that these gentlemen do not have one-track minds. They touch on the hot topics of the day, such as terrorism and same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, retreat to less controversial territory such as garden sheds, guitars, and ham radios, and eventually come back to trains. "Trains are a central theme, but a lot of other things do crop up," Kearns says. The group is close-knit, but maintains an air of informality that can sometimes have unfortunate consequences. A few years ago, a member stopped showing up on Sundays, and some assumed that he was just taking some time off or had other obligations. "I didn't find out that he had died until a few weeks later, and unfortunately, I missed the funeral," says Carlson, looking off into the distance. Slater's girlfriend, Gail McLaughlin, gets out of a station wagon to join the men in conversation. She says that more and more females are getting into rail fanning. "There's a lot of girls out there that have husbands and boyfriends that do this, and we just basically keep them in line and feed them," she says with a laugh. "And we watch the trains, and it keeps us out of the house, so for us that's relaxation." In between trains Slater shows the group some enlargements of rail photos he had taken at some of the other hot spots in the state. A few of the other places rail fans like to go train spotting include Worcester, Attleboro, Framingham, Palmer, and Middlefield. Doug Engler, a 26-year-old from Wareham, has come up with a clever way to describe rail fanning. "It's a lot like fishing," he says. "Instead of a fishing pole, you've got a camera; instead of water, it's the tracks; and instead of a depth gauge, you've got a scanner. You never know what you're going to catch, how long they'll be, and how many." Slater says he doesn't mind the days when he doesn't "catch" anything. "It doesn't upset me, because I'm out here in Ayer and I know a lot of people here," he says. "I've been doing this for a long time, and I enjoy it very much." |
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