FULLERTON - The tinny music of a band jamming at a nearby cafe filled the air at the Santa Fe Depot's pseudo-adobe buildings.
It's a little after 7 p.m. on a tepid Friday night. And the music is soon drowned out by the roaring of an Amtrak train as it approaches the station.
Dave Norris, a burly 64-year-old sitting in a folding chair he brought to the station, pulls out a notebook from the left breast pocket of his shirt. He starts jotting down information - which way the train is facing, what time it arrives, the engine's number.
Five minutes pass, and the train blows it whistle and pulls away. Norris pulls out his pocket watch again and writes down the time.
Why take notes?
"This is original resource information," Norris explains.
Norris is among a smattering of people at the train station known as rail fans, those who congregate nightly to watch and talk about trains. He belongs to a special subsection, trainspotters.
Trainspotters don't just watch the trains; they write down the train's information for posterity.
This day, Norris is the only trainspotter at the station. He normally is.
"There's not that many of us," he says.
Indeed, even many rail fans say trainspotting is not for them.
Santa Ana's Chris Guenzler, who at last count had ridden 1,363,589.4 miles on trains, said he's more into riding the trains than watching them.
Rancho Santa Margarita's Brett Canedy, 33, a traffic engineer who visits the Fullerton station at least once a week, said he prefers to just watch passenger trains. Some trainspotters take notes to connect with others across the country to see where trains end up. Since passenger trains tend to stay local, for him, taking notes would not have much of a purpose.
Michael Litschi, manager of Metrolink operations for the Orange County Transportation Authority, whose coworkers rib him for being a rail fan, said of the hobby: "Everyone has their own specific way."Jonathon Husner, 26, another rail fan at Fullerton's station this day, used to trainspot but hasn't for a few years. He stopped because he was more interested in socializing with other rail fans than taking attentive notes. He became a rail fan growing up. His father and his older brother were into trains, and they had a model train set in their house. As an adult, he sees it as an easy and cheap form of entertainment. He recently applied for a conductor job with Union Pacific.
"I love it," he said of a train's rumble. "I think, like most rail fans, I'm into locomotives. I live their power."
Norris, a retired securities printer, has been trainspotting at the Fullerton station since 1970. His grandfather was a telegrapher and a station operator. His father kept track of train numbers, too. Norris kept up the family tradition while also committing to taking more detailed notes.
He sees his role as that of a historian. The information he keeps has come in handy a few times. For example, he was once called on by a friend who worked for a train company to settle a dispute about the capacity of a car that was carrying oil; he had once written down the train's capacity after seeing it on the car's side.
He's seen many of the same exact passenger trains over and over. For freight trains, though, he's only seen the same one on what he considers a technicality - if one circles around at a junction and comes back through the Fullerton station in the opposite direction the same night.
Over the years, Norris has gotten used to his passion being misunderstood. But people scoff at him less now then when he first started. He doesn't mind being called a foamer - a term coined to describe rail fans as people who foam at the mouth upon seeing a train. He draws the line, though, at being called a rail nut, which is often preceded by an expletive.
"It's not boring," Norris said. "It's only boring if you don't know."
Dave Norris has spotted so many trains in his lifetime - thousands - that it's too hard for him to pick favorites or list them in any sort of hierarchy. Still, he provided a few that he considers "awesomely cool," which he described as ones that epitomize the power of trains.
