The Ties That Bind

GLENDALE —  Damon Runyon would have loved these guys.

With such colorful names as “Arrowhead Al,” “Typewriter Phil,” “Engineer Ed,” “Skipper Klein” and “No Name,” they’re at the Glendale Metrolink Station virtually every morning at daybreak, fair weather or foul, to watch the trains.

A loose-knit group of men and one dog, a Pepsi-addicted Weimaraner named Shanta, they share little commonality in their backgrounds but much in their love of trains. They are, they like to say, the Glendale Train Watchers Society.

Runyon, famous for the slang names of his Broadway “Guys and Dolls” characters--Liverlips Louie, Harry the Horse and Angie the Ox, to name a few--might be comfortable with these Glendale guys.

Gene Kramer has been dropping by the station, adjacent to the old Glendale train station currently being restored, for the last seven or eight years. Kramer carries a hand-held scanner radio tuned to Metrolink and Amtrak frequencies.

Many a passenger, spying the radio, has taken Kramer for a railroad employee and asked where to buy tickets, where to board the trains or asked for help with luggage. Kramer, or one of the other men, gives them a hand just the same.

For Kramer, there’s more to trains than their speed, their size and their industrial beauty. There’s a personal connection as well.

“My dad was a railroad man,” he said. “Guess I’ve been a train buff all my life.”

Is Kramer happy in his little corner of the world?

“Oh, yes,” he said on a recent morning of train watching. “Every now and then we get a nice freight train floating through here that makes it worthwhile.”

Weather, he said, is no problem. “We just sit in our cars when it rains. Guess we’re loco.” Actually, most of train watchers are retired, but two are employed.

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“Amtrak Phil” works at Union Station, and Richard Kagle works as a chef on, you guessed it, a train. Not just any train, but Amtrak’s Sunset Limited, which goes from Los Angeles to Orlando, Fla.

Asked if it seems odd that a man would work on trains and then spend his spare time watching trains, Kagle chuckled and replied, “I guess it’s like a mailman going for a walk on his day off.”

Ed Filek, known as “Engineer Ed,” shows up at the tracks every morning except New Year’s Day (“I like to watch the Rose Parade.”) He summed up the allure of the daily ritual: “The attractions are the trains and the camaraderie.” Then he added: “It’s cheap entertainment, too!”

Filek, whose license plate says “Engr Ed,” likes to boast that when he moved to North Hollywood from Sherman Oaks, he had the choice of moving east or west. “I chose east because it was closer to Glendale,” he said.

Such devotion.

Then there’s “Typewriter Phil,” a retired repairman of typewriters and adding machines. Phil Mansfield of Glendale is 87 but still drives, and every so often joins the guys at the train stop. He’s even repaired a typewriter or two for his friends, and on this morning brought Filek by two typing balls for an old IBM Selectric.

His fascination with trains has not dimmed with age. “I’ve been a train nut since I was 5 or 6 years old,” he said.

“Arrowhead Al” is Al Criswell, so named because he lives in Lake Arrowhead, and takes a train ride so he can, well, watch more trains. A former Forest Service employee, he also is retired. About every two weeks, he drives from his home to San Bernardino for the two-hour train ride to join the Glendale group.

Ron Yamasaki, who retired from Santa Monica Parks Department, said he doesn’t have a nickname yet, so he calls himself “No Name,” because he is new to the group. He also loves model trains (HO gauge) but, after a recent move, hasn’t had time to unpack the little ones. So for now, he watches the big ones.

One of the perks of being in the group is not just watching trains, but riding with friends on them. Filek described a recent journey taken by some of the group: “We take the Metrolink from Glendale to Los Angeles, then the Red Line to the Blue Line to the Green Line, the Green Line in both directions and then back to the Blue Line to Long Beach, then back to Los Angeles and then Metrolink back to Glendale.”

Cost of that trip, said Filek, was $4.80.

That’s senior citizen fare and these citizens fare pretty well on the trains.

As a westbound Amtrak train rolled into Glendale, the “hog” (that’s train-speak for engineer) proved he was an old-timer by giving a couple of extra toots on the whistle to the waiting, waving band of watchers.

So Damon Runyon would have loved these guys. But perhaps Shakespeare’s King Harry from “Henry V” would have loved them too: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers . . .”