Trainspotting...

I used to think I really loved trains.

It all started as a young boy when we would travel for summer vacation by train to visit relatives and I was hooked. So as a kid I would lovingly assemble my train set on the floor in the bedroom, happily making deliveries of goods to "towns" along the circular route. Never minding that it was the same set of plastic buildings for each town. As I grew older and my copies of Model Railroader kept growing, I began to actually have a collection of engines and rolling stock (ie, rail cars). And while real trains were interesting I never was a railroading enthusiast, always liking model ones the best.

After many (MANY) years of not being involved in the hobby, I recently decided to buy my first railroading enthusiast's magazine from a news agent here in Australia. This particular periodical hailed from the UK - the home of "trainspotters." These guys (and they are always male, it seems) get this particular nickname because they purportedly haunt train yards and lurk on rail right-of-ways wearing anoraks and clutching little note pads "spotting" trains by the number painted on the engines and writing them down in their notebooks. Sometimes traveling great distances to get that one number missing and bragging about it to their friends.

If it sounds like a sad existence, you'd be correct. And I never believed trainspotting was true. That is, until I got this magazine.

Page after page, letter after letter, article after article was written orgasmically describing train engines, the numbers on train engines, and that rite-of-passage moment into manhood when they scored "that missing number". Thank god there were no pictures.

All of a sudden, I don't think I'm so into trains after all.

- Farmer Ted