MAKING TRACKS : Train Traveler Hopes His Hobby Will Someday Take Him Into the Record Books

On a typical Saturday, Chris Ferguson gets up at 5:30 a.m., hurries over to Amtrak’s Fullerton Depot, boards a train and then spends the rest of the day riding back and forth between Los Angeles and San Diego.

Why?

Because for Ferguson, getting there is not half the fun--it’s all the fun.

He is happiest when he is aboard a train bound for some new adventure, and the San Diegan--which he has ridden more than 1,000 times--is a convenient way to ride the rails and rack up mileage when he doesn’t have time for longer trips.

Ferguson’s tattered railroad atlas and diary track the more than 562,000 miles he has logged aboard trains in the United States and Canada since his first train ride 18 years ago.

Ferguson, 29, remembers being spellbound by that ride. The 11-year-old sat gazing out the train window in sheer fascination on his trip from Fullerton to San Clemente and back. That day at Fullerton Depot--when a friendly ticket agent noticed the boy’s excitement, gave him a national Amtrak timetable and taught him how to read it--was the beginning of a great adventure. Ferguson’s fate was sealed.

He spent hours poring over the complicated schedule, imagining places he might see, cities he might visit and adventures that were waiting for him aboard trains.

Today, the Anaheim resident spends most of his free time aboard trains--weekends, holidays and vacations--living out those boyhood fantasies.

He has traveled most every route and every kind of equipment Amtrak has had--from the “rainbow trains” of the 1970s, when Amtrak trains were a colorful mix of equipment from various railroads, to today’s Superliners. He has traveled on railfan trips, excursions organized by various groups or by railroads themselves using special equipment and/or a route on tracks not currently used for passenger travel. And he has been on most of the small railroads that still struggle to survive in the United States.

“It’s relaxing. It’s fun. I never get bored,” Ferguson says of his obsession. “I always find some new little thing that amuses me that I haven’t seen before.

“It’s self-taught geography lessons. I can picture more little towns in the country than you can shake a stick at.”

He does admit that some people “think I’m a little crackers.”

But his parents, Frank and Winnie Ferguson, don’t think he’s crazy at all. They’ve even joined him on some of his travels. “I think it’s pretty neat,” his father says. “I’ve always liked trains, too, (although) not as much as he does.”

He says some people wonder why Chris doesn’t go to work for a railroad. Frank Ferguson just laughs and tells them, “It would take all the fun out of it.”

Chris Ferguson’s fondest hope is that someday--if he and passenger trains last long enough--he might come close to the mileage of Rogers E.M. Whitaker, who used the pseudonym E.M. Frimbo when he wrote about his train travels. Whitaker, a longtime editor and writer for the New Yorker, is widely acclaimed as “the world’s greatest railroad buff.” He traveled 2,748,674.73 miles on railroads around the world before his death in 1981 at age 82.

“I’m a fifth of the way there now, and I’m not 30 yet,” Ferguson says, adding that if he maintains his current average of 50,000 miles a year “and if railroads last as long as I do, there’s every good reason to believe I might hit it.”

It is an expensive hobby, but Ferguson, who works as an office manager for his father’s company, Nationwide Installers, doesn’t worry.

“If I actually knew or even wanted to try and think of how much it’s cost me, I’d probably jump out the window,” he says with a laugh. “But I don’t mind it because it’s kept me happy. . . . It keeps me tickin.’ ”

Ferguson estimates that there may be as many as 5,000 railroad mileage buffs in the United States. However, J. David Ingles, editor of Trains magazine, estimates that there may be only 500 people who “seriously” pursue collecting railroad mileage.

It is also difficult to be certain how many people in the country may have logged as many train miles as Ferguson; none of this is listed anywhere but in each rail buff’s personal records. Ted Lemen, president of the 20th Century Railroad Club in Chicago, says winners of annual mileage survey contests conducted by his group averaged only 30,000 to 40,000 miles per year.

It is safe to say, however, that Chris Ferguson pursues his hobby with an ardor few people could match.

He remembers how at 14 he persuaded his parents to let him take the train from Los Angeles to Chicago on his own. The family had taken that trip by train the previous year, and Ferguson announced that he was saving the money so he could go again.

“I gotta do it. I just have to!” he told them. When he had saved most of the money for his fare, his parents realized that he was unstoppable and gave him the rest.

Ferguson took Amtrak’s version of the Super Chief to Chicago during his Easter vacation in 1974. He remembers wandering around in Chicago’s Union Station for 5 hours--before boarding the return train to Los Angeles--absorbed in the beauty and the excitement of the colorful “rainbow trains.”

This was in Amtrak’s early years, when trains were made up of whichever cars were available from the railroad yards because Amtrak didn’t have much equipment of its own. The result, according to Ferguson, was a train that might include a mustard-colored Union Pacific diner with a red stripe, a two-tone green Burlington Northern coach, a silver and red Southern Pacific car or perhaps a sky-blue Great Northern coach car.

“It was probably 10 degrees outside,” he recalls, “but that didn’t bother me. I spent probably almost the whole afternoon just walking around to the different train sheds in the terminal and watching all these different trains pulling in and out from all parts of the country--the Cardinal, the Floridian or the North Coast Hiawatha with four dome cars on it.”

Two years later, Ferguson and a friend were aboard a run of the North Coast Hiawatha he had admired so much, traveling from Chicago to Seattle.

When a landslide on the track in Montana required a detour, Ferguson checked his railroad atlas and found that the only possible detour was a stretch of track belonging to Milwaukee Road.

This stretch of track had not seen passenger travel in 14 years and was “a real engineering feat and a half” with lots of girder bridges and tunnels, Ferguson said.

He didn’t care that the detour made him 6 hours late getting to Seattle “because I went over the track for the first time and the only time because Milwaukee Road went bankrupt and everything west of Miles City (Montana) has been torn up.” In fact, the North Coast Hiawatha was also discontinued in the late ‘70s.

Luckily, Ferguson was able to film the stretch of Milwaukee Road track and is fond of showing it to other railroad buffs who “start crying because they know they’ll never go over it.”

Canadian railroads also have provided Ferguson with some adventures.

One ride in the province of Manitoba on a “mixed train”--a freight train with a coach car in the back--took 12 hours to cover 200 miles. The freight crew couldn’t help but notice Ferguson as he sat there in his suit and tie, carrying briefcase and camera.

When it was discovered that Ferguson was a train buff, he was invited to join the crew in the comfortable caboose. The train had no diner or even snack car, but Ferguson enjoyed a nice meal because the caboose had a kitchen. The train stopped overnight in the town of Lynn Lake before making the return trip, and the crew gave Ferguson a ride to his hotel, arranging to pick him up and serve him breakfast on the train the next morning.

“I was in seventh heaven,” Ferguson remembers.

On another trip in Canada about 10 years ago, Ferguson was even allowed to play engineer for a few minutes when he and a friend were traveling from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Montreal.

Those rides in cabooses and engines may have been fun, but Ferguson’s most luxurious travels have been in private cars. These deluxe cars accommodate only a handful of people and are self-contained, with a kitchen, dining and lounge areas and real beds, not the chair/bed combinations found aboard Amtrak.

In October, 1987, for instance, on a 3-day weekend, Ferguson flew to Washington for a special train trip to Philadelphia, followed by a run on the tracks of the old Reading Railroad and a ride on a steam train.

He arrived in Washington on Friday evening and immediately went to Union Station instead of a hotel, spent a comfortable night in one of the car’s four private bedrooms and awoke to breakfast the next morning as the train was pulling out.

“Oooh, what a way to wake up,” he says.

Over the years and across the miles, Ferguson has enjoyed meeting many interesting people, a major benefit of leisurely railroad travel. He is perhaps proudest of actually having met Whitaker, the famed train buff, in 1977 aboard a special train excursion powered by the steam engine from the Bicentennial American Freedom Train.

On other trips he has enjoyed pleasant chats with football broadcaster John Madden, then-California Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. and TV actor Michael Gross of “Family Ties,” who also is a train buff.

Some friendships have developed into lasting ones, and Ferguson enjoys mapping out train trips to take with these railroad buddies. During the Thanksgiving holiday, for instance, Ferguson and a friend from Atlanta, Ga., will be enjoying a cross-country train trip.

And mileage and friends are not all Ferguson has collected over the years. His pride and joy is his substantial collection of railroad memorabilia, which he treats with reverence.

He has every ticket stub of every train trip he has taken, authentic conductor’s hats, elegant dishes and serving pieces from old railroad diners--each carrying its railroad’s logo. He has vintage schedules--one dating back to 1883--books, photographs, videos and films. T-shirts, vintage menus, towels, glassware and blankets round out his collection.

All of this is just the beginning for Ferguson, who sees many more adventures down the rails.

“I’m planning seriously on going to Switzerland in February,” he says, talking eagerly about how a friend of his was able to ride 24 different trains in one week there.

A ride aboard Australia’s transcontinental Indian Pacific train is also on his wish list. And he even has visions of riding the fabled Orient Express--considered the ultimate in train travel in the ‘20s and ‘30s--from Paris to Istanbul.

The Orient Express is quite expensive, but, Ferguson says, “I think you’re getting your money’s worth because the service, I believe, is back to the way it was in its heyday . . . 10-course dinners and lavish sleeping compartments and so on.

“I’ve never been on it, of course, but I would like to do it sometime.”