2 Men Closely Watch the Trains in Ventura : Hobbies: The buffs have recorded every rail passage through town since 1961.

Jerry Drapeau, tall, spindly and wearing a Southern Pacific cap, arrived on his bicycle recently at the Ventura railroad platform as he does seven mornings a week to await the arrival of Amtrak’s No. 774 from Santa Barbara.

Minutes later the wailing whistle of the passenger train was heard, the ringing gates at the railroad crossing came down and the red, white and blue engine rolled around the bend into sight.

“Right on the button, 8:26,” said Drapeau, checking his pocket watch. “Engine 289. Engineer Mike Fleischman should be in the cab at the controls.”

Drapeau, 62, was armed and ready with pen and notebook to record the engine number, the numbers and description of every car as he does for every daylight freight and passenger train going through Ventura.

He doesn’t work for Amtrak or Southern Pacific Transportation Co. “I’m a railroad nut,” explained the part-time courier for a local legal firm. “I do this for my own personal pleasure. I’m like an addict. I can’t quit. For me there’s something electrifying about trains.”

Drapeau and a fellow railroad buff, Don Sease, 64, have carefully kept and preserved records of every train--including passenger and freight cars, engines and cabooses--that has passed through Ventura since 1961. Both are lifelong bachelors.

Drapeau knows all the engineers and conductors on a first-name basis. They call him the Ventura Yardmaster and have dubbed Sease the Ventura Trainmaster.

Drapeau and Sease record descriptions of cargo, the number of passengers carried and any problems they observe on the passing train. The engineers shout out the number of passengers to them. If everything appears in order they flash high signs to conductors indicating all is well.

If there is a problem of any kind they get on the phone immediately and report it to the SP or Amtrak.

Drapeau has kept track of all the daylight trains since 1965. Sease has recorded every train going through the city day and night for the past 31 years.

“Southern Pacific and Amtrak know who we are and what we’re doing, but in all these years the railroad has never once asked us to look up information in our records about any of their trains,” Drapeau said.

Sease and Drapeau each have about 500 notebooks with information on nearly 100,000 trains traveling north and south along the coast through Ventura.

Drapeau’s entries are done with a flourish in calligraphy.

“We plan to leave our notebooks to the Ventura County Museum when we die,” Drapeau said.

“We cover each other if one of us is sick or out of town. It’s in our blood. Some people are religious fanatics. We’re railroad fanatics,” Drapeau said. “Don is worse than I am. He never leaves home. He doesn’t want to miss a train. He lives next to the railroad tracks and records the passing trains from his front porch.”

From time to time Drapeau embarks on long excursions--by rail, of course. He has ridden trains throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico. Every Sunday he rides a train from Ventura to Santa Barbara and back, visiting with railroad crews on layovers in Santa Barbara.

When Amtrak No. 774 pulled into Ventura recently, engineer Mike Fleischman leaned out of the cab and shouted to Drapeau over the noise of the engine: “How’s everything, Ventura Yardmaster?”

“No complaints, Mike! How’s it with you?” yelled back Drapeau.

Sease, a disabled Korean War veteran, declined to be interviewed. Sease comes from a long line of railroaders, Drapeau said. His father worked for the railroad 53 years as a railway postal clerk. He uses a powerful flashlight to record the cars and engines on the night trains.

Every afternoon the two men get together to compare notes, to talk about trains going through that day and to reminisce about trains that passed through Ventura, weeks, months or even years ago.

Both men watched and rode trains as a hobby before they began keeping records of the trains that travel through Ventura.

“You can’t imagine what it was like here during World War II--troop trains, wartime freight. It was a busy place,” recalled Drapeau, who plays the organ in his free time for residents of the Townhouse Apartments where he lives.

Engineer Fleischman on Amtrak’s No. 774 Santa Barbara to San Diego run said he has met many rail fans in his long career as a railroader, “but the Ventura Trainmaster and the Ventura Yardmaster are in a world of their own. I never heard of anyone else keeping track of trains passing through a town like they do.”