Train Tracking : 2 Keep Meticulous Logs on Ventura Rail Traffic

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 ready with pen and notebook to record the engine number and the numbers and description of every car, as he does for every daylight 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 records of every train--including passenger and freight cars, engines and cabooses--that has passed through Ventura since 1961.

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.

Drapeau has kept track of all the daylight trains since 1965. Sease has kept a record of every train that has gone through the city, day or night, for the last 31 years. He uses a powerful flashlight to read the numbers on the cars and engines of the night trains.

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

Drapeau’s entries are done with a flourish of 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.”

Sease, a disabled Korean War veteran who declined to be interviewed, comes from a long line of railroaders, Drapeau said.

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.

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?” Drapeau yelled back.

Fleischman said he has met many rail fans in his long career as an engineer, “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.”