Word of the Week: Foamer

Foamer: A train and railway hobbyist.

From a New York Times travel feature by Andy Isaacson about riding Amtrak across the United States:

Around the train car lounged Americans traveling for work and others for family, people for whom train travel is a necessity and those for whom it’s merely quaint, first-time riders and probably even a few “foamers” — the nickname that train workers privately give the buffs who salivate over the sight of a locomotive.

That sentence suggests that foamer derives from "foaming at the mouth," but a retired locomotive engineer who goes by "Hoghead" sets the record straight in Yahoo Answers:

The Western Pacific (now the UP) runs the "Feather River Route" eastward along the Feather River to Portola and beyond. The timber industry has now been gutted, but at the time there were a lot pollutants being dumped into the river upstream, primarily waste from mills and stagnant log ponds.

This caused the formation of copious amounts of foam in back washes and eddies along the river, a favorite place for rail buffs and photographers.

Often times, these people would wade into the river to get the right angle for a photo, usually knee deep or deeper amidst the foam, hence the moniker was applied; "Foamers." Its meaning has been upgraded to describe an over zealous aficionado of rail operations.

Foamer is North American slang, used by rail buffs (sometimes called railfans) as well as non-enthusiasts. (The pejorative term is FRN, for Fucking Rail Nut.) The UK equivalent is trainspotter. (Off topic, but interesting: the birdwatching world's equivalent is twitcher.)

Here's a short foamer lexicon. And here's a much longer one that includes railroad employee jargon.

P.S. I wrote this post over the weekend. Quite by chance, Monday's poem of the day on public radio's Writer's Almanac is "Trains," by David Shumate.

Comments

[Mary Sullivan]

And I imagined a foamer was a talk-show host or caller-in!

[Lance Knobel]

The more direct UK equivalent is gricer, not trainspotter.

[Nancy Friedman]

@Lance: Thanks for that tidbit! I'd never heard of "gricer," so I did a little research. According to this site http://www.geoffspages.co.uk/raildiary/gricer.html "gricer" derives from the sport of grouse shooting and the concept of a successful "bag."

Several readers have been finding this post via Wordcraft, where a thread about trains (http://is.gd/mC3E) includes a couple of references to "what we in the UK would call transpotters" (or more generically "anoraks").

[Lance Knobel]

I think there's some skepticism (or in Br Eng, scepticism) about the derivation for gricer.

Have a look at the scans collected on http://www.avoe05.dsl.pipex.com/GRICER.htm, if you want to get tangled in the etymological weeds.