Train Superfans Are Stopping Teens from Setting Fires on Subway Tracks

Max Diamond, aka DJ Hammers, is riding the J train. Behind him a drowsy homeless man is ominously unbuttoning his outer pair of jeans to readjust the waist, causing passengers to nervously jump to an adjacent car. But DJ Hammers is unfazed. Deep in thought, he's shooting video out of the front window of unused switches and abandoned stations lining the rundown cars' route, listening to the crescendo hum that defines the New York City subway.

The other riders might be on the train because they're headed to Brooklyn, but DJ Hammers is here solely because he really, really likes trains. This is an R42, a model currently being phased out in favor of the newer R179. In other words, it's a dying breed.

DJ Hammers, an 18-year-old freshman electrical engineering student at Cooper Union, is a "railfan," or train enthusiast. He runs one of the most viewed channels in a YouTube subculture of New York City subway anomalies and engineering intrigues. These videos, to a layperson, might look just like a regular train pulling into a station. But there are hundreds of these clips labeled with names like, "Rare: R143 Running on the F Line Passing Smith 9th St. on the Express Track." Others offer hours-long journeys through the innards of the subway system.

Hammers's most popular video is an hour of footage from a trip from Coney Island to 125th Street, and has more than 64,000 views. He told me that some people watch these videos for the technical value, observing the intricacies of a train system that serves 7 million people per day. He adds that others on the railfan forums liken the appeal to Norwegian "Slow TV," the ride through the system a meditative experience delivered via YouTube.

"Railfanning" as a concept has been around as long as railroads themselves (Hammers has books with pictures of trolleys and trains from 1910). The phenomenon is widespread: Railfan.net has more than a million train images, and users post videos of train systems from all around the world (Hammers claims there are thousands of railfans in New York City alone). They can be found selling roll signs and old MetroCards on Ebay.

"Some fans cry whenever the MTA retires a train," Hammers told me. "I don't go that far."

About a year ago, on one of the railfan forums, trouble began to brew. A group of kids who call themselves "the Conquestors" started posting pictures and videos where they'd used scissors to change the metal roll signs on the outside of old trains that display the first and last stops. They would then declare that train to be "Conquested," as if they owned it from then on. The train had been marked by their very specific brand of trolling—almost like tagging, except all mischief and no artistry. These pranks were largely harmless to the train-riding masses, but the kids were the scourge of the MTA for months. (One MTA employee told me he and his co-workers can get written up for incorrect signage.) The agency posted the Conquestors' pictures all over the crew rooms and towers.

The railfans decided they were fed up with the Conquestors blowing up their spot. They kicked them off their forums and publicly derided them, but the gang only got worse. They posted videos on their individual Facebook pages where they shoved open car doors. They broke into the conductors' cabs and blew the train horns. They "conquested" large slabs of metal and shoved them into third rails, creating minor spark showers on cell phone videos. Their actions began to come to a head when they managed to get the keys to a train, and, more importantly, a brake handle. Now they had free run of the rails. You can watch Hammers's compilation of this mischief below.

The Conquestor boys, in N train hats, started posting videos of the train doors opening and closing rapidly, like some ghost had taken hold of the system. They would break into trains' vacant conductor cabs, and during service they "conquested" the lights, turned off the AC, and made announcements over the PA. With their newly found brake handle, they could now stop and start trains. The subway's signal system stopped them from running trains haphazardly up and down the tunnels, but nothing could stop them from putting pieces of metal on the third rail so that a train would trip it, sometimes halting service for hours.

That's when DJ Hammers and the railfan community went on the defensive.

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"The worry was that the distinctions between our group and their group would get lost," he said.

The two groups share some obvious similarities. They are both keen observers of the riding stock. The Conquestors also refer to the trains by the make of the car (R42, R160A). They are both working every day to satisfy their fascination, to peel away the mystery of the train system. But the railfan community grew anxious that it was going to be demonized—that their members would be filming the trains, and an MTA worker might assume that they were trying to figure out how to break in, or how to adjust the brakes. Some feared that the MTA would ban photography altogether. The community looked to the member with the widest reach on YouTube: DJ Hammers.

At 8:15 on the morning of April 2, according to a criminal complaint obtained by VICE, Keyshawn Brown, the 16-year-old son of an MTA employee and a Conquestor, placed one of his acquired old-fashioned roll signs on the third rail of the C line at Nostrand Avenue. When the train arrived in the station, a minor explosion and a track fire occurred. The train stopped for more than an hour as the passengers evacuated.

At this point, the railfans were sending Hammers any video they could rip off of the Conquestors' Facebook pages—he had become their whistle-blower. He put together a compilation video and posted it to YouTube. Then he sent it to the NYPD, Gothamist, and PIX 11. The next day he was being interviewed at Grand Central station on CBS nightly news during primetime. Keyshawn Brown was arrested and charged with reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, and arson. In an email to VICE, MTA spokesperson Kevin Ortiz said of the remaining Conquestors, "We are working with the NYPD to have them arrested."

The railfan forum is still hot with gossip about Keyshawn Brown and the Conquestors, although the discussion sometimes verges on the brink of obsession. There is now an advisory at the top of the forum:

"People, please stop posting things related to the arrest of Keyshawn Brown. Nothing worse then seeing multiple posts relating to the same thing. No reason for all of this to be discussed, we all know it happened, keep things moving. -Staff"

Samuel Lieberman is on Twitter.