In a kitchen drawer in the Mayor of Hudson’s 6th Street home, lives not knives and forks, pots and pans, or a well-organized spice collection, but model trains — lots of them. Miniature boxcars, sleepers, and engines from Walthers Mainline, Atlas, Accurail, and Amtrak are stacked, all still in their packaging, destined to one day be part of an elaborate model train set.
“The modeling thing is aspirational,” said mayor of Hudson Joe Ferris, who struggled to close the kitchen drawer, his collection of rolling stock jamming up the runners. “Modeling the scenery is a big hurdle, but the amount [of models] I have is an effort to make the jump and get started.”
Joe Ferris took office in January 2026 after narrowly defeating incumbent Kamal Johnson. But if you run into Ferris, you’re just as likely to end up in a conversation about vintage Amtrak cars as Hudson’s fiscal policy. Whether it manifests itself in modeling, train tourism, or train policy, the Mayor of Hudson is a bona fide train enthusiast.
Clues to Ferris’ train hobby are not just tucked in drawers, but displayed on every available wall space, magazine rack, and mantelpiece in his home. In the living room, a trio of old advertising posters for New York Central Lines hang above the mantelpiece. By the stairs is framed Brooklyn Rapid Transit bond from the 1910s, next to a map of the New York City subway system from 1937. A New York Central train timetable from 1964 is around the corner, and on the coffee table, copies of Trains Magazine are hidden amongst stacks of The Economist. Perhaps the crown jewel is an outrageously heavy refurbished subway roller which once hung in a New York subway car in the 1960s, with hand cycled destination signs.
Hudson is New York State’s third busiest Amtrak station, a fact Ferris enjoys surprising people with. And while Ferris’ mayoral duties mostly don’t overlap with his train expertise, there are times when the worlds of lobbyist and hobbyist collide.
Ferris has been working with the Empire State Passengers Association to see if Hudson can help in their goal of reducing commute times from New York to Albany to two hours. One idea is to reduce passenger exchange times at stations like Hudson’s, with its lack of level boarding. Ferris also keeps up with train news as it pertains to Hudson. For example, last year’s now-cancelled plan for Metro North to extend its service to Albany (and thereby Hudson) was a major development. In March, previously suspended Empire Service trains between New York and Albany were restored. “As a mayor of a city that relies so heavily on Amtrak service, you can’t take your eye off the issue,” said Ferris. If Hudson once staked its identity as a seafaring town — its softcore maritime feeling presenting itself in ship wheels, whales, and anchors ornamenting street signs, hotel lobbies, and brochures — It’s perhaps more accurate to call it a railroad town today.
Ferris grew up in Brooklyn until he was four, when his family moved to Burlington, Vermont. But the initial track of Ferris’ interest in trains was laid before they left New York. His father was the catalyst, and would take him around the city via subway as he ran errands. Eventually, the duo would ride the subway simply for the fun of it. “We would just get on the subway and try to see how many transfers we could make, and just bop around,” said Ferris. Since then, childhood birthday parties were always at the Transit Museum, and a popular afterschool pastime was pouring over subway maps.
Today, train tourism is a large part of his hobby. Ferris has traveled many of Amtrak’s major scenic routes like the two-day California Zephyr from Chicago to San Francisco, the Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle, the Adirondack from New York to Montreal, and operated a quarter-million-pound diesel locomotive on the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad as part of their “Hands on the Throttle” experience. In December 2025 Ferris took the Eurostar from London to Paris and back, a blisteringly fast train that connects the UK to mainland Europe via an undersea tunnel. “I had never gone that fast on the ground before,” said Ferris. “It’s just like a reminder of what can be in terms of public transit.”
With such a deep-seated hobby, nurtured from his earliest days, you might think that Ferris has thought about turning his hobby into a career. Indeed, he got very close to doing just that.
One day in 2007, Ferris was walking through Penn Station. He had recently graduated college, and spotted a notice that an Amtrak job fair was taking place. He showed up — resumé in hand — and gravitated toward the conductor’s table. After an informal interview, the Amtrak representative said that Ferris would hear back soon. Ferris handed over the resumé. He heard nothing for a few weeks, and was quickly casting off his train conductor aspirations as a pipe dream. “I put my resumé in as a lark,” he said.
A few weeks later, he received a letter forwarded to him by his mother — it was from Amtrak, inviting Ferris to the highly selective conductor’s test in Newark, New Jersey. However, on his resume, Ferris had used his old college address, not his new apartment that he had lined up in Jersey City. By the time his college forwarded the letter to Ferris’ parents, who then passed it on to him, the test day was two days gone.
If things had gone differently, Joe Ferris could be at this moment hurtling through Arizona, conducting the Southwest Chief. He could be checking tickets at Grand Junction, Colorado, as passengers embark the California Zephyr. Hudson could’ve been just a passing station for him, one notch on a long workday. Instead, Hudson became his home station, and Ferris became a conductor of a different sort, responsible for keeping the city — from its cab to its caboose — on track.
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