I'm partial to Yaesu products. I replaced my ancient Radio Shack scanner with a Yaesu FT-60. It's a ham radio/scanner that can transmit in the ham radio frequency range, 140-144, give or take. I'm not a ham, so I can't use it to transmit anyway.
Regardless of which brand you buy, buy one that has a 'matched' programming program to go with it. RT-Systems has one for every Yaesu out there, from what I can tell. The extra $40 or so for the programming software is well worth the investment.
Like you, my primary use for the scanner is while riding Amtrak. In fact, at the moment, I'm spending a night in hotel in Portland OR as the 4th night of a 12 day, 9500 mile Amtrak joy ride (9 nights in a roomette) mostly on AGR points. Using the RT-Systems program, I easily entered all AAR radio frequencies on their respective channel numbers. Then, I have 10 frequency lists (in memory 'banks' (eg, spread sheet columns) for each Amtrak route. It's like a spreadsheet where each row is an AAR channel number, and each column that has an X in it means that bank (column) will stop on that frequency when it's transmitting. I actually built an MS Excel spreadsheet which currently has 14 columns on it, one for each Amtrak route. I then swap in/swap out column 10 whenever I need one of those routes on the spread sheet, print it, then bring up the RT-Systems program, plug in my channel numbers for the 'new' route, and with a couple of clicks, download it all to the scanner.
Is the Yaesu an overkill for a run of the mill railfan? Perhaps. But the ease of programming it is light years ahead of manually entering each frequency one digit at a time like my old Radio Shack.
There's a number of RR frequency 'tuned' antennas available that cover the 160-161 range of frequencies. The $20 or so spent buying one of those is well worth the money as they'll almost double the range your radio can receive.
