“We pretty much were ready to just hang it up at that point.”

As mandolin player and founding member of York bluegrass trio Waitin on a Train, Tony Staub has seen dark times – one so dark that, three years later, it continues to influence and define nearly every move the band makes.

In November 2006, the band suffered the loss of bass player Adam Sullivan following a tragic hiking accident at Chickies Rock. In addition to coping with the untimely death of a close friend, Staub and Waitin on a Train guitarist and co-founder Paul Wykowski were faced with a difficult decision.

“That summer, we had recorded an album with Adam and we were just finishing it up when Adam died,” Staub explains. Ultimately, the two decided to release the album in memory of their friend. Entitled In the Path of Pain, it developed into a document of what was a truly painful time in their lives. “The album just sort of seemed to fit that strange time of our lives and of our band,” Staub reflects. Even then, though, he and Wykowski did not imagine they would have the wherewithal beyond the tragedy to continue as a band.

The two initially resisted propositions from a friend, bassist Johnny Hank, who thought perhaps he could step into the late Sullivan’s shoes to breathe new life into the band and honor Sullivan’s legacy. Staub explains, “We were leery at first, but then decided to just see how it goes, especially since it was someone that we knew, that we felt comfortable with.” Hank had been a regular on the York scene and a friend of all three members of the trio. They explored the idea cautiously. Eventually, after a series of rehearsals and a handful of informal jam sessions, “[Hank’s] personality fell right in,” Staub says. “We set up a gig and it just felt right … so we just kept going.”

Since making the decision to move forward, Waitin on a Train have gained a regional following and a genuine respect among peers and critics in the bluegrass community. Much of this success can be attributed to the band’s effortless authenticity, something that is often hard to come by. For Staub and Wykowski, music that reaches back to America’s Appalachian roots is really the beginning and the end. Industrial Pennsylvania still seems to have in its blood that old banjo and acoustic guitar sound that sailed here with the Scots and the Irish a few hundred years ago. This is a tradition that has always been at its center music for regular folks, made by people who work and who know something about hardship.

“Coming from this area, country music is kind of thrown at you at all angles,” Staub says. “So as kids, the AM country stations, I remember listening to them growing up and loving the sound of pedal steel guitar, listening to the words of truck-driving songs and loving that.”

Wykowski has long been influenced not only by the American heirs to the old Celtic folk music such as Bill Monroe, but also by legendary singers of Irish folk songs, and more specifically the Dubliners. Staub remembers when Wykowski turned him on to the band, and counts it as a key point in his own musical development. “One of the influences that made me pick up a mandolin was the Dubliners,” he says. “They have a tenor banjo player that plays some mandolin. When I heard it, I was like, ‘What is this instrument?’”

Despite embracing a style of music that is old by any standards, Waitin on a Train have been carving out a niche all their own in part by incorporating a punk rock rebelliousness in their well-pedigreed bluegrass. Staub’s mandolin-on-crack speed churns some songs into breathless punk-rock fervor. “We all kind of went through a punk music stage, a rebellious teenage stage,” he laughs. “As you get older, you get tired of carrying around amplifiers and stuff like that, so we started playing acoustic again and coming back to the stuff we grew up listening to.”

Since congealing as a trio, Waitin on a Train have developed a stage show that hisses like a live wire, regularly drawing riled-up crowds full of people singing and stomping along. “Our live shows can definitely get pretty rowdy,” Staub concedes. Buzz about the band’s performances has landed Waitin on a Train in some surreal situations. A definitive career highlight for the band was participating in a show that proved York’s place in bluegrass history, while synthesizing its past and present on one stage, alongside York native – and arguably one of the most famous and respected living bluegrass legends – Del McCoury. McCoury, who has been playing bluegrass for 50 years and who made his name playing with Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys, came home to play a benefit for a former bass player who was fighting cancer. Waitin on a Train was invited to share the bill with not only McCoury, but a host of other accomplished players as well. Straub recalls, “That was a pretty fun seeing all those old-timers from the ’60s and ’70s who are great bluegrass musicians.” If sharing the bill with a legend weren’t enough, Waitin on a Train also warmed up the crowd at a rally last year for a rising star on the international political scene. You might have heard his name recently: Barack Obama.

In late September, Waitin on a Train released a new, self-titled album and vinyl seven-inch. The record seems to represent a bittersweet new beginning of sorts for the trio. Staub says, “We feel real good about it, because unlike In the Path of Pain, we got to finish it to the point where we wanted to finish it. Here, there were some songs that we had written that got to mature a little bit before we put them down.” The result is a fresh, mature and slightly lighter result than its predecessor, but no less vital and emotive.