There’s a new brewery in town — and it’s on track to spark railroad nostalgia

Ralph Rapa has the side job everyone wants. Which he deserves, because he has the day job no one wants.

This is opening week for railroad-themed Rule G Brewing Co., a Coconut Creek bar and restaurant co-owned by Rapa, whose sturdy build, formidable beard and gregarious personality seem right out of central casting for a brewery boss.

But he’s also a man of intriguing complexity — a third-generation railroad worker, now in a management position at Brightline, with a doctorate in psychology and stories to tell.

Rapa doesn’t bring any brewing experience to the project, but the 58-year-old Parkland resident knows an opportunity when he sees one.

“I just like beer,” he says, with a smile. “There really aren’t any pubs around here. This area is untapped.”

Rule G Brewing is located in West Creek Commons, a center anchored by a Publix and a Duffy’s Sports Grill at the corner of Lyons Road and West Hillsboro Boulevard. It has been something of a craft-beer desert, with Big Bear Brewing Co. in Coral Springs and Cove Brewery in Deerfield Beach each about a 20-minute drive away.

After a soft opening last weekend, Rule G Brewing opened on Monday with nine taps for five beers and four seltzers made on the premises in gleaming tanks just behind the bar, plus an efficient menu of bar bites and live music on Friday and Saturday nights. There are large TVs for sports viewing, including a jumbo projection screen with sofa seating in one corner. It’s dog-friendly, and they welcome kids up until around 7 p.m.

A back-of-a-napkin dream became reality, Rapa says, as he did market research into the area’s attractive demographics, homeownership and income data. He cites the nearby Promenade at Coconut Creek, which capped an 18-month surge of new businesses with the opening of The Cheesecake Factory in November.

“That place is always crowded. People want to have amenities closer, and Coconut Creek is wide open,” he says.

If Rapa has any experience in the hospitality field, it comes from his years with Amtrak, where he worked in a variety of service roles on trains running between Miami and New York — from serving in the dining car to managing a sleeper car.

“It was like running my own little hotel,” he says.

After his stint at Amtrak, Rapa had a 14-year run at Tri-Rail as a conductor and engineer, then as director of operations. His favorite thing about being an engineer?

“Waving at the kids. They reminded me of when I was a kid,” Rapa says. “Whenever I would put my train away up in the West Palm yard, there was a mom who would bring her little boy, every day, to see us come in. … I would slow down deliberately, and that was like the biggest thing for him.

“So that one little kid in particular, but just waving at the kids. Because kids always wave. I liked that job a lot.”

This explains the ambience at Rule G Brewing Co., where photos and posters of trains, signs from long-gone railroad lines and old locomotive lanterns pay homage to the heyday of rail transportation. Rapa builds model trains and has plans to run one of his G-scale trains on a track suspended near the ceiling inside the brewery.

Rapa’s partners at Rule G also bring train experience to the project, if not his sense of railroad romance.

Head brewer Rex Reed is currently an engineer for Tri-Rail who was barely out of his teens in Missouri when he started driving Union Pacific freight trains that sometimes stretched 2 miles behind him. Reed is also a yacht broker who would much rather be on his boat or brewing beer than driving a train.

The operations manager at the brewery, Edward Reardon, is a former bartender-manager at 4:30 Boardroom Bar and McSorley’s Beach Pub in Fort Lauderdale, but also once worked as a brakeman in a railyard near Boston. Reardon met Rapa through his father, who knew Rapa from work in the industry.

“No, I didn’t like it. That’s why I’m doing this,” Reardon says, laughing.

Rapa grew up in western Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, where his father worked for the railroad, as did his father’s father and assorted aunts and uncles. When it was time for his doctoral dissertation as a psychology student 20 years ago, he chose to write about post-traumatic stress in locomotive engineers.

“PTS related to suicide, railway suicide, hitting trucks and cars,” he says. “I did (the dissertation) even before I was a locomotive engineer.”

It was a little-appreciated issue two decades ago, but the Federal Railroad Administration soon enlisted his help, says Rapa, who has been an adjunct psychology professor at Barry University for more than 20 years.

“Since that time, they have mandated critical-incident stress programs for all railroads in the U.S. If something happens today, we offer that crew immediate relief,” Rapa says.

At Brightline, that expertise has earned Rapa the title of Environmental Health and Safety Manager, which includes the role of first responder when a train strikes a person or a vehicle. In such cases, while passengers are sitting on the train waiting for it to begin moving again, Rapa is dealing with the horror on the track.

“I go there to get the railroad back open. So I’ll go and talk to police: ‘OK, there’s carnage on Track 2. How long is it going to take until you can get this cleaned up? When is the medical examiner coming? Can we use the opposite track to run trains by at restricted speed?’ That sort of thing,” Rapa says.

Then there is the emotional wreckage of the engineer.

“The psychology of it — it affects everybody. When I ran (Tri-Rail trains), I only killed a truck once. A lot of these guys have got multiple fatalities on ’em. After a while, it starts to corrode the mind a little bit,” he says.

If his side hustle at the brewery helps Rapa leave the railroad behind in retirement, he’ll depart with his sense of humor intact.

One of his other responsibilities for Brightline is to manage random testing of employees in accordance with the regulation prohibiting railroad workers from being under the influence of alcohol or drugs while on duty. The regulation is known in the industry as Rule G.

“Yeah, I’m a little bit of a smart a–,” Rapa says, laughing.

Rule G Brewing Co. is at 4800 W. Hillsboro Blvd., Coconut Creek. Visit RuleGBrewingCompany.com.