Western Train Museum

Engineer
Originally uploaded by Robbi Baba.

On the last Saturday of April, the girls and I joined Jerry, Jon and Zephyr on a trip to the Western Train Museum in Rio Vista. Well, actually, the museum is out in the middle of nowhere (which, as it turns out, takes about an hour and a half to reach from our house).

There used to be an electric train route from downtown Oakland all the way to Sacramento, back in the early part of the 1900s. The train actually crossed over water on a ferry boat at one section! The track had a 1200 volt third rail too! Zaaaap.

They’ve restored about 5 miles of track and run their ‘museum on wheels’ down and back. It was a pretty rocky ride. All along the route was a big windpower farm, with huge turbines. A nice contrast with the old fashioned train cars.
It was hard to get a sense of how big these turbines were. The engineer told me the nacelles (the part that holds the blades) were about as big as a school bus. And they stand about 300 feet high—the length of a football field!

The old cars they’ve restored are gorgeous. It must have been so cool to be able to hop aboard a tram, trolley or streetcar and be whisked downtown. Selling real estate was the driving force behind all the tram lines. They’d run a service out to the countryside and folks would buy lots and build houses. They had photos of the open hills and meadows around Oakland before it got all built up.

The following little known bit of history is swiped (and roughly quoted) from Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation:
“In the late 1920s, using a number of front corporations, GM secretly began to purchase trolley systems throughout the US,—more than 100 in all. These were completely dismantled, their tracks ripped up and cars burned, to be replaced with bus lines. With new buses built by GM.
In 1947 GM and a number of its allies in the scheme were indicted on federal antitrust charges. Two years later, the workings of the conspiracy and its underlying intentions, were exposed during a trial in Chicago. GM, Mack Truck, Firestone, and Standard Oil of California were all found guilty by a federal jury. The companies were fined $5000 each and the executives who had secretly plotted and carried out the destruction of America’s light rail network were fined $1 each.”

I saw a photo once of hundreds of LA’s trolleys stacked five high just before they were torched. I think of that whenever I hear the term ‘conspiracy theory’.

Anyhow, the museum visit was great. I’ve got a little video here of the highlights.