Early Saturday morning found me in Capitola Village.
Capitola was founded in 1874 as a beachside resort and in the age before the personal automobile it owed its early popularity to the railroad.
The Santa Cruz Railroad, opened in 1876 and brought sun worshippers to Camp Capitola.
Southern Pacific took over the railroad in 1882. The SP brought beach goers to the small seaside town, passengers detraining at the new depot near the east end of the trestle, this location is known as Depot Hill.
I chose my sketching position above Soquel Creek on the historic Stockton Avenue Bridge (1934) which parallels the trestle. The seaside air was wet with fog, I hoped it wouldn’t smear my ink drawing.
The wooden trestle over Capitola Avenue looking towards Soquel Creek. The Capitola Depot is about 100 yards behind me and up the hill. I have always loved the parking spots under the trestle (parking is a premium in Capitola Village).Colorized postcard (early 20th Century) of a double header passenger train with three baggage cars, crossing the trestle over Soquel Creek taking beach goers to Santa Cruz. This perspective is close to where I chose to sketch. Looking down the trestle in direction of the Capitola Depot and beyond, the connection to the mainline at Watsonville Junction (15.7 miles down the line). The green growth around the tracks shows this track has not been active in over ten years.
A recent Labor Day tradition has been to ride one of my favorite roller coasters of all time. It’s also my birthday weekend.
This is not a steel coaster with high speeds, loops, and corkscrews. This is a 100 year old wooden roller coaster at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.
The big dip of the Giant Dipper.
This is the Giant Dipper and is the oldest roller coaster in California.
I have ridden the Dipper many times since I was tall enough to ride it and like my father before me I ride it every summer. And the ride remains as thrilling now as when I was young!
Partly because I’m not sure how this elderly ride still remains safe and standing. This is a testament to the care and maintenance that keeps the dipper rolling.
The ride starts off dropping into a pitch black tunnel and when it rounds a curve you see the lift incline to take the train to the top of a 65 foot drop. There is a slight pause as the coaster drops, reaching speeds of 55 miles an hour before accelerating up a banked curve and the the coaster takes some rises and dips that nearly lifts you out of your seat. The coaster returns to the boarding station one minute and 52 seconds after leaving it, leaving most riders out of breath and with a hoarse voice from screaming!
Since 1924, more than 66 million riders have ridden the crazy train that is the Giant Dipper.
The Boardwalk and Giant Dipper have been featured in some films including: The Sting II, Harold and Maude, Sudden Impact, The Lost Boys, Us, and Dangerous Minds.
The classic sign was featured in the finale of the fourth Dirty Harry film Sudden Impact.
Over the Labor Day weekend, I sketched the Giant Dipper three times. Two were in a small “point and shoot” journal (a gift from my students). One sketch was from the perspective of one of my favorite movies featuring the Dipper, Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude.
There is a scene filmed on the Santa Cruz Wharf with the lights of the Giant Dipper in the background. This is the scene where Harold gives Maude a token that says, “Harold Loves Maude” and Maude proceeds to chuck it into the ocean saying, “Now I’ll always know where it is.”
I returned on Sunday morning with Grasshopper and sketched the Dipper from the empty parking lot off Beach Street (featured sketch).
I was meeting a friend in the East Bay city of Martinez and I had a little time to sketch before lunch.
Martinez is a hotbed of railroading with both the Union Pacific and BNSF passing through as well as some marquee passenger trains such as the Coast Starlight and the California Zephyr making stops at the Martinez AMTRAK station. And the Capitol Corridor commuter takes on passengers traveling north and south on shorter journeys.
The California Zephyr Train No. 6, at the old Southern Pacific Depot in Martinez. This train is heading east to Chicago. To the right in the background is SP switcher 1258 on static display.
There would certainly be something to sketch here and I was going to start with a historic train trestle.
I parked at the Mount Walda Trailhead. Soaring above me was the 1,600 foot long steel Muir Trestle (aka the Alhambra Trestle). The single track trestle was so long that I could only see and sketch one section of it before it disappeared into the trees to the east. The trestle rises 75 feet above the roads, trees, and houses it crosses over.
A detailed view of the steel supports of the Muir Trestle.
The trestle is within the John Muir National Historic Site. To the north is Muir’s Martinez home. Muir and his wife Wanda sold the land for the trestle for $10 and a lifetime rail pass to the San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railway. The original wooden trestle was built through a pear orchard and completed in 1897.
This is a historic photograph of the Stengel-Muir ranch in 1897. The Muir house is on the top left and the trestle is viable behind the house. At the time of the photograph, the trestle was constructed of wood.
At the eastern end of the trestle there was a passenger and freight station named Muir Station. The station is now long gone but is immortalized in a street that parallels the rails named Muir Station Road.
From this station Muir could ship his produce to Oakland or to the port in Martinez.
One of Muir’s neighbors in the Alhambra Valley was John Swett, Muir close friend. Swett was the State Superintendent of Public Education and is known as the “Father of California Public School”.
In 1898, Santa Fe purchased the line and it became their Valley Division. This division still exists as BNSF’s route from Richmond to Fresno.
The Muir Trestle from the intersection of Alhambra Way and Muir Station Road.
I took up a sketching position near the trailhead and started my drawing. The trestle above me is on the Stockton subdivision and is used by BNSF intermodal freight. There was no train crossing during my sketch.
SP 0-6-0 switcher No. 1258 and its consist of a wooden box card and Santa Fe caboose 390 on display across the tracks from the AMTRAK station. The locomotive is in sad shape, missing some hardware like her bell and whistle.
One of the Seven Marvels of the Feather River Route is to be found a few miles north of Quincey.
The Feather River Route, also known as the Canyon Subdivision, stretches between Oroville and Portola, Ca and competed with Southern Pacific’s route over the Sierras at Donner Pass.
The Marvel is known as the Keddie Wye. This is where two tracks comes together to form one track, looking like the letter “Y”. Now this in itself isn’t much to write home about but when both sides of the “Y” are on trestles above a creek that joins together before entering a tunnel and then you know this is a special piece of railroad engineering.
The two forks of the “Y” are also where two different railroads meet. On the right is the former Western Pacific Railroad, now Union Pacific, and one the left is the BNSF (Burlington Northern and Santa Fe).
After about a 45 minute drive from Portola on Highway 70, the famous Keddie Wye appeared to my right. I pulled over and found a vantage point to sketch. I perched on a narrow trail above Tunnel No. 32 looking out to the two forks of the wye.
Now the only thing missing was a freight train. It would have been nice to see a train traverse one side of the “Y”. As I was told at the Western Pacific Railroad Museum, Sunday is a quiet day on the high iron.
After my sketch (right side of the spread), I headed down Highway 70 into the Feather River Canyon proper. The Highway parallels the railroad and the Feather River. This is a beautiful drive and I periodically looked off to left at the rails across the river. No trains.
I was about 20 minutes from the wye when I heard the screech of steel wheels on rail. I looked to the left and a Burlington Northern and Santa Fe (BNSF) was climbing up the canyon with a mixed freight consist.
I found the nearest pullout and then reversed direction as I chased the BNSF up canyon. I wasn’t going to miss the freight on Keddie Wye!
As I climbed up Feather River Canyon I kept an eye to my right for glimpses of the train. I should have no problem overtaking the train as the line speed limit was 25-30 mph.
I soon came to the end of the train and before long I was approaching the five bright orange diesels on point. I passed them with time to spare.
Once I reached the wye I reversed direction again and parked at the pull out. I figured I was about ten to fifteen minutes ahead of the freight and I took my position on the narrow path above Tunnel 32. Now I had to just wait, wondering if I would be able to hear the approaching freight from my position.
Within ten minutes I could hear the diesels working up grade and the first locomotive appeared below me. The train headed onto the left side of Keddie Wye onto the BNSF Gateway heading north towards Lookout and Klamath Falls.
What a memorable experience to see a piece of railroad history that is not a static museum piece isolated in time but in use today.
At the Western Pacific Railroad Museum, there are many pieces of railroad equipment: locomotives, cabooses, rolling stock, and maintenance equipment.
It has been said that this railroad museum has the greatest amount of equipment from a single railroad family: Western Pacific (WP).
There is lots to explore at the WPRM and you are free to wander around the yard and look at the diesels and rolling stock. I was in search of an FP7 mock up of WP No. 804-A that was used to pull the California Zephyr. The mockup was just of the cab section and it was on display at Disney’s California Adventure park.
While looking for the cab I came upon an old tender that had the faded WP logo on its side. It was a six axle tender so it must have been attached to a substantially sized steam locomotive.
The mysterious tender.
I thought perhaps that this tender once belonged to the largest locomotive that WP owned and operated the 2-8-8-2 mallet or perhaps a 4-6-6-4 Challenger. The railroad owned 27 mallets, some of which operated up and down the Feather River Route. Sadly all 27 mallets were scrapped as the age of diesels took hold. Was this tender a last relic of the mighty mallets of the WP?
Turns out the answer was much more exciting!
I found out from one of the volunteers that the tender belonged to a GS-6, No. 484. These Northern type 4-8-4s were some of the best passenger locomotives ever made for the Southern Pacific.
The GS originally stood for Golden State and the streamlined locomotives were on point of one of the most beautiful passenger trains, the Coast Daylight. The train took passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in under 10 hours. During the war when the GS-6s were produced in 1943, the GS meant “General Service” because the locomotives were designed for freight as well as passenger service.
During the war railroads needed approval from the War Production Board to order new locomotives. SP and WP both petitioned for a new order of passenger locomotives. They were turned down because they didn’t think streamlined passenger locomotives were necessary for the war effort.
The zenith of the GS class (Golden State or General Service) was the GS-4.
28 GS-4s were built by the Lima Locomotive Works in 1941-42. 10 GS-6s were built in 1943 under war time restrictions, meaning the locomotives had to also be used for freight service and lack the streamlining of the GS-4s. What I was unaware of is that Western Pacific had six GS-6s on its roster (No. 481-486).
During the end of the age of steam (the 1950-60s) many railroads scrapped their steam locomotive fleet. The idea of steam preservation did not take hold until the 1960s and 70s.
One GS locomotive that was preserved and put on static display in Oakes Park in Portland, Oregon was Southern Pacific GS-4 No. 4449. The locomotive was restored to working order and pulled the Freedom Train across the United States in the late 1970s.
A 2016 field sketch of the GS-4 No. 4449 at the Oregon Rail Heritage Center in Portland, Oregon.
There is only one other GS class locomotive that is still is in existence. This is the GS-6 No. 4460.
4460 was the first GS-6 manufactured (built in July of 1943) and it is the last steam locomotive to operate on the Southern Pacific when it made an excursion run from Sacramento to Spark, Nevada in October 1958.
4460 was donated to the National Transportation Museum in St. Louis, Missouri in 1959.
Until my visit to Portola, I assumed there were only two relics of the Southern Pacific’s mighty GS class and finding the tender in the yard was like finding a piece of railroad history gold!
You really have to like trains to make it out to Portola, Ca. From my mom’s house it was a two hour drive over windy roads to reach the small town where the former diesel shops of the Western Pacific were.
These shops and the rails around it, are now the Western Pacific Railroad Museum. The museum is adjacent to the tracks of the Union Pacific which acquired the WP in 1982. Heading west from Portola you enter the Canyon Subdivision which is the WP’s Feather River Route. This is one of the most scenic sections of the the former WP. It was the route the original California Zephyr took from the Bay Area to Chicago.
The museum has four cars from the streamliner, the California Zephyr.
While many railroad museums focus on the age of steam, the WP was one of the first major railroads in the west to dieselize. The museum has 29 diesels in its collection.
The WP acquired its first diesel in 1939. The SW1 switcher was built by the Electro Motive Corporation for an original cost of $64,525. It was built to work in the yard and with a top speed of 45 MPH, it was not designed to be out on the mainline.
The WP tested out the diesel (No. 501) and liked what it could do. It later ordered two more sister locomotives and 14 years later the Western Pacific was completely dieselized. The genesis of WP’s diesel age is now part of the museum’s collection.
A sketch of some of the WPRM’s collection including WP’s first diesel: No. 501.
The museum has many classic, epic, and iconic diesel-electric locomotives in its collection and I added a few to my sketchbook.
An iconic locomotive is the WP 805-A. This is an EMD FP7. This hood unit was on point of the California Zephyr from Oakland to Salt Lake City. The diesel was in service on the Zephyr from 1950 to the route’s end in 1970.
805-A is the last WP California Zephyr locomotive in existence, so I had to sketch it.
One of the epic diesels in the museum’s collection is perhaps the most epic diesels ever built, this is Union Pacific No. 6946. This 6,600 horsepower behemoth is EMD Class DD40AX “Centennial”, the largest and most powerful diesel-electric locomotive ever built and is the successor of UP’s Big Boy. 6946 is the last (out of 47) Centennial ever built. Only 13 Centennials still exist, the large locomotives having been retired from the UP fleet in 1986.
The beast that is the last Centennial ever built. Like the Big Boy, it’s two locomotives smashed into one mighty powerful machine.
A docent told me I could climb aboard the duel engine workhorse and I walked along the gangway to the cab.
I liked the view so I sketched the 1953 diesel shop from the gangway of 6946 (featured sketch).
One of the legendary railroad routes is the section of the Transcontinental Railroad that climbs the western flank of the Sierra Nevada Mountains up to Donner Pass. The construction of the railroad was an engineering marvel and much of the original route is still in use.
Southern Pacific used their AC articulated cab-forwards to tackle the grades and heavy freight over the pass and now the world’s largest articulated locomotive would be climbing up to Donner Pass for the very first time. And I planned to be there.
There was a planned 30 minute whistle stop at the historic railroad town of Colfax at 11:15.
I was in Colfax an hour and a half before arrival and more and more people were streaming into town.
4014 left Roseville on time but was halted when the train hit a tree that had fallen near Auburn. The UP tracking app noted that 4014 was “currently stopped near Auburn”. At first I thought it was just a maintenance stop but then word spread that Big Boy had hit a tree and there was some damage to the underside. This was not good. Especially for the hundreds of people waiting in the heat for 4014 at Colfax.
Word spread that the locomotive might have to be towed back to Roseville. The train was now an hour late. I decided to head back to Penn Valley, to air conditioning and the second half of the European Cup Final. I would continue to monitor the UP tracking site. But I had to beat the heat in Colfax.
Just after the game ended (Spain was European champions for the fourth time), the tracker read, “4014 currently moving near Auburn”.
My plan was to drive on Highway 20 to where it merged with Highway 80. This was Yuba Pass and I wanted to see Big Boy in this historic location.
I arrived and there were plenty of other rail fans lining the tracks at Yuba Pass. This was a good sign because 4014 was still climbing the grade and had not reached my position.
After about a 45 minute wait a plume of steam exhaust appeared down line and the mighty roar of the Big Boy filled the cut.
Then the iconic articulated giant appeared working up grade towards my position near the signal gantry. 4014 was putting on a show that enveloped all the senses.
As 4014 rounded the curve, the articulated properties of the design were in full display. While the leading truck and front drivers rounded the curvature of the track the boiler remained rigid making it appear that the drivers and boiler were separating. Afterwards I did a spread to understand the articulation design (below).
After the train disappeared into the tunnel, I headed back to my car and was soon driving east on Highway 80. To my right, I could see the tell-tale exhaust up the hill on the railroad grade. Soon I was pacing with 4014 and I then pulled ahead and planned to head to Soda Springs to see the steam mammoth as she neared Donner Summit.
I made it to Soda Springs off Historic Highway 40 and the biggest challenge was finding a place to park as there were many people waiting trackside for the arrival of the Big Boy.
I found a parking spot and headed down to the grade crossing. There was a festive atmosphere around the tacks and to the south many Cal Fire trucks and personal (including Smokey) looked and listened down track for the first appearance of the 4-8-8-4.
4014 would be spending two nights in the important rail hub of Roseville.
Roseville is at the base of the climb up the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Donner Pass. It is here where the tools to conquer the Donner extreme winters are kept. Across the tracks, near the depot, the spreaders and flangers could be seen. A little further down the siding, the ultimate snow fighting machine could be seen: the rotary plows.
But on this July Friday and Saturday an army of foamers, rail fans, history buffs, and the curious would be invading the city of Roseville.
They were all here to see the largest steam locomotive in the world, Union Pacific’s Big Boy No. 4014. For the two display days the largest operable locomotive would be static and not moving. The Goliath would be brought up to steam and boiler pressure to conquer the Sierra Nevadas on Sunday.
I arrived early on Saturday to find a parking spot and to spend some quality time with the 4-8-8-4 before she, or he, was besieged.
Roseville is a busy point on the railroad with many freight trains starting the climb or descending the Sierra Nevadas. The passenger service is alive and well in Roseville with the California Zephyr and the Capital Corridor stopping at the passenger depot.
The present and the past of Union Pacific freight. A eastbound freight passes 4014 at Roseville.
4014 now had a consist of Union Pacific passenger cars. I heard a ticket for the trip from Roseville to Reno, Nevada would set you back $700. The train was parked near the intersection of Atlantic and Vernon Streets near Southern Pacific’s 2252 and a rotary snowplow on display.
Roseville is a very busy point on the line and it was about to get much busier with the influx of people coming into town to see a Big Boy’s first visit.
I walked to the grade crossing at Yosemite Street and looked west (towards Sacramento) and sketched 4014 and the Roseville yard (featured sketch).
The viewing of 4014 officially opened at 9:00 AM and there was already a group lined up to get a closer look at the Big Boy.
As the clock ticked closer to 9:00 AM, more and more people were showing up to see the first visit of a Big Boy to Roseville.
This important railroad town was the home of Southern Pacific’s articulated, the cab forward. These massive locomotives were designed to haul freight over the pass and the locomotive was reversed with the cab in front (hence the name) so the crew would not suffer from smoke asphyxiation while traveling through the many tunnels and snow sheds on the route. In the age of steam Roseville had two roundhouses, one was specifically designed for servicing the labor intensive cab forwards. At one point Roseville was home to 60 cab forwards.
Only one Southern Pacific cab forward still exists, the AC-12 No. 4294. She is on static display at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. But unlike Union Pacific’s 4014, 4294 is not operable.
Soon it was hard to see the Big Boy through the forest of people surrounding it. So I did a sketch to capture the experience.
Corvid Sketcher 