The last steam locomotive that Southern Pacific ever purchased is on display at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. And she’s massive!
This is the only one of the 256 cab-forwards that still exist. The 4-8-8-2 locomotive was turned around so the cab was in front and the exhaust was behind the cab and crew. The natural habitat of the AC-12 Class No. 4294 was over Donner Summit. And because of the heavy snowfall in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, 37 miles of the line was covered in snow sheds to keep snow off the tracks. This innovative design prevented the crew from smoke exhaust induced asphyxiation.
This last of the cab-forwards was such an engineering marvel that it was designated a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1981. It was the first steam locomotive to be added to the list. Of the 300 landmarks in existence, only seven are steam locomotives, including Union Pacific’s Big Boy No. 4023 and Norfolk and Western J-Class No. 611 (more about 611 in a later post).
This locomotive is massive and the largest and most powerful locomotive in the museum’s collection. The locomotive and tender are 123 feet and 8 inches long and the total weight of this Beast of the Sierras is 1,051,200 pounds (525 tons). One of the docents I talked to was old enough to see a cab-forward in action as a child and he told me that the locomotive scared him and the ground shook when it passed by.
On my visit to the California State Railroad Museum, high on my sketching list was this massive cab-forward. There was only so many perspective to sketch 4294, I tried sketching from above but I couldn’t see the entire locomotive and tender from the third floor gallery so I took a seat under the massive glass Southern Pacific logo and sketched 4294’s front and left side. My wide panoramic journal was perfect for this.
Drawing the complicated running gear was a challenge so I used along of shorthand and used my sketcher’s license!Looking down the length of 4294 to where I sketched this Beast of the Sierras. I sat on the bench under the SP logo that was once at the Port of Oakland.
One Civil War location I have been interested in visiting and sketching for a long time is Appomattox Courthouse in southern Virginia.
This is not the site of a major battle. Civil War lovers come here to visit a house just down the street from the courthouse and pay a visit to the front parlor.
Now how did this small parlor in a small southern Virginia town become a major historical landmark?
This is where the Civil War ended, at least on paper.
The McLean House.
The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by General Robert E. Lee, was surrounded by Union forces near the small town of Appomattox Courthouse. Lee was now out of options and had no choice but to surrender. Lee said, “there is nothing left for me to do but go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths. “
On April 9, 1865, in the early afternoon, Robert E. Lee, entered the village of Appomattox Courthouse. He headed past the courthouse and stopped at the McLean House. Lee dismounted his horse Traveller, and entered the house.
Shortly afterwards General Ulysses S. Grant, General-in-Chief of all the forces of the United States, entered the house.
The front parlor where Lee surrendered to Grant.
The two men met in Wilmer McLean’s front parlor while the family was in the upstairs bedrooms. Here the lenient terms of surrender where agreed upon. The Confederate soldiers had to pledge not to take up arms again against the United States, they had to turn in their rifles but could keep their sidearms, and Lee was allowed to go free.
This surrender Appomattox was the beginning of the process of reunification.
Or was it?
Coda: Before he lived in Appomattox Courthouse, Wilmer McLean lived further north in Manassas.
During the the first battle of Manassas (aka Bull Run), McLean’s house was used by Confederate General Beauregard as his headquarters. His house was shelled by Unionist cannons.
It is said of McLean that the Civil War, “began in his front yard and ended in his front parlor”.
Having made it through TSA in 11 minutes on a Saturday morning, I found myself before Gate D9, an hour and a half before boarding. Being that I was in the back of the plane, in Boarded Group F (I’ll let you use your imagination as to what F stands for), I knew that I would be one of the last to board the Alaska Boeing 737.
So after getting some joe and a scone, I found an empty row and had breakfast.
Now it was time to get low tech in the form of my soft cover Stillman and Birn Beta Series sketchbook (No batteries required).
I found one of those nice swivel chairs and sketched the Alaska Airlines jet at gate D9. The Boeing 737 sat at the gate with a fuel hose attached to the bottom (always a good sign) and the crew loading luggage into it’s underbelly.
Our flight was on time and despite the demands to check bags from Boarding Groups E and F because the overhead bins were full.
I was able to waltz on the plane as a one bag backpacker, shouldering my Osprey Farpoint 40 and I found an empty bin right above my aisle seat in Rom 30 (at least I was close to the bathrooms!).
On the other half of my panoramic sketch I added my view from Row 30, Seat D.
A little time travel: the featured sketch is from Reagan National Airport (DCA), in Virginia, just across the Potomac from Washington D. C. This panoramic sketch is from my return journey to SFO.
Colonial Williamsburg is a sketcher’s paradise, especially if you love to sketch architecture.
Williamsburg was the capital of Virginia, preceded by the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown and followed by Richmond (which moved from Williamsburg at the time of the Revolutionary War to be further away from the coast). The capital of Virginia remains in Richmond today.
Colonial Williamsburg represents the capital in the years leading up to the break with Britain. It is billed as the “world’s largest U. S. history museum.”
Many of the current buildings have been restored or even reconstructed to appear as they did in the years before the American Revolution.
Along Williamsburg’s streets are historical reenactors who portray people of the time. Which reminds me of California’s Renaissance Pleasure Faire (a reenactment of Elizabethan England).
You can enter many of the buildings and are met by period interpreters who talk about the life and times of the people of Williamsburg.
One of these building I toured was the home of Peyton Randolph (featured sketch), one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He was the first president of the First Continental Congress. Randolph was a very wealthy and influential man. He died in 1775, a year before America’s monumental year. Some historians have theorized that, had he lived, he would have been our Nation’s first president.
It took 27 slaves to tend to the house and part of the tour focused on the slave quarters.
In most cases, slaves slept where they worked. So if you were a cook, you slept in the kitchen. If you where a personal servant to the lord of the house, you slept on a straw stuffed mattress which resembles a large dog bed placed at the foot or the side of their master’s bed.
Another building that I toured and sketched was the Capitol Building. It was in this two chambered government building that representatives from the colonies meet with the British government sowing the seeds of our own independence.
The clock tower of the Capital building. I couldn’t fit the tower into my sketch and it was also shrouded in trees, and I ran out of paper!
Yorktown is one of the vertices of the Virginia’s Historic Triangle. The other two being Colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown.
Yorktown is the site of a major victory of the Revolutionary War. The Battle of Yorktown led to the British surrender and the end of British rule over the colonies. It was also one of the last major land battles of the war. This was the beginning of a new nation.
The American army was led by General George Washington with the help of French and the British forces was commanded h Lieutenant General Cornwallis.
The Yorktown Victory Monument which was completed in 1885, over 100 years after the battle and 20 years after the end of the Civil War!
Signs of this important battle are still visible in the landscape and the buildings that existed from Fall of 1781.
It is one of these signs of battle that I sketched into my sketchbook.
This is the Nelson House on Main Street. Thomas Nelson Jr. served in the Continental Congress and was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. His brick house now has two cannonballs embedded in the brick wall, signs of the fighting in Yorktown. This is the subject of my featured sketch.
Another cannonball embedded in the Nelson House. This one just missed and upstairs window.
Jamestown, Virginia is the site of the first permanent British settlement in the New World and has been called “America’s Birthplace”.
So I figured this was a great place to start my Virginia rambles and sketches.
The Union Jack proudly waves over the fort at Jamestown.
Jamestown is now more of an archeological site than a surviving settlement. There is not much that survived from 1607. There are statues, of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas (not together but separate statues), a monument that looks like a smaller version of the Washington Monument, and some reconstructed structures.
There is one structure that survives to this day of the period when Jamestown was the Capital of Virginia. It is the brick church tower. It was built around 1680 and it the most famous structure of Jamestown. So I had to sketch it of course!
The Jamestown Settlement faces the James River and the Chesapeake Estuary. It was also a great place for birds and I kicked myself for not bringing my binoculars but this was more of a historic and train trip rather than being a birding odyssey. A lone bald eagle climbed above the river and then sailed off to the north.
The Captain John Smith statue looking out to the James River. The beloved (but also hated) and much photographed statue of Pocahontas. Her story represents the good, the bad, and the ugly of the interactions of the native peoples and the English colonists.
One of the ships docked at the Hyde Street Pier is the former Northwestern Pacific ferry boat Eureka.
In the era before bridges, (the Bay and Golden Gate), the only way to get from San Francisco to Marin or Oakland by rail, was by rail ferry.
The passenger cars would be boarded on the ferry and then, well, ferried, across the Golden Gate to Sausalito or Tiburon where they would be unloaded and continue north on the rails of Northwestern Pacific.
The ferry and the Hyde Street Pier was actually considered part of Highway 101.
The boat was built in 1890 in Tiburon by San Francisco and North Pacific Railroad Company and was originally named the Ukiah, which was as far north as the line reached. The Eureka is a double-ended, wooden hulled ferry-boat that was originally built to hold train cars. Two standard-gauge tracks where built into the main deck.
This 277 foot, 2,564 tonnage boat is the largest wooden-hulled boat afloat in the world.
A pen brush field sketch of the Eureka, displaying the Northwestern Pacific circular logo, and the modern San Francisco skyline.
The Ukiah was initially in service to ferry people from San Francisco to Tiburon during the day and then carry freight cars during the night. In 1907 the Northwestern Pacific Railroad took ownership of the Ukiah and it was routed to the Marin port of Sausalito.
During World War I, the ferry was rebuilt and the refurbished ferry was renamed the Eureka, in honor to the northernmost station on the Northwestern Pacific Railroad.
The Eureka from the bow of the Balclutha and Coit Tower echoing the steam stack of the Eureka.
The ferry was later used to ferry automobiles on her main deck and had a capacity of 2, 300 passengers and 120 cars. At this time, the Eureka was the largest and fastest double-ended passenger ferry in existence and because of this, the Eureka was called up for the busiest commuters times from Sausalito to San Francisco. Hyde Street pier was the primary auto terminal to connect San Francisco to points north and east.
When the Golden Gate Bridge was completed in 1937, ferry service passengers dried up and Northwestern Pacific abandoned all ferry service in 1941.
The Eureka found a new life in the 1950s with a new owner, the mighty Southern Pacific. The Eureka now linked passengers on SP’s overland service from Oakland to San Francisco.
Today the Eureka is docked with the C. A. Thayer (foreground), the Eppleton Hall, and the Balclutha (background).
I got to the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento a little early so I walked over to sketch the replica of the Central Pacific passenger depot. (The former stations had burned down.)
This station is at ground zero from where Central Pacific started the Transcontinental Railroad. Mile Marker 0 was a hundred feet behind me as I sketched.
I walked around the depot and looked at two amazing Santa Fe steam locomotives that where sitting on sidings in static display. Both of them had come from New Mexico and both where not in great shape, needing some cosmetic restoration.
Santa Fe No. 2925 is a 4-8-4 passenger locomotive. This is one of the heaviest 4-8-4 Northerns ever built. Today only five of the 30 produced survive. SP No. 2467 is a 4-6-2 Pacific type build in 1921. She pulled passenger trains and was retired in 1956. The locomotive was restored to working order in the 1990s and is still operational.
Once in the museum, one locomotive on my sketch list was an EMD diesel-electric F7 painted in the iconic Santa Fe Warbonnet livery.
When I was a child my dad used to take me to the tracks to see passing passenger trains. And one Christmas he got me my first HO train and it was a smaller version of the classic Santa Fe passenger locomotive.
This paint scheme is so famous that if you Google EMD F7, a picture of the Warbonnet F7 comes up.
The iconic Santa Fe units where on point of the 2,227 mile route from Chicago to Los Angeles called the Super Chief. This was one of the first all streamlined diesel cross country route.
Today the only way to get from Los Gatos to Santa Cruz is to drive over Highway 17. You can no longer take a passenger train. The last train ran in 1940.
On the other side of the Santa Cruz Mountains, you can board a train at the Santa Cruz Beach and Boardwalk and it will take you 6.8 miles north into the mountains to the town of Felton.
Detraining here you follow the line past the train shed and machine shop of the Roaring Camp and Big Trees Railroad and the old passenger and freight depot and then you cross Graham Hill Road and walk north on the rails toward Zayante, using the rusty rails as a guide.
The line begins to parallel Zayante Creek. The road builders used the watersheds of the Santa Cruz Mountains as a route to work up and down the summit. A good part of the Santa Cruz to Felton route parallels Santa Cruz County’s largest river, the San Lorenzo.
After a few miles you eventually come to a siding, this is the former stop of Eccles near Olympia Station Road. This was a flag stop as far back as 1901. There was once a passenger shelter (1913) and a freight platform.
The main line and siding at Eccles. The 310 foot siding was probably used to store lumber cars.
The station sign remained in place until 1942, when the station was decommissioned following the abandonment of the the railroad.
After World War II, passenger service was not resumed and the station shelter was torn down. The Eccles sign was saved and was on display at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History in downtown Santa Cruz.
Here’s where the Eccles station sign used to be at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. It’s gone, like the rails that once reached over the Santa Cruz Mountains.
One a recent visit to the museum the sign was no longer on display.
I continued north as the siding rejoined the mainline. And after about a five minute walk, the tracks end without much ceremony. There is no bumper stop to mark the end. And one tail is longer than it’s mate, 4 feet and 8 1/2 inches away.
This is the end of the line and as far north as the tracks go.
He grew up as an only child in San Fransisco in an era when most people got around the city in street cars (or trams as they are called in Britain). He would ride them as a child getting to know the motormen (who where mostly Irish). Once they were beyond the last houses and running out into the sand dunes that would later become the Sunset District, the motormen would let my father take the controls as the motorman ate his lunch. Such a scene seems so unthinkable now!
We were down sketching at Hyde Street Pier and I wanted to show Grasshopper Sparrow some of the vintage streetcars that were running along the Embarcadero.
The most common vintage car seen on the F Market Line is a PCC (President’s Conference Committee) car. In this case No. 1053, painted in Brooklyn, New York livery, was built in 1947. MUNI has a fleet of 32 PCC cars.
This weekend was extra special because it was Muni Heritage Weekend and Market Street Railway was bring out some of the vintage cars like San Francisco Municipal Railway’s No. 1, built in 1912.
The one car that I wanted to show Grasshopper was an open-air car from the coastal resort town of Blackpool, England that I read was going to operating this weekend. This car is so unusual and rarely out on the line because it takes a crew of two to operate and has a lower passenger capacity that your normal PCC car. This is the Blackpool boat tram! I remember riding this car in the mid-1980s with my father.
This red and cream boat on wheels announces it’s presence with a nautical air whistle. These novelty cars where built in 1934 and out of the twelve cars in existence, MUNI owns two.
My plan was to drive along the Embarcadero from it’s intersection with Grant Avenue to the Ferry Building in search of the boat. It turns out that we didn’t have to search very hard. The Blackpool boat was at the turn around at Jones and Beach Streets.
So the chase was on! We easily passed the boat and pulled far enough ahead and pulled over just past Bay Street to get a photo run by.
Blackpool’s boat tram is a real head turner. The destination sign reads “NOWHERE IN PARTICULAR”. Here No. 228 heads on the rail right-of-way on Embarcadero towards the Ferry Building and the San Francisco Railway Museum.
We then drove on to the heart of the Heritage Weekend at the San Francisco Railway Museum near the beginning of Market Street and the Embarcadero.
We were able to get a parking spot on Mission and walked over past some vintage buses painted in the famous green and cream livery of MUNI. Shortly after our arrival, the boat pulled in front of the museum and I started a quick field sketch (featured sketch) before it loaded up and left. I finished the sketch with help from one of my photos.
The area around the museum had a carnival feel to it. Many people were out to see and ride these vintage buses and street cars. The museum was selling used rail books outside. I foraged through the titles, many of which my father owned. Perhaps some of these were his books; we ended up donating hundreds of my father’s books when he moved out of his home (my childhood home).
I selected a few titles about mainline steam engines and a book about the streamlined passenger train era. I took Grasshopper into the museum and pointed out a vintage streetcar roller sign that was displayed on the wall, which my father had donated to the museum from his collection of San Francisco street car artifacts.
The roller sign was procured from a streetcar near Fulton at a place called, the Boneyard. Nowadays we would call this “trespassing” and “stealing”. But because of this “stealing” and a railfans’s passion, this bit of San Francisco rail history is preserved and is now on display for all to see.
I talked to the manager of the museum and told her that my dad had donated the sign and he was also pictured in one of the displays. She of course knew my dad and was excited to meet me and noted that I looked just like my father ( but with more hair). This is always nice to hear!
She told me that my father had an interest in streetcars from an early age and he was not allowed to join the local rail society because he was too young so he formed his own youth group with his friends.
The picture of my dad at the museum is of him in later life aboard a streetcar. He is dressed up his motorman outfit. Standing to his right is his friend Walt, one of his lifelong friends he formed the youth rail group with. He must have been volunteering for some excursion. My dad is looking dapper in his black tie and Market Street Railway motorman’s cap (which I now have).
My 600th post is dedicated to my father, John E. Perry Jr. He introduced me to streetcars and trains, history and travel, and that a good life is well learned. His greatest complement of my sketching: that I drew a nice straight line.
Corvid Sketcher 