Alfred Hitchcock’s own favorite film was his 1943’s Shadow of a Doubt starring Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotton.

The noir thriller was filmed in the Sonoma County city of Santa Rosa. The city was picked by Hitchcock and his team as a quaint and peaceful small city in which to inject the Merry Widow Murderer (Cotton). The script was cowritten by Our Town playwright Thornton Wilder in an attempt to capture the flavor of life in a small town.

Uncle Charlie is eventually foiled by his namesake Charlie (Wright) as she slowly realizes who he really is and meets his end on a pilot of a freight train (spoiler alert!).

Uncle Charlie first enters idyllic Santa Rosa at the stone Northwestern Pacific (NWP) Depot (1904). The depot looks very much the same as it did in 1943, as it has withstood various earthquakes that have destroyed many of it’s contemporary surrounding buildings.

As the train approaches the depot the exhaust from the locomotive is an ominous pitch black and as the train pulls past the camera, a shadow envelopes the platform. This was all planned by Hitchcock as a modern “something wicked this way comes”. The arrival of Uncle Charlie to Santa Rosa.

I sketched the depot and platform from the approximate camera position when the northbound train first arrives. It was a frigid morning and my fingerless gloves came in handy.