When I was a little kid, I really wanted a train for Christmas. Some of the richer kids in town had electric trains with lots of tracks and accessories. Being in the depression, I was lucky, one Christmas, to get a windup train with a 2’ in diameter track. It would make a train noise and sparks would fly out of the stack (until the flint wore out).
In the late 30’s, I would go down to see my sister, Shirley, in San Francisco on the Sacramento Northern Electric Railroad by myself. She was working at an advertising agency. The train went to Suisun Bay and got onto a barge to take it across to near Moraga where St. Mary’s College was located. I remember once, while crossing Suisun Bay in a dense fog, I was standing at the fan tail when all of a sudden, a large ship passed just behind the barge. I was close enough to see the name “Tatuta Maru” which I found out later was the last ship taking scrap steel to Japan before World War II. On another trip to San Francisco, a similar event happened in the foggy crossing. This time, I could clearly see in the wheel house where the ship’s officer had a Nazi swastika on his arm.
When the train got to Oakland, it ended at what was called the Mole where I had to wait for a ferry boat to cross to the Ferry Building in San Francisco. The Bay Bridge had not been completed at the time. I would usually have enough time to get a snack and once, I noticed a bank of movie machines. You could put in a nickel, turn a crank and through the view window see a short Dick Tracy movie. In 1939, I took the Key System train from San Francisco to Yerba Buena Island where it turned to the west onto Treasure Island, the site of the San Francisco International Exposition.
In the early 40’s, some of my buddies from Live Oak would go down to Marysville every Saturday on the Sacramento Northern Electric to go to the movies. The train would cross the Feather River and come right down 5th street. We would go to the State Theater for a double bill with news, cartoon and a serial, run to the Sandwich Inn (where I would have 4 or 5 small delicious hamburgers and a chocolate milkshake) and then run down to the Tower Theater for a double bill, with a newsreel, a cartoon and a serial. After the movie, we would run up D Street to catch the train going home. The train made two trips a day on D Street to a roundhouse on the other side of E Street. Only once did we miss the train and have to call one of the mother’s to come and pick us up.
The next time I took a train was when I was in the Army in the Far East during the Korean War. I was stationed on Okinawa and my Military Police company had decided to send me to Japan to attend Supply Specialist School at the former Japanese Naval Academy on the island of Eta Jima in Southern Japan’s Inland Sea. I was going there on the 140 mph Japanese “Bullet” train and was told we would arrive in Osaka at 8 AM the next morning. I had my own stateroom and, sure enough, as I was waking up at 8 AM, I looked out the window just as the Osaka city limit’s sign went flashing by.
After the war, I had married a girl from Feather Falls about 25 miles northeast of Oroville, California. The mill was shutting down operations there and moving the lumber mill to Oroville. The citizens of the town were being relocated by the company to other places and the Georgia Pacific Company set up two or three flat bed cars with seats and had provided snacks and refreshments for the trip. It was an interesting trip that no one had had a chance to do before.
When I was working in Design and Planning at CalTrans in the late 80’s I was working on the Sacramento Light Rail Project. My part of the project was tying down the alignment to make a “best fit” to the route areas that were available. In a few places, we had to come very close to a large Lumber Jack home improvement store and a main Post Office in North Sacramento. I had to design a passage under Highway 160 and up to a crossing of the Sacramento River. There were a lot of tight controls and I didn’t want my design crashing on the first trial. When our portion of the project was ready for a trial run, our design team, along with the group designing the route coming in from Highway 50, rode one car into town. Everyone on the streets we passed, stopped and gawked at this new “street car”.
About a year before I retired, our design group went down to the Bay Area to study the Bay Area Rapid Transit. We parked our state car in Lafayette and took the train under the Bay to San Francisco. One of the women with us (a delineator that would be drawing up plans for light rail work) was shivering, afraid the tunnel would collapse and we would all be drowned! We came out of the tunnel near Macy’s on Market Street and transferred to the San Francisco Municipal Railway. After lunch we went to their repair facility near the San Mateo County line. We were shown how the ride was made smooth by having a large “donut” of rubber from the axle to the outside of the wheel, where the cars are cleaned inside and out at the end of each day and other maintenance operations.
It was getting near the rush hour and we decided to see how crowded it really was. We were packed in like sardines and when we got to the end of the line on Geary Boulevard, we decided to go into a bar and have a couple of beers until the rush hour was over and we could return to the car in Lafayette.
The last time I took a train was when I went down to California with my friend. Cathy Davidow’s son Sam and granddaughter Asherah, on Amtrak. I now live in the Northwest which is a ten to fourteen hour train ride south to my former California home. We left Albany Oregon at 4 PM and arriving in Chico at 4 AM. My seat, one of about twenty, was in the entry level compartment. Sam and his daughter were seated on the upper main level. I was told to pick out any seat and I found one where I would be by myself and able to read. We had only gotten to Eugene (about 40 miles) when a couple got on board and I was asked by the conductor to move. The only place left was in the front of this small section and I couldn’t stretch my feet out. It was very uncomfortable but I had an interesting guy to talk with. When he got off, a large woman sat next to me and told me her mother was from Paradise near where I lived in California. She got off at Klamath Falls and I had the seat all to myself.
Sam had made reservations for a 6:30 dinner so I went up to the main floor dining room and enjoyed watching the scenery until it got too dark to see anything. The dinner was pretty expensive. A steak was $22.50 so I had the cheapest thing on the menu, crab cakes at $16.95 and they weren’t very good. The three of us were joined by an interesting guy traveling to Hollywood who was in the entertainment business. Sam had a lot to talk about with him as Sam has been an actor, on stage, films and TV and a writer for local productions. It was interesting hearing them talk about “show biz”. After dinner, everyone was settling down for the night.
Of course, my seat was where passengers got on and off the train at each stop. The doors opening and closing, conductors directing passengers to their seats, flashing lights, and blasts of cold air were not helping at all in getting any rest. I had my jacket pulled over my face trying to shut out the light but it was not enough to induce sleep or sweet dreams. Arriving in Chico at 4 AM, Cathy took our sleepy party to Denny‘s for a big breakfast and then, twenty miles up the mountain to our Magalia homes.. I don’t think I would like to ride that train again. The lady who got off at Klamath Falls said she had gone cross country 3 or 4 times on Amtrak.
My final item on trains is about a book I happened to see and buy at Costco. It was called “A Train to Potevka” by Mike Ramsdell! It is a true story about him as an intelligence officer with the U.S. Army being sent with a team into Russia to bring back a very bad and dangerous ex-KGB operative for trial in the west. Things went horribly wrong and he was barely able to escape with his life. We are distantly related and I contact him fairly often. Last year, he and his wife, Bonnie, went to East Germany, Lithuania and Finland scouting out background areas for the movie being made of his book. Recently, I received an email from his wife telling me that the movie is being cast and they are enjoying being technical advisors working with the screenwriters preparing the script. She said that the movie will be finished near the end of 2009 for release in the spring of 2010. I think it would make a very good movie.
