Steaming into 2008
A wonderful story over at
Cabinet of Wonders:
Bringing in the New Years' With Steam
As we walked in along the wet and muddy gravel road through the crisp darkness from where we had parked our car, the children shrieked with glee and went running ahead, toward the large grassy clearing and the little train station, now lit with Christmas lights. A large bonfire burned at the other end of the frost-covered grass, and people stood huddled around it, drinking hot cider from paper cups. In the distance the train whistle sounded, and we knew we'd arrived in time to catch the 11:00 pm run of the Swanton Pacific Railroad.
The Swanton Pacific was the child of entrepeneur and train man Al Smith, who lost a leg working for Southern Pacific, and later made his fortune parlaying the family hardware business into a successful chain which allowed him to retire and concentrate on his first love: trains. With some of his savings he bought two of the engines that were built to run the Overfair Railway, a small-scale railroad installed in San Francisco for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915: built along the lines (with improvements) of Southern Pacific's 4-6-2 Pacific type engines, they were 1/3 scale with an unusual 19-inch gauge track.
Go there and read the rest -- it's a story that is hard to excerpt and a wonderful piece of writing. What a way to greet the new year!
Posted by DaveH at January 1, 2008 8:22 PM