Visit to Rio Vista

Frank writes...

My employer sponsored a trip to California over the past weekend and, since the company is in the model train industry, there was a great deal of train content. (Fellow blogger David Wilkins was also able to tag along.) This is the first of three posts I'll be writing about my travels and covers a visit to the Western Railway Museum in Rio Vista. We weren't sure whether we'd make it to WRM but as it turns out we did make it there on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately, as I review my photos, I realize that I didn't actually do a very good job of documenting the high points of a visit to WRM. They have a spectacular visitor's center and a new car barn which is arguably the nicest anywhere in traction preservation. But I did grab some shots of some interesting stuff. I'd like to thank Dave Beuchler, Chris Pagni, and Jim Ward, all of whom helped set up some great sights!

One of the most interesting sights to me was Portland Traction 4001, courtesy of Dave and Chris, who made sure it was running. This is the sister car to our own Indiana Railroad 205 (PT 4001 was 202 on IRR, while the 205 was Portland's car 4003). WRM recently finished a top-down rebuilding of the car headed up by Dave and it's now one of their regular runners.

The car is beautiful and runs wonderfully. It's painted in early-1940s Portland colors, which were also worn by our car at that time. We went for a ride on it to the end of WRM's electric line at Bird's Landing. They have a eight-mile great route, on the right-of-way of the old Sacramento Northern, and the museum actually owns 20+ miles of track although most hasn't had wire strung back over it.

This isn't a very good shot of our motorman, whose name I didn't catch, but oh well. Note that the car has some differences from the way the 205 has been restored (and I don't mean "the 205 looks like a polished turd" type of differences!). The 4001 has retained the wooden end windows and air horns installed by Portland, while it lacks dash headlights and is instead equipped for hang-on headlights. WRM did reinstall the MU sockets, nonfunctional in Portland, which that city removed around the early 1950s.

I took a quick walk through the open-ended barn that serves as one of the two main operating barns for the museum. There is a lot of interesting equipment in that barn, including much of the museum's regular operating fleet. Pictured above is CRANDIC (ex-C&LE) 111, a high-speed car that is a bit out of place among all of the western equipment. Naturally, IRM covets this car, but there's no doubt it's in a good home and well cared for.

Then there was Muni "Magic Carpet" car 1003, which was built by St. Louis in 1939. It's similar to a PCC but the San Francisco city charter prohibited royalty payments at the time and as Muni was city-owned, they couldn't purchase cars that used PCC patents. So this car has a body similar to a double-end PCC but has Brill 97 trucks and Cineston hand controllers. It's painted in prewar Muni colors.

Then it was over to WRM's new car barn - but more on that in a moment. Jim Ward was getting ready to take Key System steeplecab 1001, pictured above, out for a quick trip and kindly invited me along. Jim is a longtime IRM member and occasional volunteer who had worked in the past helping Pete Vesic and Bill Wulfert. Key 1001, for its part, is a homebuilt shop switcher dating to 1910.

Here's Jim in the cab. It's a nice locomotive, and with that pantograph, changing ends is as easy as moving the reverse key! Key 1001 has GE Type M control; WRM runs more Type M cars than anyone except IRM and Seashore and this locomotive has C-6 controllers, so those were familiar. The contactor box, in one of the hoods, looked similar to what's under the 319 and 321.

And then it was on to a tour of the new barn. It's large, roughly 100'x350', and six tracks wide with ample display aisles. On the two west tracks the museum has set up demonstration trains with some of their mainline railroad equipment. Here we see an attractive Western Pacific ten-wheeler, number 94, built by Baldwin in 1909. This locomotive used to run at WRM back in the 1970s when they were more like IRM and had both steam and traction operation. In the last 20-25 years they've concentrated on the traction collection. Behind the engine are some nice heavyweight passenger cars including Pullman car "Circumnavigator Club."

And then there's the freight train consisting of very nice wooden freight cars, some restored, and a Saltair center-cab switcher on the point. This diesel replaced electrics on the Salt Lake Garfield & Western and at one time would have towed ex-electric cars after the wires came down.

Portholes are something you don't see on many electric cars outside of California. This car is Southern Pacific (later Interurban Electric) 602, built in 1911 by ACF for service from the SP Oakland ferry terminal to other cities in the area including Berkeley and San Leandro. When this operation quit in 1941, not long after operation over the new Bay Bridge began, this car and several others were sold to the Army for use as locomotive-hauled trailers during the war. WRM has a handful of carbodies from the SP/IER operation.

There are very few open-platform interurban observation cars in preservation. One, Illinois Terminal 234, is at IRM. No fewer than three are at WRM including Sacramento Northern "Bidwell," which is an unrestored body; Salt Lake & Utah 751, a Niles-built arch-roof steel car in occasional use; and this car, Oregon Electric 1001 "Champoeg," a classic of the interurban era. OE 1001 was built by Niles in 1910 and was sold to the Pacific Great Eastern in British Columbia after the OE quit. The car came to WRM in 1974.

San Francisco & Napa Valley 63 is an interesting one. It was built by St. Louis in 1933, possibly the last interurban car built until the CA&E 450s, as a replacement for a car burned up in a fire. It used the original car's trucks and electric equipment but the body strongly resembles the doodlebug bodies that St. Louis was building at the time (see Union Pacific M-35 at IRM).

WRM has three of the four surviving Key System "Bridge Units." These were articulated two-car trains built by Bethlehem Steel in the late 1930s for service over the new Bay Bridge directly into San Francisco. They used electric equipment from retired interurban cars so these modern steel cars with cab signals, big picture windows, and semi-bucket seats have GE Type M control and C-6 controllers like what's on the 309. Here David prepares to head for the Transbay Terminal... the cabs on these things are pretty tiny!

Some of the most historic cars at WRM are the two Richmond Shipyard Railway cars, built in 1887 for the Manhattan Railway elevated lines as steam engine-hauled coaches. They were electrified in 1901 by General Electric using the first version of Type M control equipment that was developed: DB-15 contactors, C-6 controllers, and GE 66 motors. The next year, the new Aurora Elgin & Chicago interurban line decided on this equipment - at the time the state of the art for heavy electric equipment operation - for its interurban cars. Anyway, the Manhattan "el" lines retired these cars around 1940 and in 1942 they were sold for operation to the shipyards in Richmond, CA during the war. Note the steps and traps that were grafted onto the cars for this service.

Richmond 561 and 563, preserved at WRM, are the last two of these cars left. Both cars have motors but only 561 has a pantograph; in service the cars would have run bused together. Car 561 has had its interior stripped and largely restored to its New York-era condition.

The car's controls are visible in the motorman's cab including the C-6 controller and M-1 brake valve.

And to finish off our WRM visit, we have here a very impressive interurban train. Sacramento Northern 1005 was a major restoration project completed five or so years ago. It's a wooden combine built by local builder Holman in 1912 for SN predecessor Oakland Antioch & Eastern. It outlasted SN electric passenger operations, being sold to Key System in 1941 and running over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco for a few more years until WRM acquired the car for preservation.