By Janet Fullwood - jfullwood@sacbee.com
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Volunteer John Krauskopf introduces visitors to the Western Railway Museum in Solano County. The museum, which seeks to preserve electric railways, offers scenic tours on its historic cars during the wildflower season. Audio slide show (Hector Amezcua / hamezcua@sacbee.com)
Business at the Western Railway Museum in Solano County will hit its seasonal high in the next few weeks – about the same time the native wildflower bloom hits its peak.
An institution dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of California's once-thriving electric railways, the museum offers weekend rides in historic interurban train cars along a five-mile stretch of track that traverses a slice of rural landscape little changed in 100 years.
During April – when the wildflowers are blooming – three of the four daily interurban runs are designated "Scenic Limiteds," and the museum also opens on Wednesdays. For $5 over the $10 admission fee, passengers can take in the scenery and enjoy refreshments from an open platform car while docents identify what's blooming in the surrounding Montezuma Hills.
Among other sights to behold from the swaying antiques are newborn lambs, an old-fashioned windmill, newfangled wind turbines – and, in the distance, the historic Shiloh Church, a cherished Solano County landmark dating to 1870.
"With the operating part of the museum, we're preserving a kind of fantasy of what it was like for your grandparents," said John Krauskopf, a docent serving as conductor on the train's 11 a.m. run Saturday. "They went shopping on the interurban, went visiting, went on dates – anything you do in a car today, they did in these things.
"At the time this line was finished, about 1913, going through Solano County in a private vehicle would have been very slow and difficult," he added as Car No. 52 – a circa-1903 wooden relic of the Peninsular Railway that once operated between San Jose, Los Gatos and Palo Alto – clacked down the track at a sedate 15 mph.
With about 80 cars in its collection, the museum, founded in 1946 by the Bay Area Electric Railroad Association, is one of the most prominent facilities of its kind in the West. Its main exhibit hall houses historic photo displays, while the archives hold about 100,000 items, from station records to postcards, documenting the rise and fall of a transportation revolution that swept the country in the early 20th century.
"We've all lived through the Internet explosion, and now we can't imagine life without computers," said Phil Kolhmetz, the museum's executive director. "Electricity and electric railroads are tied up in the same way. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, engineers were finding all kinds of new applications for electricity – it could run lights, and it could run public transportation systems. So virtually every city in the country was building electric railroads."
In Northern California, one of the biggest names in interurban transportation was Sacramento Northern, whose trunk line stretched 184 miles from Chico to San Francisco. Consolidated from three existing lines in 1928, it carried passengers until 1941 and included networks of streetcars in communities along the route. Chico's trolleys, which kept chugging until 1947, were the longest to hang on.
Besides its signature, 50-minute interurban train rides, the museum offers 15-minute excursions on historic streetcars. And it's not just die-hard baby-boomer train nuts who climb aboard.
On Saturday, one of the most awestruck riders was Stanley Chan, a San Francisco 4-year-old infatuated by anything to do with trains.
"We have almost 100 Thomas the Tank Engine toys at home and he knows all the cars' names and numbers," laughed his mother, Iris Chan.
Volunteer John Krauskopf changes the line on a Birney Safety Car, an electric streetcar built in 1920. (Hector Amezcua / hamezcua@sacbee.com)
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