Railroad Museum
Started: 2023-02-26 20:31:05
Submitted: 2023-02-27 21:59:32
Visibility: World-readable
Visiting California's greatest train museum then taking the train home
After taking the train to Sacramento for President's Day weekend, we ate breakfast at our hotel in Natomas, then checked out and caught a Lyft down I-5 to Old Sacramento.
We arrived at the California State Railroad Museum a few minutes before it opened at 10:00. There was already a small crowd gathered around the museum; many of the other visitors seemed to be families with young children, probably trying to get into and out of the museum before nap time. Just before 10:00 a museum employee stepped out onto the sidewalk, dressed as a rail station manager. He attempted to warm up the crowd, by leading us in a chorus of "I've been working on the railroad", before letting us into the museum.
The movie that introduces the museum was closed, so we didn't get to see it set the stage for the construction of the transcontinental railroad in California (and end with a dramatic reveal of the museum's first gallery, set up as a diorama of a snow shed in the Sierras; I've visited the museum more than once and the big reveal at the end of the movie impresses me every time). Instead we walked straight into the first gallery. I pointed out to Julian the salient points of the engineering and surveying exhibit, and read about engineer Theodore Judah, who surveyed the route in California and promoted the railroad, with a special exhibit about his wife Anna, who surveyed with her husband in the field.
The museum had a star drill set up inside a steel cage to demonstrate how to drill into solid granite using hand tools, but they took some sensible precautions to protect the hammer from being swung at random by museum visitors. But the result was the only way to interact with the hammer was a wheel, which removed much of the visceral impact of swinging the hammer at the drill. (It did occur to me to wonder how much the drill in the exhibit bites into the rock. The exhibit doesn't turn the drill after each strike so it doesn't get the full experience.)
We made our way into the body of the museum, stopping at exhibits showing a private rail car (with a bedroom, a dining room, and a small kitchen), and a refrigerated car (packed with blocks of ice) carrying produce from California to the rest of the country. Julian can now read much of the interpretive text himself, though sometimes he could benefit from some additional context about the exhibit.
We saw an exhibit about snow removal in the Sierras, centered around a rotary snow blower positioned at the front of the train. There was a Pullman sleeper car, set up with a device to rock the train carriage as if it were moving, with lights and sounds coming from outside the train as if we were crossing through a level crossing (complete with the Doppler effect distorting the crossing bell as we sped past). The next carriage was a dining car with an attached kitchen, and a display of plates from various rail lines of the twentieth century.
Upstairs we found a backlit display case showing thousands of little model train cars, mostly HO scale, some larger. This is a hobby rabbit hole I'm trying to avoid falling down, because if I were to build my own model train layouts I'd want to set up block signaling and automatic train operation and automatic switches so the trains can traverse the layout and decelerate to stop at the station platforms then gradually accelerate as they pulled out of the station. I'm tempted by the HO scale BART train cars though so I may not be able to resist forever.
Next was an exhibit of model train layouts, each set up as elaborate dioramas with miniature trains traversing scale mountains and bridges and hills and towns. We stopped by the children's play area, where Julian played at the wooden train tables, then nipped out of the museum and headed under the freeway to eat lunch at a fast-casual burger restaurant.
On our way back to the museum I took a block-long detour in Old Sacramento to visit a monument for Theodore Judah, featuring a bronze bust set into stone carved with a relief depicting the railroad through the Sierras.
We reentered the museum and stopped by the golden spike exhibit, featuring a large painting depicting the 1869 golden spike ceremony celebrating the joining of the transcontinental railroad.
There was an obvious gold spike in a display case, but the display case seemed to be lacking context that might explain whether it was one of the original golden spikes. The museum's website tells me it is, in fact, an actual golden spike from 1869 (though the displays in the museum also told me that there were multiple golden spikes and they each went different places so there's probably an interesting story about the provenance of the spike and how it came to be in the possession of the California State Railroad Museum).
Right around the corner was the Southern Pacific Railroad 4294, a massive 4-8-8-2 oil-fired steam locomotive with an unusual cab-forward design. Historically steam locomotives were built with the cab behind the boiler, so the fireman could directly operate the boiler by shoveling coal into the firebox; but this locomotive was powered by oil so the fireman had a chair in the cab with control levers to adjust the flow of fuel into the firebox and water into the boiler. Southern Pacific decided they would prefer a cab-forward design to keep the crew ahead of the smoke and steam generated by the locomotive in the tunnels and snowsheds of the Sierras. This particular locomotive was in service for only twelve years, from 1944 to 1956, when it was retired and replaced with diesel locomotives.
We climbed the stairs on the side of the locomotive to enter the cab Julian sat in both seats on either side of the cab: the fireman's seat on the left side, operating the levers that fed fuel into the boiler; and the engineer's seat on the right side, controlling the movement of the locomotive and, by extension, the entire train.
We looked at the rest of the rolling stock on display (including a small-scale operating steam locomotive, which is a different rabbit hole I might fall into) and spent some time trying to figure out what we could build with what looked like a large-scale erector set, with wooden beams two to four feet long and plastic screws an inch in diameter.
(Two years ago, when we were looking for houses to buy in the Santa Cruz Mountains, one house showed up with narrow-gauge train tracks visible in multiple pictures, showing a route into the garage, into a storage area behind the garage, and out into the yard on a series of viaducts that looped around the yard and encircled the house. I briefly imagined taking possession of the house and buying suitable rolling stock, and spent an evening watching amazing garden railroad videos on YouTube, until I learned from a casual Google search that a garden-scale locomotive costs as much as a compact car (and then one still has to buy the passenger carriages, though they are fortunately somewhat less expensive) and I decided that I didn't really need it after all.)
On our way out of the museum we passed a pair of rails that had been used at the groundbreaking for California's high-speed rail mega-project. I hope someday to ride on the high-speed train, and I also hope that the state can also find a way to fund investments in local and interurban rail systems so that I might be able to get from San Jose to Sacramento faster by train than by car.
We emerged from the railroad museum in the middle of the afternoon, having seen every exhibit and every locomotive and every carriage on display. We walked next door to a different perspective on history, the Sacramento History Museum.
The first thing I saw in the museum was the Sacramento Bee's Linotype machine, used to typeset the newspaper's articles until it was replaced by newer technology in the 1970s. The machine was surrounded by other printing equipment, including an even older hand press that the museum occasionally operated. I tried to point out all of the exciting historic printing equipment to my children, but I'm not sure they got any of it. (I was a yearbook kid in high school, so that shaped my understanding of printing and design.)
The museum had exhibits on food production in California, an exhibit on gold mining, and a short film on the floods in Sacramento in the 19th century that led to the city being raised up above the level of the river (which means that Old Sacramento has its own underground tour, operated by the history museum, which we will need to see on a future visit.)
We emerged from the museum after an hour, just before the museum closed, and tried to figure out what we wanted to eat for supper before catching the train back to San Jose. Mardi Gras was descending on Old Sacramento again, so we headed under the freeway again to a French bakery in the mall that had a selection of macarons (somewhat diminished at the end of the day), and also had a couple of sandwiches we could order.
After eating a light supper we walked a few blocks to the Sacramento Valley train station, arriving in time to look at the large mural of the groundbreaking of the transcontinental railroad in Sacramento (the second appearance in one day of robber baron and California governor Leland Stanford in a large painting) and pick up snacks at the vending machine in the waiting room before heading out towards the platform, where we found our Capitol Corridor train waiting to depart.
The train departed right on time at 18:55 and headed west through west Sacramento and onward towards Davis. It was dark outside so it was harder to see the scenery as we rolled past, but I tracked our progress on the map and watched our speed by my GPS. (Large sections of the route are rated at speeds up to 79 miles per hour, making the sections of track where the train slows to a crawl that much more frustrating. It was, at least, satisfying to pass cars stuck in traffic on the Yolo Bypass heading west out of Sacramento.) As we approached the Bay Area people began to disembark; less than a quarter of the passengers remained by the time we reached San Jose. (I couldn't help but wish that a group of loud passengers sitting right next to us had picked an earlier stop, but they stuck around until we were in the East Bay.)
We arrived in San Jose at 22:00, after a whirlwind two-day train trip to Sacramento, and drove the rest of the way home across the mountain to Santa Cruz.
I took more pictures of the museum; you can see them all at Photos on 2023-02-19.
