Roaring Camp

Started: 2023-06-14 20:47:14

Submitted: 2023-06-14 23:13:47

Visibility: World-readable

Riding the Roaring Camp Railroads through the redwood forest

My in-laws came to visit for Memorial Day to attend Calvin's eighth grade graduation, so I bought tickets for our nearest excursion train, Roaring Camp Railroads in nearby Felton. They operate two trains from Felton: a narrow-gauge steam train heading up a hill, and a standard-gauge diesel train running to the beach boardwalk. I've lived in Santa Cruz County for almost three years and I haven't visited either of the excursion trains (though the first part of those three years was during the acute phase of the pandemic, followed by a long slow reopening).

At least, that was the plan, until my in-laws tested positive for COVID-19 and left early, then Kiesa and Julian tested positive and attempted to isolate themselves in the guest room.

By Sunday morning, Calvin and I were still testing negative for COVID-19, and we were not experiencing any symptoms. (I tested negative again the next day, and didn't test positive until Tuesday, when my clean run through the pandemic ended.) We drove to Felton to ride the train while Kiesa and Julian stayed in quarantine at home.

I drove to Felton with Calvin. As we walked from the dusty parking lot into the field lined with old-timey buildings, we heard the ghostly whistle of a steam train somewhere in the hills above us, as if this were the first act of an episode of The X-Files where Mulder and Scully had just shown up in the mountain town (clearly filmed somewhere just outside Vancouver, but set anywhere in the US) to investigate the monster of the week, a spectral steam train preying on unsuspecting visitors.

We arrived with plenty of time to pick up our ticket from the ticket office and watch a blacksmith demonstration before our scheduled 13:30 departure. We joined the growing crowd at the depot waiting for the train to arrive, where one preschooler asked their parent when the train would be coming and then asked if they could track it on their phone like a MUNI train.

Then a whistle sounded (a regular-sounding whistle, for this train; the ghostly whistle belonged to the other locomotive running the route on this holiday weekend) and the steam train chugged into view, pulled by a perfectly-preserved geared Shay locomotive from the Lima Locomotive Company, while everyone scrambled to capture its arrival for their social media of choice.

We boarded the train and selected an open-air carriage near the back of the train. The carriages were all built with bench seats running down each side, allowing for flexible seating and a fairly good view of everything around, except for the scenery immediately behind me.

The train departed on schedule at 13:30, then waited for a minute before resuming. (The stop put me directly under the water tank.) The train looped around the field, crossing the path we walked on at a level crossing, then heading into the woods to begin a gradual ascent of the adjacent hill.

I spent much of the train ride with a similar view from near the back of the train: the carriages in front of me, flanked by towering redwood trees on both sides of the track, occasionally with a better glimpse of the oil-fired steam locomotive at the front of the train. (The conductor told us the locomotive was burning recycled motor oil.)

Half-way up the hill we passed the site of an old trestle that was built to carry the excursion train up a tricky section of hill before it was burned in a forest fire in 1976. The trees had recovered from the fire, to the point where there was very little remaining evidence of the fire on the trees themselves, except for some blackened trunks.

The trestle, though, was a total loss. They left the skeleton of the trestle towering above the tracks as a ghostly reminder of the past, which seemed appropriate that this excursion train (even though it was built specifically as an excursion train, with no actual freight or passenger purpose except for tourists) would have been partially abandoned, with its trestles left to quietly disintegrate in the woods like so many other railroads throughout the American West.

Unlike many railroads built around the turn of the last century, this railroad recovered and built a new track, bypassing the old trestle. The new track included a switchback, which they thought was appropriate given that it was a narrow-gauge train inspired by logging and mining trains, even though they apparently built, on accident, the steepest railroad in (if I recall correctly) the United States

The switchback is hard to represent in still photographs but above we see the train heading backwards up the switchback, approaching the next section of track on the right. The locomotive is pushing the train from below onto a dead-end section of track; once the whole train cleared the switch the engineer or fireman jumped out to throw the switch so the train could continue up the hill to the right.

At the top of the hill the train stopped in a clearing so we could get off the train, stand up and stretch our legs, visit the restroom if needed, and get a good look at the locomotive at the front of the train. I joined the crowd of people looking at the engine and saw the fireman checking the temperature of all of the moving parts of the engine (using an anachronistic infrared pyrometer) and oiling the pistons and other parts (using what looked like it could be an authentic turn-of-the-last-century oiler).

I took my picture with the locomotive, of course, and stopped to study the unique power system of this geared locomotive, with the vertical pistons powering a drive shaft on the right side of the engine, coupled with a universal joint to the driving trucks, with reducing gears on each axle.

This was state-of-the-art technology once, and it occurred to me to wonder if, in the future, people would pay for excursion flights on restored twentieth-century jumbo jets, playing the part by shuffling onto the plane and taking their seats and listening to the safety demonstration, then waiting for the plane to taxi and take off, then loop around and land again.

The whistle blew to tell us to board the train to head back down the mountain and we headed back to our seats. Before we began our descent in earnest, the conductor jumped off the train to visually inspect all of the breaks on each passenger carriage as it passed. (This train was equipped with air brakes, since they've been the standard for more than a century.) We descended along the track we'd already ascended (except for the large turning loop at the top of the hill), past the switchbacks, though this time the train was facing the opposite direction.

As we approached the station at the bottom of the hill the locomotive blew off steam to spray out any deposits that had accumulated while it was boiling water to make steam to power the train. This produced a large cloud of steam; as the train rolled forward the cloud descended on us in the passenger carriages as a cloud of slightly-warm mist.

We disembarked at the station at the bottom of the hill, then headed back to the car to return home. It wasn't quite the experience I was expecting when I bought the train tickets, but at least Calvin and I had a good day out riding an excursion steam train.