ROAD FLAGGER Phillip Rose watches for traffic as the Skagit crosses White Rock Road. Rose is president of the Placerville and Sacramento Valley Railroad Association. Photo by Bob Payen
The sun is shining, the El Dorado Hills are still green and there are cows taking a morning constitutional on them. Looking to the left out the front window of the Skagit, a restored rail motor car from 1936, riders on the Placerville & Sacramento Valley Railroad (P&SVRR) can see a landscape unchanged since the 1800s— maybe even longer than that.
Among the day’s passengers are Ted and Cleo Liddle, both 87, and volunteers with the Folsom, El Dorado & Sacramento Historical Railroad Association. Ted helped to restore the Skagit and is one of today’s flaggers, getting out at road crossings and making sure it is safe for the Skagit to scoot across the public road.
It’s a bumpy ride, but oddly soothing—this three-mile jaunt from Hampton Station in Folsom to Latrobe Road. John Atkinson, another passenger, is a railroad volunteer who maintains a rail line in Stockton. He helped fix the washout on this line which is where the Skagit will stop today. Flooding in the late 1990s and again in the 2000s washed out 50-60 percent of the rail near Latrobe Road. John Haverty of Haverty Construction in El Dorado Hills jumpstarted a movement to put in culverts for drainage, lay track, set plates and pour in ballast to repair the line.
“It’s a maintenance problem — just moving some dirt,” Haverty explained to El Dorado County DOT officials who eventually allowed the volunteers to proceed.
“We were quoted $100,000 to do this, ” said Philip Rose, president of the P&SVRR and another passenger,” but we did it with volunteer labor. This is massive progress.”
Railroad volunteers from as far away as San Diego repaired the washout and laid the rails by hand just a month ago, extending the line a little further. That’s the goal here — extending the line, a little at a time and funding it with excursion rides instead of government money. That’s the way it was built over a hundred years ago — a little at a time, from Folsom to Latrobe, Latrobe to Shingle Springs, Shingle Springs to Placerville.
The line, an extension of the Sacramento Valley Railroad, the first railroad west of the Rockies built in 1856 by Theodore Judah, was completed from Folsom to Latrobe in 1862 and extended to Shingle Springs in 1865. Built by hand, using black powder in the years before dynamite, the line served the mining, agricultural and timber industries in El Dorado County and the Central Valley. By 1888 the line was extended all the way to Placerville where it served for another 90 years, carrying fruit and timber from El Dorado County to all parts of the nation.
Heritage vs. grants
Funding bit by bit, not with government grants, but by generating money through excursion rides and special events is a proven method, according to Rose.
“During two days of runs in Shingle Springs, we took in $2,000,” said Rose.”We’re offering weekend excursions now and we’re going to be offering a monthly excursion for Latrobe Breakfast Specials later in the summer.”
Rose has experience with this type of funding with heritage railroads in the U.K. — using excursions and special events to fund extensions of the line, building depots and then extending on from the depots as funds accumulate. The rail is actually in better shape the farther up the line it goes, so not as much expense, according to Rose. Up the line would be to Shingle Springs and the town of El Dorado where the track still remains in place. Beyond, it has been removed to allow for trails.
At the White Rock Road crossing, the Skagit stops and flaggers descend. Cars go past, passengers gawking in amazement. Some of them wave. The Skagit continues safely across, birds and bunnies pacing the car as it winds up to the trestle over Deer Creek. It stops there so passengers can get out and stare down at the water below. The trestle adds a little frisson of danger to the ride, but the passenger are safe. Up around the bend, there are volunteers waiting for the Skagit at the end of the line — the repaired washout. After a lunch provided by the volunteers (special to this trip), our motorman and conductor, Eric Olds, vice president of the P&SVRR, backs the Skagit home to Folsom.
The P&SVRR envisions excursions that could start and end in a variety of places, with passengers picking up the train in Latrobe and riding to Shingle Springs, or picking up in Shingle and going to El Dorado, linking up with the El Dorado Historical Railway Museum and the narrow gauge demonstration train or today’s excursion from Folsom to Latrobe. It’s a long-range plan, but it’s moving forward with support of the Joint Powers Authority for the Sacramento Placerville Transportation Corridor, despite opposition from trail enthusiasts who want to remove the rail and use the rail bed for trail building.
The see-saw of balance between the two potential users of the corridor has caused opposition instead of cooperation. The railroad volunteers who have spent almost two decades restoring rolling stock and maintaining the rail line think rails and trails can co-exist; the trail enthusiasts don’t agree.
As the Skagit rolls back to Folsom, passing again the grassland sparkled with wildflowers, the site of a former sawmill that is now equipment storage for Doug Veerkamp Engineering, farmhouses, windmills, the white rocks of White Rock and an aerodome for remote controlled airplanes, the passage is slow enough to feel connected to the countryside and to see almost everything in it, unlike the cars speeding by on nearby Highway 50. It’s a little window into history, one hard to achieve in any other way.
For information and the schedule for excursions on the Placerville & Sacramento Valley Railroad, visit psvrr.org.
Short URL: http://www-new.mtdemocrat.com/?p=71074
Posted by Wendy Schultz on May 26 2011. Filed under El Dorado Hills, Featured Stories, Folsom, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
That's a great question. I think it could be because at various times certain groups may have wanted the corridor to themselves. I think it would be wrong for a train group to say they don't want to share any part of the right of way with a trail. I also think it would be equally wrong for a trail group to say they don't want to share any part of the right of way with a train. If one option is more expensive to accomplish, that should not justify sacrificing another group's project.