Hot.

I think the temperature up at the railroad today was about 105°. At any rate, at 5 pm the thermometer at the shop — which is in the shade — read 99°. It was quite hot. Ellen and I and Joseph worked on digging up some raised planting beds near the roundhouse. The bushes which had occupied them had died from a lack of light combined with little feet. It's quite easy for a child to climb from the benches between the beds onto the beds themselves, and the bushes had long died off. It was the sort of day where one works 15 minutes and then takes a half-hour break.

The crew had rigged up some low-pressure drip sprinklers into a branch near the ticket booth, so we had about 8 square feet of gentle rain under one of the Redwoods. It was terrific on such a hot day. Grant and JP were trading shifts on locomotive number 11, a 4-6-0 10-Wheeler type named "Sequoia". I got a footplate ride with JP at one point, during which he demonstrated the things to look for when a loco is running well. It's hard to explain, actually, being a combination of the look of the smoke and the sound of the "puff". I get the feeling that it's something that takes a while to learn, like driving a stick-shift but more so.

It was Grant's day off, but he'd agreed to fill in for somebody so he was itching to get away early. I wound up working the platform for the last hour and a half. This involves punching the tickets of the passengers, keeping people on the platform behind the white line when the train is arriving or departing, and generally keeping an eye on things around the platform.

I'm on my way to take a shower and go to sleep, so I won't tell you in this post about Colorado. My wife and I went out to Denver to visit her brother and sister-in-law, and we took in a visit to the Colorado Railroad Museum and Tiny Town, but that's going to be another post.

New carburator, pulling couplers, and dressing track

Today I got to the railroad just as Grant was working on #2. I promised a photo in an earlier post, and here she is. She's got a gasoline engine, basically out of a car, which runs a hydraulic drive. She was running pretty rough on Friday when we were building up the work train, which is why we used #4 (a steam loco) on Saturday for the work day. #2 isn't particularly beautiful, but unlike a steam locomotive she doesn't require constant attention to keep steam up. You just flick a switch and she goes.

Grant and Ray had an idea that the carb needed a servicing to correct the rough running. I got there just as Grant was trying to get the last of the bolts tightened up. See the radiator in the photo? Just to the left is a belt pulley that drives, I think, the air compressor. The carb is right behind that, so the air compressor had to come out. It's a bit of a pain, but everything got put back together again, and #2 is running strongly again.

I helped Ellen sand down some pieces of wood that will be painted into new opening times signs for the front gate, and then Grant and I ran down in #2 to pick up one of the gondola cars (see photo at right) which needs coupler work. We got the car back up to the railbench where #2 is in the photo above, and jacked up each end before blocking it on ties. We wheeled away the trucks, and removed the several nuts and bolts that hold the couplers in place. The repair of the couplers themselves will wait for another day, and Grant and I headed down to dress some track.

This past weekend, we'd re-levelled a long section of track, which involves dumping down lots of new ballast. After the ballast is all packed into place around the ties, it needs cleaning up. That's what dressing track is. We worked along about a 50' section, doing another round of tamping, and then using shovels to scrape ballast down to the level of the ties, and then sweeping some of the dust off. It makes the track look nice and even, but it's also good to have the ballast moved away from the railhead. It's easier to walk on, too.

So I got both greasy and dusty yesterday. I attracted a few interesting looks in the supermarket on the way home...

Day 4 - Trackwork

Ballast, the rocks that you find around railroad tracks, serves at least four purposes:

1. It's good for water drainage
2. It protects rail from ground frost
3. It helps to stabilize the ties, preventing them from moving around too much
4. It helps distribute the weight of the passing train over a larger area of ground

And fine adjustments to the trackwork can be made by manipulating the ballast. This, despite the advantages, still means quite a bit of work. That's what I spent yesterday doing: working on a section of track with a group of other volunteers and staff.

Using a laser level, Ed had surveyed one 180 foot section from Flush Flat into Wet Neck, and we got to work making the gradient of the track nice and consistent all the way through the curve. The rail does descend through that whole area, but we want a smooth decline, not full of lumps and bumps. The way we get the track raised is as follows: One person jams a long, heavy, solid steel pole under one rail, lifting it a fraction of an inch. Another person checks with the laser level to see if the rail has been lifted the right height. Several other people with long, heavy, solid steel poles then pound away on the ballast next to the surrounding ties, attempting to tamp it into place and lock the rail into the right height. Then you have to check the cross-level, which is the height of one track relative to the other. So it's lots of pounding to get the ballast packed in around the ties.

I'm feeling a little sore today.

By the way, the two areas of the route that I mentioned have strange names, but there's a reason for them both. Flush Flat is named for a toilet. Before it was a railroad, the southern end of Tilden Park was an actual army camp, and the cement foundations of the old latrine are just north of the track at this curve. Wet Neck is where the track heads back into the redwoods (as you can see in the photo). In the early morning, the blast from the smoke stack knocks the dew off the branches, and it rains on the engineer's neck.

Day 3 - Building the work train

Tomorrow and Sunday are work days, when all the volunteers descend on the Redwood Valley to get projects done. In order for things to be ready for tomorrow morning, we got a work train set up.

Ed picked me up in Berkeley and drove me up to the railroad. We met up with Grant and got to work on switching to build up the work train consist. "Consist" is the railroad term for the mix of railroad vehicles that make up the train. In this case, we made up a mixture of flatcars and hoppers for ballast. There's a spur near the barn that allows us to load ballast in from the top (fortunately, or we'd be shovelling a lot of rock), so we ran the hoppers around to fill them up. We built up the train and moved it up to a siding where the track gang will pick it up tomorrow.

To do all this switching, we used #2, which is a gasoline-powered locomotive. Steam's more romantic, of course, but our steam locos take about 2 hours to steam up, while an engineer just pushes a button on #2 and it roars to life. Or, rather, splutters. She's a bit cantankerous. I'll see if I can get a photo tomorrow.

After lunch, Grant and I took #2 and an empty hopper to recover some ballast. Previous trackwork had left a pile of "used" ballast next to the track in the front loop (near the platform), so we shovelled it into the hopper. Ballast is rock, and is therefore heavy, and shovelling it is tough on the lower back. Anyway, over the course of the day I got lots of practice coupling and decoupling cars in a train. It's a good idea to keep one's fingers out of the way! I watched how #2 is driven, and I learned some basic brakeman's signals for communicating to an engineer that it's ok to proceed, to slow down, and to stop. Very useful when switching.

I'm going up for the work day tomorrow, where I'll try to get some more photos, particularly of #2 and of some trackwork. Incidentally, if you have any questions about railroad terminology, drop me a comment and I'll try to answer it.

Day 2 - Photos and Sand

I had a full day today, but I wanted to drop by the Redwood Valley for a half hour or so. I dropped off a book to add to their library, and took a few photos, which you can see here. Grant was driving Locomotive #4 "Laurel", which is a 2-4-2 Columbia Class, and his wheels were slipping on the way in and away from the platform. He asked if I could grab the sand can from the ticket booth and sand the rails in the track area. Pretty straightforward, but then I'd never done it before, so it's just one more thing that I've learned.

The photo at the right is Laurel waiting for passengers to board. That's Ray driving at this point, as Grant was taking his lunch break.

Day 1 - Clearing Brush

I went up to Redwood Valley this afternoon, having called first to check that Ellen would be there. I parked in the crew lot and met up with Ellen for some foliage clearing on the track. We each took a pair of pruners and started out along the railroad's mainline*, clipping back any foliage that was close enough for kids to grab from the cars, or low enough to be a hazard. As the train comes around roughly every 20 minutes, we'd listen for the whistle and stand well off to the side to let the train pass. The sight of happy kids and parents waving to you as they roll on by is a fine thing to see.

It took a couple of hours to work all the way around the mainline, and then to work up the spurs that lead to the shop, barn, and roundhouse. We pile the brush in neat, orderly piles by the side of the track; later we'll haul a gondola with the work locomotive and pick up all the brush for disposal.

After the work was done, I went out with Grant on a run. He let me sit next to him on the footplate as he drove. I got to check out some of the basic operation of a locomotive during a run. It's a complicated balance of steam pressure, water level, fuel flow (these locos are fired with oil), and speed. Looks like it takes a long, long time to get to know how these machines work.

Edit: Someone on the crew today mentioned that several passengers had read an article in "the paper" about the RVRy. It was, in fact, in today's Contra Costa Times, and can be read here.

* the mainline is the primary stretch of track on a railroad, as opposed to sidings, spurs, and yards. The mainline is what the railroad is all about. It's also known as the "high iron", from which the name of this blog is taken.

Workin' on the Railroad

This is a blog about working on the railroad. The railroad in question is the Redwood Valley Railway, which is a 15" gauge, 5" scale live steam tourist road located in Tilden Park, 1600' above Berkeley and Oakland, California. I'm Chris, and I'm totally new to the railroad world, and now I'm volunteering with the RVRy.

Earlier this summer I took a trip to England, which included a visit to the wonderful National Railway Museum in York. When I got home, I picked up Empire Express, David Bain's history of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. I read all about Huntingdon, Hopkins, Crocker, and Stanford; these were the "Big Four" directors of the Central Pacific which was attempting to build a railroad between Sacramento and Truckee, and eventually into Nevada and points East. I read all about the tremendous and tragic story of Theodore Judah's surveying and engineering work on the first part of the railroad (before dying of Yellow Fever following a trip across Panama on his way to New York).

Digging a bit more, I discovered that Sacramento is the home of perhaps the finest railroad museum in America, the California State Railroad Museum. Sacramento is only 2 hours away, so I travelled up to visit (via Amtrak, of course), and right there was a statue of Ted Judah, a recreation of Huntingdon and Hopkins' general store, and the Central Pacific's first locomotive, Governor Stanford. Coming back home, my wife and I went up to Tilden to take a ride on the Redwood Valley. The ride's about 12 minutes, covering about 1.25 miles, and costs $2. We loved it.

I went back up a few days later and chatted with some of the crew up there. Most of them are volunteers, and I told them I was interested in getting involved. I got a tour of the roundhouse and the machine shop from Ray, who's been there a long time. He spent 14 years building the road's latest locomotive. I also met Ellen, whose dad founded the Redwood Valley in 1952, and who keeps things going at the road.

So now I'm a volunteer. I'll be keeping a log of my experiences at the RVRy, workin' on the railroad.