Steam & Excursion > Some Houses Just Plain Have Better Views Than Others Do!

While most normal folks would tell you they would never want to buy a house anywhere near a rail yard, ask any railfan if they would have wanted to live in one of these houses and you will get quite the opposite response.

The Northwestern Pacific yards at Tiburon, California had a number of houses perched on the hillside immediately next to the yards.  That gave those lucky homeowners a perfect view of the roundhouse and steam operations of the NWP.  In this view NWP 0-6-0 #231 is going about her business in those yards directly under the gaze of the homeowners in the houses just above the yards.

Sure the clanking and banging of the engines and cars in the yard might get old along with the whistles at all time of the night, but I don't think so.

Martin



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 02/20/17 03:45 by LoggerHogger.

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Back around 1961 I took photos of the NWP from that hill with the houses. With the exception of the roundhouse, pretty much everything was still in place. Then in 2003 my wife and I stopped there on the way home from Winterail. My plan was to shoot fom the same spot as before, but after 42 years of progress I coulnd't get to the old location. Newer houses and streets had gone in. One homeowner allowed me to shoot from the rear porch he was building, but it wasn't going to work as houses were blocking part of the old view. In town, other than the railroad museum along the bay, you'd never would have known a railroad once had a yard, roundhouse, and car ferry float in Tiburon. - Tony J.

It would be my rotten luck to buy one of those mega-priced houses only to have the railroad dieselize within a year, and then be abandoned completely in another two or three years! 

I would bet money, those houses lodged a bunch of rails. Tiburon was a home terminal for freight back then.  Sausalito was the on and off duty station on paper, even through the 70s.


Nudge

I would love too own one of those houses now...probably worth Million +++

And I see clean laundry on the line ready to catch some soot if the wind blows in the right direction.

Stephanie Ann