Steam & Excursion > A Chance To Ride Behind Steam On This Line Brought Out The Fans!

There were not many chances for railfans to ride behind steam on certain railroads, and when the chance came they came out in numbers to take advantage of it.  We can see by the number of cars used on this train and the number of fans aboard that this was a popular excursion indeed.

This trip was scheduled in the early 1950's  on the Hammond Lumber Company logging railroad out of Samoa, California just across the bay from Eureka.  Even though Hammond had taken delivery of a new Diesel locomotive a year or two earlier, the Railfans chose 90-ton Baldwin #15 to be the motive power for this trip.

The 3 coaches and one baggage car that the Southern Pacific had supplied to bring the group up from the Bay Area was not enough to hold everyone so 3 gondolas and an SP caboose were added.  This made for quite an impressive train as it traversed the big trestle on the return trip to the yards at Samoa.

This just goes to show what king of a crowd steam power could draw back in the day.

Martin



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 01/15/20 04:15 by LoggerHogger.

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And how 'bout the guys riding on the roof of the caboose.    Today, they probably have discussed seat belts for commuter coaches!

Probalby was full inside back then people were smart enough to hold on and not fall off.
 

That's a great shot of many people having a great time!

Larry

Note the wooden truss rod baggage car....

On the wide-window 60' Common Standard ("Harriman") coach, the over-and-under double window is peculiar. I'll have to look this up in the SPH&TS S.P. Coaches book.
- Doug Debs

Are those Sugar Beet style Drop-Bottom Gondola cars?  I wonder if they put down plywood or steel plates before letting passengers in.  :-)

I know the two open-air cars used at the California State Railroad Museum are Drop-Bottom Gondolas, heavily modified of course.

This was a Railway & Locomotive Historical Society excursion that ran on Oct. 23-25, 1952.  

The excursion started at San Rafael and had 275 passengers.

What was the building on the bridge behind the train for?

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A-1 Wrote:
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> What was the building on the bridge behind the
> train for?


That was the covered bridge span.

Martin

Here's another view of that train, same place, same date.  For those not familiar with this location, it's Hammond Lumber's crossing of the Mad River a bit northwest of Arcata, California.  When built the railroad originally crossed the Mad at this point with a three 150-foot span covered bridges, plus 944 feet of trestle on the south side of the bridge and 1,775 feet of trestle on the north side so as to stay above the river's expansive flood plain at least most of the time.  In 1942 Hammond replaced two of the three covered spans with a steel bridge, leaving the one stretch of covered bridge that shows up in the photo Martin posted.  The steel spans are just out of that view to the right.  Hammond successor Georgia Pacific shut the railroad down in 1961.  The trestlework is long gone, but the two steel spans still exist looking very much out of place out there on the Arcata Bottoms.  They now carry the very southern end of the Hammond Coastal Trail, which runs on the old grade for about five and a half miles north of the bridge to McKinleyville.  I've also attached two modern views of this spot, the first shot from the end of the southern trestle towards the steel spans- note the rasied grade to the left of the fence that abruptly ends- and then looking through the steel spans.  

There is one interesting bit of irony associated with this bridge and this railroad.  The Dolbeer & Carson Lumber Company initially supplied their big mill on the Eureka waterfront with logs cut from their extensive holdings in the greater McKinleyville area, with the logs hauled south to Eureka by the Oregon & Eureka Railroad under contract.  Lumberman A.B. Hammond bought the O&E when he expanded his operations into the redwood region shortly after 1900; William Carson, one of the D&C owners (and builder of the famous Carson Mansion in Eureka) deeply resented Hammond's entry into the area, and in 1904/1905 the D&C built this railroad as the Humboldt Northern Railroad, running from a log dump into Humboldt Bay north of Samoa north to McKinleyville and a connection to the D&C logging railroads in that area.  This allowed D&C to stop using Hammond's railroad altogether.  The D&C used this line to haul logs for itself and a couple other operations up until 1930, when they finally exhausted their timber reserves in the area and shifted operations to the Elk River watershed southeast of Eureka.  D&C sold the old Humboldt Northern to the Little River Redwood Company, which had been the other major user of the line; the ironic event happened in 1931 when Little River Redwood ran into financial difficulties that forced its sale to Hammond, who immediately shifted their log trains headed to Samoa to the old Humboldt Northern line.  Thus, the railroad built by a competitor explicitly to bypass a Hammond owned railroad three decades prior became the Hammond railroad main line for the last thirty years of its existence.  

Jeff Moore
Elko, NV 

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johnsweetser Wrote:

> This was a Railway & Locomotive Historical Society
> excursion that ran on Oct. 23-25, 1952.  

The excursion ran on May 23-25, 1952 and was sponsored by the Pacific Coast Chapter R&LHS and the Calfornia - Nevada Railroad Historical Society.  The photo runby pictured above took place on the 24th.  The flyer is below, along with a Dudley Westler photo of the runby showing the wooden covered bridge and steel truss, all courtesy the Western Railway Museum Archives.

 

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Thanks Evan.