Nostalgia & History > Thanksgiving WP Wednesday

I've posted this before, but it's been well over 10 years so I thought an updated repost would be okay.

It was November of 1982, I was fresh out of high school and my Mom and I decided to drive from Los Angeles to Reno to visit my Grandfather for Thanksgiving. I was assigned driving duties so early in the morning of November 22nd, I pointed our diminutive but trusty 1977 Honda Civic roughly north and threaded our way through the labyrinth of L.A. freeways until we finally made our way through the Antelope Valley and onto highway 395 for the long drive along the Eastern Sierras all the way to Reno.

I never did like this route. It's dull and trainless for most of the 470 mile journey. I'm not much for the desert either so the only portion of the long drive that I enjoy is the leg roughly between Mammoth and Bridgeport where there are lots of trees. As it turned out, I didn't even get to enjoy that when we drove right into a fierce winter storm that made the drive treacherous and exhausting. By the time we arrived in Reno that night I swore I'd never take that route again to get to Reno.

The next morning I needed a train fix pretty badly and having been recently bitten by the WP bug, I decided to see what I could find in town since the weather was still pretty bad and I didn't want to venture too far from the home base (Grandpa's house).

In North Reno, two days before Thanksgiving and about a month before the official UP-MP-WP merger date, I found the Reno Local getting ready to depart for a days work and I snapped this shot of it. As it turned out, the handful of shots I took on this day would be the only on-line WP shots I ever got to take aside from one quick visit to Sacramento and Stockton the previous year. I never did make it to WP's famous Feather River Canyon until years later well after the UP merger but I now have two properties in the region, one in Quincy and one in Portola, and Keddie is now one of my away-from-home terminals on my BNSF runs out of Stockton, Bakersfield being the other. 

A Happy WP Thanksgiving to all on Trainorders.

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Very cool. 
JB

Good story Mike. That "backside" route can be pretty darn wintery.

TJY

Awesome shot, MM!

Z