Railroaders' Nostalgia > "Invasion" of KRK's Motel Room by the Southern Pacific ...

Hello- to all my railroad fans..  I just happened to remember a minor happening when traveling with my grandparents on vacation.
This would have been in the timelime of 1954---1959.    We used to go on vacation a LOT to either Pepperwood along the 'Avenue of the Giants' in Humboldt County, or to "Homestead on the Rogue" near Medford, OR.
This one time that I recall, we were heading South to the Bay Area, and decided to spend the night in a motel in WILLIAMS, CA  (or it might have been WILLOWS, CA--I can't remember for sure..)    There was a Southern Pacific railroad track VERY close to the motel !
We finally settled down for the night and sometime during the middle of the night, I heard a diesel locomotive horn that had woken me up.
I kept listening as I laid in my bed and it sounded like it was getting closer and closer.

All of a sudden, the grand finale came !!    A giant blast of air-horns and I thought that sucker was going to come right through our room.
For a nine or ten-year old, I will never forget that experience !

What SP line might that have been ?

KRK

West Valley?

Mike Root
Madras, OR

Yes it was the SP west Valley line.

That would definitely have been the former SP West VALLEY Line which runs
between Tehama CA (south of Red Bluff, CA) to Davis, CA. This is the former SP mainline that runs parallel to the 5 Freeway in the Sacramento Valley
This is the main and fast SP passenger line that was used by most of the SP varnish running
from Oakland, CA to Portland (Shasta Line). This was also used by Amtrak Coast Starlight from 1971 to 1982. During those Amtrak years the Coast Starlight did NOT serve Sacramento, CA.
Sacramento CA AMtrak passengers used the Davis train station to board--detrain the Coast Starlight.
I do NOT know how or if Amtrak offered transportation to Sacramento passengers forthe 13 miles , Sacramento to Davis in those days.
In 1982 Amtrak Coast Starlight began service Sacramento, Marysville CA and Chico for the first time in Amtrak company history
----Daniel



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/21/17 19:40 by daniel3197.

Had a similar life experience back in (about) 1952. On the way to summer vacation (can't even remember where we were going) my parents ended up staying in a motel track-side in Lovelock, Nevada. It was a long day and late arrival in Lovelock that put is in that cheap motel, probably the last room in town. Shortly after settling in, the parade of trains started. AND CONTINUED ALL NIGHT LONG, about 20 feet from the motel room wall. There was a crossing involved, so each and every train not only shook the room, but the airhorns sounded almost continually. It drove my parents nuts, no one slept at all. I was ambivalent over the situation, perhaps the earliest sign of my railfan interests. It was a frequent topic of my parents conversations there after...."never staying in Lovelock again". A moment in time I will never forget.

Ed

When I was a kid my parents were very indulging in my fascination with trains so when we went on family vacations my dad would often/usually get a motel rooms across the street from train tracks or occasionally have the tracks behind the room. Since there were 4 of us in the family but rooms only came with two beds my parents would also get a "roll-away" bed for the room for either my sister or me; on the nights we were near the tracks I'd get the roll-away bed. Of course for me the ideal arrangement was to have the roll-away right next to the window so I could spend all night popping up and down to "roll the trains by". Good times!!!

Ken --
My, my! What an experience! Some of us have also had similar
experiences -- including my family and me. This was back in --
I think -- 1972. I was still married back then, and my sons were'
quite young. I planned all the family vacations, and was always
looking for something different we had not done beforeto do while
on vacation. We have been AAA members for a long time and got
their monthly magazine, and I think that is where I saw an ad --
or something -- for the Skunk Train, so we made plans to ride it.
We drove up to Willits, and chose a campsite to car-camp in just
outside the town. When we bedded down for the night, a train
came along not long after that, and I swear the thing sounded as
though it was going to come right through our tent!! We were
camped in a KOA (remember those? Nice! And cheap!) that was right
next to the Skunk Train right of way. We did not do that deliberately --
we just chose what seemed like a nice campsite. And only Dan was a
railfan back then; I had not yet "seen the light" -- <G> That
train going past our tent right next to it was really something!!

(That was the vacation we took during which we rode the George Tolasano
Retirement Special on the McCloud River Railroad, and I have no idea
how I learned about it, as it was a NorCal (Northern California RR Club)
excursion, and we had never even heard of NorCal. I will have the
flyer from that trip. It was fun. (No, I have no idea how I manage
to remember miscellaneous, mostly useless (to me) facts like the name
of that excursion, but I know I inherited that from my father. He
called it having a "flypaper mind", or "The Department of Useless
'Informnation". LOL! Miscellaneous facts stick in my mind/memory
where I easily remember them, sorta like burrs stick to your socks. LOL!)

Auburn Ed --
My heavens! THAT was a true "railfan room"! And -- are you sure
it was 1952, and not 1962? You said "air horns", but 1952 was
still in the steam era, so you should have been hearing mostly
steam whistles, not air horns, as the SP died not fully dieselize
until well after 1952. And you would have heard a LOT of chgging,
tooo back in 1952. Nonetheless, what an experience!!

Railbaron --
How wonderful of your parents to be so indulgent of your love of
trains! You were one lucky little kid!



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/23/17 13:22 by Margaret_SP_fan.

When I was a kid, my parents had a vacation trailer. One Easter vacation in the late-50's we took a trip to Death Valley, having to go over Tehachapi Pass on the way. This was pre-freeway days, and our going was slow.....I don't know where my Dad was trying to get to for our first overnight stay, perhaps Mojave. At any rate, darkness had fallen by the time we reached Tehachapi, and a thick fog had settled down in the Tehachapi Valley. My Dad kept driving, and by the time we reached Monolith, the fog was near zero visibility. After crossing the tracks in Monolith, my Dad had had enough of the thick fog, and within half a mile, found a wide spot to pull over in for the night. My Dad checked things out.....we were on a flat spot and 20-feet from the highway traffic lanes, the perfect spot! We retreated to the trailer, fixed and ate dinner, and went to bed. Ten minutes after we went to bed, there was a loud rumble and what felt like an earthquake. It was a train passing by us.....real close by us. Shining a flashlight outside, all we could see was the thick fog! We went back to bed, and were awaken by more than a dozen trains during the night! Come morning, the fog had thinned out to a great extent, and we discovered that my Dad had parked us only 20-feet from the mainline tracks over the mountain!

This is a great thread Ken! We were always looking for motels by the tracks so I could see the trains (I still do this today...). Reading of your adventures, as well as the others on this thread, brings back lots of great memories for me. Perhaps I need to start my own nostalgia posts on here as you have. In any event, thanks for sharing these fun experiences of yours!

Best wishes,

ShastaDaylight

No, my memories are of horns, mostly ones that sound like the one on the #4449. Didn't hear a lot of whistles from the Espee. Of course the horns on Espee's F units sounded the same, too.

Ed

That motel could have possibly been the "Blue Gum Motel" where we stayed in the early 1970s one day while traveling to Seattle to visit my wife's Aunt and Uncle.
Aside from the Mosquitoes and a dirty swimming pool which we finally allowed our two girls to step in to.
The SP West Valley tracks were right across the road, along a row of Eucalyptus trees, but I don't recall ever seeing or hearing a train during our stay.
--- Thanks for the memory

James R.(Jim) Baker
Whittier, CA

We used to travel to Oklahoma every year to visit my moms family and this was way before the Interstate system so gues what? Route 66, We stayed in little motels in Arizona, Seligman, Winslow, Holbrook, etc. The Santa Fe tracks were right behind all of them. I loved it. All day and all nigh, and many with steam engines.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/25/17 07:55 by whistlepig.

KRK's experience reminded me of one I had in 1979, but it didn't involve a hotel.

I lived in Ferndale WA. I bid into a relief dispatcher position in Havre MT. This was technically a voluntary move, even though it actually wasn't, so I got no moving expenses. I loaded up the car with all I could take to set up for living in Havre until I could manage to bring the family and household, headed for US 2 and went east. Havre was a good 16 hours away. I got started late in the morning. Hotels were not in the budget. Somewhere west of Bonners Ferry ID, I couldn't drive any more. It was late, probably around midnight, and very dark. There was an inviting wide shoulder, the old time equivalent of a rest area. I parked, put my feet up on the passenger seat and fell asleep. A while later, there was a startling sudden very loud noise that woke me up, wondering what was going on, it took a couple of seconds to realize that it was a train. It sounded like it was doing around 40 mph and it also sounded like I must have been close to fouling the track, but where? I got out of the car and looked in the direction the sound. I couldn't see anything, but it sounded like if I had a hoop, I could hand up to it. I was surely safely parked on the graded shoulder rest area. Then the train that I never saw was gone. I got in the car and slept until daylight, at which time I discovered that the rest area was only about 30 feet from the SI main track.

TAW



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/25/17 10:42 by TAW.

Makes me think of my parents complaining about the trains when we stayed at a hotel in Lovelock, NV years ago. I slept through it all!

Nathan

On a long distance bicycle trip I pitched my pup tent next to the Erie Lackawanna outside Huntington, Indiana one night about 1975. Man, talk about the sound of the trains and slack action. This seventeen-year old was a die hard railfan but the sounds made me almost think the trains were going to roll over on me. (I had my prized ten-speed in the tent with me as was afraid someone would steal it.) Here is a photo taken right outside my tent that morning. I wonder what the railroaders thought of that pup tent near the tracks?

Victor A. Baird
http://www.erstwhilepublications.com

---

I read about a boat owner who was making a solo trip along the Intracoastal Waterway along the East Coast. He planned to tie up at a port down the coast a ways, but "things happened" and it got dark and he got tired at about the same time. He motored along until he spotted what looked like an abandoned dock in the gloom and moored his boat to the old timbers. He fixed some chow and then turned in for the evening. But along about midnight, he was awakened by a loud roaring sound, and then a blinding light lit up his cabin. His first thought was that he was about to be abducted by space aliens, then he realized that he had tied up to a railroad trestle and it was the night freight train, not a UFO.