CALIFORNIA: City considers purchase of rail cars to draw tourists
SACRAMENTO - For sale: two 1974 rail cars. Lovingly restored, gas-powered, low maintenance. A potential tourist draw and possible link to your Gold Rush past. Asking $136,000 for the pair. Owner looking to move fast, according to the Sacramento Bee.
That's the deal railroad buff Jim Busby is offering Folsom. Buy the cars, he and other railroad enthusiasts say, and the city can attract tourists, residents and shoppers to one of the oldest railroad lines in the West.
"They're the kind of thing that railroad enthusiasts will come up here and enjoy just because they're here," Busby said. "There's a definite lore to them."
City leaders appear interested, particularly if they can secure federal money for the purchase.
"We are definitely looking into it," Folsom Councilwoman Kerri Howell said. I think this could be a great tourist attraction."
Folsom's railroad history goes back to the 1850s, when the city was the eastern endpoint of the Sacramento Valley Railroad, the oldest rail line in California. The line was later extended past Placerville to carry miners and freight into the Mother Lode.
Traffic on the extension eventually withered away. But for years, city leaders have envisioned vintage steam engines returning to carry wide-eyed travelers among the foothills beyond Folsom.
Busby's self-propelled rail cars look a little like modern-day subway cars, with their boxy shape and aluminum sheathing. They may not have the same mystique of steam engines, railroad enthusiast Bill Anderson said, but they don't have belching smoke or high fuel costs either.
"It's not practical to start out with steam engines (on the extension) because they're so expensive to operate," said Anderson, chairman of the Folsom-El Dorado-Sacramento Historical Railroad Association.
Anderson and the association would like to operate the cars on five miles of track between Folsom' s historic downtown and U.S. Highway 50 at first. Passengers would pay about $6.
Eventually, the rides might be extended nine miles for a trip to the El Dorado County community of Latrobe.
"We've already discussed a wine and cheese trip or a dinner train, but that's a long ways away," Anderson said.
The rail cars could connect with the light-rail station Regional Transit expects to open in downtown Folsom by 2003.
The rail cars originally belonged to the Weyerhaeuser Corp., which used them to move loggers and equipment along the rugged coastal ranges in Washington, Busby said.
Busby bought the two cars in 1994 and moved them to a recreational vehicle pad on the side of his suburban home a year later. Restoration took five years.
Today, the cars' interiors resemble those of a school bus with large windows, high-back bench seats and single-driver seats. But the rail wheels, bell and eardrum-numbing, horn are just like the features of any other train.
The cars can run as fast as 75 mph, but operators typically keep speeds to a more passenger-friendly 10 to 20 mph.
But to accomplish its goals, he said, the system will need more than two dozen additional cars, and traffic on downtown MAX streets may have to be banned someday so an extra line can share the street. Also, he said, the airport and Interstate trains, expected to be single cars, may have to be coupled together at the Rose Quarter to help downtown traffic.
As for buses, Sebree sees them as a necessary part of transit but he remembers the days when buses replaced streetcars.
"People were screaming about riding the old rattletrap trolleys, but when they were replaced by new buses, boardings dropped a lot. If a route had been carrying 20,000 people on the rattletraps, suddenly the new buses were hauling 12,000. It's a psychological thing: People have always felt a train, even a rattletrap, was a higher-class ride than a bus. That has not changed."
As for the other camp that wants new freeways, Sebree said: "Whose house will be the first to be torn down?"