Saratoga Stereopticon
Riding the rails, right here in Saratoga
Proving the little engine that could really can
By Willys Peck
Anniversaries, especially in multiples of five or 10, have always stuck in my mind. For instance, this past April 15 was the 90th anniversary of the sinking of the British passenger liner theTitanic. I find the concurrence of this and the deadline for filing U.S. income tax returns to be of almost cosmic significance.
Of course, if the feds had wanted to commemorate a domestic disaster, all they needed to do was move the date up to April 18, in remembrance of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Incidentally, April 18 this year was also the 60th anniversary of Col. Jimmy Doolittle's "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" bombing raid of World War II.
In my own experience, next month will mark the silver anniversary of the gold spike. It was on May 28, 1977, that this ceremonial bit of hardware was driven to celebrate the addition of motive power to the Dangerous Instrumentality & Attractive Nuisance Railroad that encircles the upper part of my yard on Saratoga Avenue.
The D.I.&A.N. has already gotten its share of ink in this publication: a nicely handled staff-written cover story 10 years ago, and one of my Stereopticon columns five years ago. In the interests of recycling, however, masking a dearth of column ideas, I'll just run over some background material.
First, the name. I chose it while studying torts at Santa Clara University School of Law, since it seemed to describe the liability involved in operating a two-foot-gauge, passenger-carrying railroad in one's yard. Although the name is of unwieldy length, I figured that if the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific could get by with just Milwaukee Road, I could get by with D.I.&A.N.
The inspiration for this project went back to my early childhood, when at the age of 5 or 6 I got a book for Christmas called The Wonderful Locomotive by Cornelia Meigs, a well-known writer of children's books. It was about a little boy who was befriended by an elderly railroader who, it turned out, had an old, wood-burning locomotive on a siding in his yard. It was Engine 44 (I suspect Ms. Meigs chose the number because that was her age when she wrote the book in 1928). The engine had a big top, or diamond, smokestack of the type used to arrest sparks.
In the story, the boy, Peter, drove this engine across the continent using what his old friend called magic, which turned out to be Peter's dream. The really good thing about the story was that, although it was fantasy, there was enough technical accuracy to get a kid like me really hooked on railroading. I knew then that someday I was going to have to have my own railroad, with an Engine 44 running on it. The number 44, incidentally, became my generic term for any locomotive with a diamond stack.
Almost 25 years had to go by before I could do anything about this particular ambition. Then, when I bought my house in November 1951, I knew that here was a piece of property that cried out for a railroad. The problem of material could be met from fruit drying yards, then being replaced by dehydrators and, soon thereafter, subdivisions. Almost every orchard had an open field to which trays of prunes or apricots were brought for sun-drying. The trays were transported to the yard while stacked on four-wheel cars with flanged wheels that ran on a miniature railroad track.
One day in early 1953, I was on one of my periodic train rides from Los Gatos to San Francisco. These were purely recreational jaunts that I took mainly for the ride. In the springtime, when the orchards were in bloom, there were sections where it was like traveling through a tunnel of blossoms. As the train neared Congress Junction, at about the present crossing of Highway 85 over Saratoga Avenue, I looked out the window at what was then an unused drying yard, where the Bellgrove townhouses are today.
All but overgrown by grass was a long section of two-foot-gauge track, which even included a switch. It was exactly what I was looking for. Resisting the temptation to get off the train right there at Congress Junction, I went on to San Francisco, but the next day I was at the door of the woman who owned the property. Her price for the track and several four-wheel rail cars was $50.
This was at a time when my wife and I couldn't even afford a washing machine. But she went along with my desire, and so I paid $50 to get what for all practical purposes was a load of scrap metal.
It would be another year, April 1954, before I would spike down the first section of track, and another 15 years before I had the yard encircled. During that time, the growing railroad got plenty of use from our two growing children and their friends. There was also the episode in 1971 when the D.I.&A.N. lived up to its name. More on that and on Engine 44 in the next column.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
