East of Sparks
In a little more than a week, I will be riding with a small group of folks on a private railroad car heading from Emeryville to Denver and back again.. As things go, this isn’t a new experience. I have made many a trip aboard private railroad cars including a couple of long distance trips of many days.
What sets this one apart is that I haven’t ridden a train east of Sparks, Nevada by rail over the Southern Pacific”s Salt Lake Division since October of 1980. As then, the destination in 2019 is Denver, Colorado.
Now before this particular trip, I had been lucky enough to have ridden to Reno a number of times by train including a trip before Amtrak in 1963. But this trip would be different. For the first time, I would be riding the same rails that my great grandfather had worked over between Sparks and Carlin. I was keyed up from the excitement that night. I chatted with some of the train crew members who worked for the SP then. Listening in on my train radio, I could hear discussions between the train and the dispatcher as we sped east. The stop the train made in Carlin to change crews was a quick one. Headlights from automobiles illuminated the trackside for those moments as the San Francisco Zephyr made it’s short stop there. It was a visit back in time, even if a brief one.
I was lucky enough to have ridden for a short ride around the Spark’s yard at the age of 3. My great grandfather arranged with some friends to take me into the cab of a locomotive being moved about one afternoon. It was indeed memorable and somewhere, I have a photograph taken at the ancestral home at 401 Sixth Street in Sparks with my father and great grandfather after the ride. I was all smiles. (And yes, it rubbed off big time, leading to a life long passion for railroading.)
My father used to ride on occasion with his grandfather on trips to Carlin. They would stay with my grandfather’s brother Joseph, who was also a conductor with the Southern Pacific. My father recalled trips aboard both diesel and steam locomotives, including the famed Cab-Forwards. In those years, Chris Walker had enough seniority that he was strictly working passenger trains. I have some train register books from the post war era, and his name is listed among the engineers who signed in, on a regular basis.
While I may not have the same anticipation today as I did back in October of 1980 for the ride over those rails between Sparks and Carlin, I will be taken back to many years ago of family history.
Special, indeed…