So far, this has been a strange year. My plan was to get out more, then I tore my left meniscus, then I got a nasty winter cold. While this was going on, Michele’s cousin, Fred Hilsenrath, died and her step-fathers best friend died. In the background, it is raining and raining and raining. Before my meniscus tore and the rains settled in, I did get out.

Like a lot of kids my age, I had a Lionel toy train set. As I got older, that morphed into pretty large HO scale model railroad that took over much of the end wall of my bedroom and an interest in real trains. I think that Railroads represented freedom when I was young, probably about nine or ten, and first took the train to San Francisco on my own. For a couple of years, probably when I was 13 and 14, a friend and I took the train, alone, to the State Fair in Sacramento as part of a trip that included taking a steam ferry, the Eureka, across the Bay to Oakland, a train to Sacramento, and a streetcar to the Fair (where we would always look at the huge model railroad among other delights). Fortuitously, I think, railroads completed the switch from glorious steam to boring diesel at about the same time I lost interest because I had discovered cars and girls.

Last month, the end of January, actually, I went to Sacramento with Burt Kuhlman to see The California State Railroad Museum. I had not been there since the opening week and it didn’t seem much different than it was in my memories. The problem with railroad museums is that engines are so big, so heavy and hard to move, that it is hard to have more than a couple of them and no museum is going to have a large collection. In the whole country, there are only 45 full-size steam locomotives built prior to 1880, this Museum has eight of these but that is still not very much. One of my favorites is the Governor Stanford. The Governor Stanford built in Philadelphia 1862, disassembled, put in crates, and shipped around the horn to San Francisco. The engine was then put in service hauling freight over the Sierras when they were building the Transcontinental Railroad. It went back and forth between Sacramento and, eventually, Promontory Summit in Utah where an actual Golden Spike was driven in to mark the connection of California to the East 1869.

Looking at the Governor Stanford, it just seems so small and open to go the 750 miles, over the Sierras, through Nevada, and across Western Utah in all kinds of weather. Only forty years later, behemoths, like the one below at 266 tons, started hauling long trains over the same route (and over the Tehachapis some 350 miles, or so, to the south). This particular locomotive was delivered to Southern Pacific in 1944 and was the last steam locomotive they bought. The world was changing, steam engines were sold for scrap and the world changed to diesel.

What struck me most about the difference between the two locomotives is how similar they are. Each generation of locomotives was built with the rules and thinking of the last generation. There is no sense of thinking out of the box, at looking at the problem with fresh eyes. They are stunning human artifacts and they infer that it is very hard to change a way of doing something.