With the New Year here and Train of Lights season over, it was time to break up the TOL consist that has called our mainline in Brightside home for over two months. With a new operating season arriving in March, we need to get our regular season consist ready while storing away those cars we do not use as often. Plus, we had to position several cars so our volunteers can get to work on them this season. This includes everything from a new generator under our concession car to new windows in our Western Pacific coach #315 to work on our locomotives to keep them in top form.
To facilitate all of this switching, we took Sunday, January 19th to assemble three trains crews and more along with three locomotives to get all of the jobs done. Southern Pacific switchers #1423 and #1195 held down working each end of our yard while Western Pacific #713 delivered a car to storage in Niles and ultimately a car to storage in Sunol along with taking our Southern Pacific combine up to our Sunol depot to allow our Gift Shop staff to move their inventory from their on train TOL Gift Shop back into our Sunol station gift shop. It took a village as they say and about 7 hours, but everything was complete by mid-afternoon and the engine safely tucked away.
We want to thank our volunteers for all of their hard work; some of them out to learn more about being a railroader and switching a railroad yard. Many of our train crew learn their craft at our museum, and we hope to offer a new brakeman training class soon for anyone new who is interested.
Here is a large set of photos taken across the day as the crews moved a huge variety of equipment all over our Brightside yard and railroad. We hope you enjoy them, and maybe they will inspire you to come volunteer with us.
All images courtesy of Christopher Hauf (@crhphotog / Christopher Hauf Photography)
