We had a cultural enrichment day today by making a trip to visit the California Railroad Museum in downtown Sacramento. It was about a 20 mile drive from our RV park in Nicolaus to Sacramento and it was a nice ride until we got into the mysterious and circuitous roads of our state capital. We found our way into the parking area for the museum after only one or two direction reversals. Once parked, both of us adults became completely stymied by the machine that dispenses the little paper chit making the parking legal. It was confusing for us so I called the phone number prominently displayed on the expensive kiosk housing the expensive electronic gizmo and was rewarded with extended recordings of information about how to retrieve a towed vehicle, how to acquire neighborhood parking permits, the location of the parking authority and other equally useless tidbits of info before finally being allowed to press zero to speak with a human. The human told us that the reason we could not get the frustrating machine to take our money was because our credit card was no good. Strangely, after that we were able to get the machine to accept our allegedly no good card and were rewarded with a six dollar scrap of paper.
We strolled over to the museum where they took another $12 a head to get in. The price, however, is quite reasonable once we took a look inside.
California has a rich and varied history of railroading being the terminus for the first transcontinental railroad and having considerable passenger and freight service. Additionally, the state has abundant agricultural lands served by extensive rail assets along with many mining railroad systems. It seems pretty plain that Californians have a considerable debt to acknowledge as almost all the work was performed by 18,000 Chinese laborers along with quite a few Irish immigrants. It was a difficult and dangerous job making rail beds through the Sierras considering that the work was performed by hammer drilling and black powder explosives, all done by hand. There are hundreds of tunnels through granite, miles of rail protected by snow sheds, massive amounts of cliffside work along with gigantic cut and fill operations and low wages. The Chinese withstood all of this misery in the hopes that they could live better than they had in China in the late 19th Century.
The museum has extensive displays about the labor forces, the rich kleptomaniacs that funded the operations and a truly spectacular display of both steam and diesel locomotives in addition to freight, passenger, refrigerator, sleeper and dining cars. They have a primitive but quite effective tunnel boring machine, railroad size. The largest steam locomotive I have ever seen is located indoors right near the lobby. There are even displays of prosthetic devices used by folks who had their hands and legs amputated by dangerous work practices. The museum’s collection is extensive and thorough. There is also a nice gift shop with very expensive items available for purchases by suckers, including us.
We lingered in the museum until our parking permit expired so we made our way back to our truck and left the capital city for the drive back to Nicolaus. We took a little different route back home and stopped in East Nicolaus, an intersection with even fewer building than Nicolaus. The only open business we detected was a Mexican food and hamburger joint called Sammie’s. They served us superb burgers, amazing carnitas fries and the best chocolate milk shakes we have had since 2016 in Manti, Utah. The prices were very good.
See photos by clicking the link. https://photos.app.goo.gl/JJqz8dUw4LV7xxdu6