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Trains return for Sacramento Northern's centennial

Updated 11:25 pm, Monday, September 2, 2013


  • Volunteer conductor Paul Trimble gives passengers a history lesson to observe the Sacramento Northern's anniversary. Photo: Mathew Sumner, Special To The Chronicle


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This day 100 years ago, a brand-new electric train headed out of Oakland through the East Bay hills, bound for Sacramento.

By modern standards that train looks old-fashioned and clunky, but a century ago it was on the cutting edge of technology, using clean electric power instead of smoky fossil fuel. It went a mile a minute and was as modern as tomorrow.

The railroad - eventually called the Sacramento Northern - is gone now, but it was an early-day version of BART. A portion of it still lives at an out-of-the-way corner of Solano County, and the public can ride on it on weekends through this month.

The Sacramento Northern's fastest trains - the morning Comet and the afternoon Meteor - could make the trip between San Francisco and Sacramento in two hours and 41 minutes. For a time, they even ran across the Bay Bridge. But the railroad never made money for its owners, and passenger service stopped in 1941.

But the memory of the old S.N. never faded, and admirers of electric trains built a nonprofit museum to honor their legacy. This month, the old Sacramento Northern has come back to life at the Western Railway Museum on Highway 12 near Fairfield.

The museum has two Sacramento Northern cars and is running them on a 5-mile portion of the railroad's old main line. In the heyday of the Sacramento Northern, the Comet and the Meteor would rocket through this part of the world at 60 to 65 miles an hour.

Slower, but still good

Now its cars do about 30 - the speed limit on the museum's track - not bad for electric train cars that are a century old. The lead car is S.N. No. 1005, built by the Holman Car Co. in San Francisco in 1911. The second car is No. 1020, built by the Hall-Scott Co. in Berkeley in 1913.

"This is the closest thing you could possibly get to riding the Sacramento Northern," said Bill Kluver, a longtime volunteer who is chairman emeritus of the museum. "We have the original cars on the original track."

The two cars have been restored so carefully that they look like new. "They have plush upholstery and dark walnut wood trim," he said.

The exterior paint, a dark shade of green, gleams in the sun. The electric motors and all the gears were rebuilt. It has taken years of volunteer work to restore the cars, a labor of love. Kluver said it was worth it.

"I've run the 1005 from time to time," he said. "It really has a lot of get up and go. A lot of pep."

"Pep" was something that was in favor when the cars were new back in 1913. Travelers between Sacramento and San Francisco had a choice of riverboats, steam trains or dusty, unpaved roads. A new, fast electric train line through Contra Costa and Solano counties seemed like a good bet to San Francisco financiers - a startup with unlimited potential.

The line, originally called the Oakland and Antioch Railway, was part of a boom in electrically powered trains that swept the nation and California. There were electric lines in Marin and Sonoma counties, two on the Peninsula and two in the East Bay. The huge Pacific Electric system reached out from Los Angeles like the fingers of a giant hand.

Hitting a bottleneck

The Oakland and Antioch was designed to offer fast service from Oakland to Sacramento, with two ferry connections, one to San Francisco and another across an arm of Suisun Bay.

The company went through several name changes, mergers and rebranding, to emerge as the Sacramento Northern in 1928. It offered rail service all the way up the Sacramento Valley to Marysville and Chico, 185 miles from San Francisco.

For a while, the good times rolled - first-class service on parlor cars, meals prepared by a pioneering African American catering company.

But the Sacramento Northern had a fatal flaw. There was never enough money to build a bridge across Suisun Bay, so the railroad operated its own car ferry, a slow and ungainly craft called the Ramon, which could carry both passengers and freight trains. It was a bottleneck and expensive to operate.

And in 1927 a new highway bridge across Carquinez Strait opened, cutting automobile driving time to Sacramento substantially. In 1930, the Southern Pacific Railroad built a new bridge from Martinez to Benicia, eliminating a train ferry operation. Now both the highways and the S.P. steam trains were faster and smoother than the Sacramento Northern.

The competition was killing the electric line, and the next blow, the Great Depression, sent it into a tailspin.

When the Bay Bridge opened, the Sacramento Northern was able to offer direct rail service to downtown San Francisco. "No tolls, No crowded highways, No traffic jams" the ads said. But it was too little, too late. The last passenger train ran in 1941.

S.N. freight service continued through Contra Costa until 1957. It seemed the days of electric trains were done.

Construction of BART

But times changed, and electric-powered rail service made a comeback. A new publicly-owned system called BART was built on the S.N. right of way between Walnut Creek and Concord. The old Sacramento Northern track through Lafayette and Moraga was turned into a bike path. So was another section out of Sacramento.

In the meantime, fans of the old electric trains formed the Bay Area Electric Railroad Association determined to save the region's rail heritage. They acquired equipment from vintage electric streetcar and interurban railways, including the S.N.

In 1960, they bought 25 acres of land between Rio Vista and Fairfield, right on the old S.N. line, and set up a museum there.

The museum is located on Highway 12 between Fairfield and Rio Vista in Solano County and is open from Wednesday through Friday from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $10, $7 for children.
