TRAIN RIDE - Part Two

For the second time in less than a week, we found ourselves riding the rails. Lou has wanted to take the Niles Canyon Railway excursion train from Sunol to Niles for quite awhile now. Our schedules finally aligned with the limited train schedule & today we enjoyed another train ride, although this one was considerably shorter than our trip to Reno at just over an hour round trip.

The Niles Canyon Railway excursion train. The caboose is behind the engine because there are two cabooses so when they switch the engine for the return trip there is always a caboose at the end.

With Lou's long arms, we've been taking these pictures of ourselves for 12 years. Now, suddenly, they have a name for it - a "selfie".

Over 20 years ago, Darrin belonged to a model railroad club that had a huge layout in the basement of the Niles Depot. I spent a lot of time driving him back & forth to Niles. Fortunately, Darrin told me that several years ago they had moved the depot about ¼ mile from the location I knew it to be or I’d have been thinking I was going nuts.

The Niles Depot is now located in downtown & houses a museum of railroad artifacts. They are looking for volunteers to get the model railroad up & running again.

The old town of Niles is now a district in the city of Fremont. There are numerous antique stores, eateries & other quaint shops lining its main drag.

Lou & I had lunch at Bronco Billy's - I remember eating there several times with Darrin many, many years ago.

Silent film stars Charlie Chaplin & Bronco Billy Anderson made a lot of movies in Niles starting back in 1913. Anderson built a movie studio in town with a partner whose last name started with an “S” – hence the name of the studio, “Essanay” – for “S” and “A”.

The original Essanay Studio is long gone but there is a Silent Film Museum in the Edison Theater from the same era.

The Silent Film Museum has a fantastic collection of old movie cameras, projectors & posters. They continue to show silent movies on Saturday nights at the Edison Theater.

We were given a tour of the original projection room. It is lined with tin since old film was quite flammable & they didn't want to burn the theater down if it caught fire. The projector at the lower right is an old hand cranked model which still works.

More of the extensive camera & film projector collection.

After a couple of hours exploring Niles, we made the return train trip. Sunol is a tiny little town in the outskirts of the San Francisco Bay Area. I remember it being famous back in the 1980s for Bosco, a black Labrador & Rottweiler mix, who was elected mayor of the city. His name was put on the ballot as a joke & he beat two human candidates to become America’s first dog mayor!

A bronze statue of the Mayor of Sunol - Bosco, born in 1981 & died in 1994.

The cloud formations were beautiful today which, along with the gorgeous scenery, kept me occupied snapping lots of photos on our journey back to Sunol.

These wispy clouds were the perfect backdrop to the hills & trees in Niles Canyon.

Old redwood telegraph poles are no longer used but still dot the countryside along the tracks.

More of the crazy cloud formations. These looked like cotton.