Overland and by Rail

Friday, January 3, 2014, the morning we debarked from the cruise ship, Frank and I embarked on an overland adventure. Ah, safe on land, at last! Well, sort of. We were going to visit the Orange Empire Railroad Museum in Perris, California, about an hour and twenty minutes from Long Beach, where the Carnival Inspiration docked. The museum is touted as "home to over 200 historic railway cars and locomotives from Los Angeles and the west".

This was our route from our cruise ship to the railcar museum.

We set our Magellan GPS, who we named Maggie, to 2201 South A Street and followed her instructions religiously. We began to lose faith in her judgment when the road quality and scenery we viewed out the car windows degraded as we approached our destination. But, these "roads" actually had street signs and names and were recognized by the software of our GPS and my iPhone so they must be legitimate. Right?

The bear went over the mountain. The bear went over the mountain.
The bear went over the mountain... to see what he could see.

As we crowned a hill, the prescribed route stretching out before us did not inspire much confidence.

He saw another mountain. He saw another mountain.
He saw another mountain...  'Twas all that he could see.

There was little comfort in the landmarks along the way... discarded mattresses, dented auto bodies, other rusted car parts, abandoned sofas, even a bee apiary, unclear to us whether it was active or defunct.

Frank takes me the nicest places...

The paths narrowed and the terrain increased in roughness. We were on the lookout for a location wide enough to turn around and go back to more civilized roads. As we crowned a particular hill we got stuck, like an impaled insect. Suspended on the peak, the drive wheels were not contacting the dirt and were unable to propel us forward over the crest of the hill or to backtrack us down from where we had climbed. Frank got out to assess the situation. He placed some rocks under the drive wheels hoping to allow them to gain enough traction to move the car, but he had no luck engaging the tires with the ground.

What a view!

Even if we did jack up the car, precariously on a slope mind you, we had no tools to dig out under the center of the car. We thought a push assist might be in order, but which direction? Frank started to stand in front of the car to push it backwards but I thought that that was a bad idea in case the car decided to roll forward down the hill over Frank. Standing in back of the car and pushing forward had the same disadvantage. The car would back over Frank in reverse with even less visibility. If I did run over Frank I could not call for help. My cell phone battery had very little remaining charge so its function was dubious at best. It gets worse. I still had a badly sprained ankle from falling down the stairs from the family room into the garage on Christmas Day evening, so hiking back to the main road over that uneven terrain was not desirable, either.

Decision made. There would be no standing in front of or in back of the car. Period. So we tried the only thing we had not tried yet. Frank got out and I got behind the wheel. It was my car, not Frank's that we were driving so, in theory, had a better feel for it since I drove it just about every day. It is a 2003 Pontiac Grand Prix and does not have four wheel drive. I put it in reverse and eased very gently on the gas, only giving it a bit more when I thought I felt one or the other tire grab. Maybe it was my better feel for the car-road interface, or a change in the weight distribution, or shifting rocks and dirt beneath the wheel, or our joint desperation that backing was the only thing to do, or a little bit of each of the above... but the car moved. I backed quite a ways, navigating in reverse between a couple of rock outcroppings, and K-turned the car to head back out to the main road.

On our way in to this desolate landscape, small tributary dirt roads had joined the one we were traveling. Going back these paths presented as a sequence of forks in the road demanding a right or left decision, based on our vague memory of where we had come from. Thank goodness for memorable landmarks: to the right of the couch... bee apiary on the left going, on the right returning... hadn't we passed that radiator?... I remember that refrigerator... etc. We did make it back to the main road and called the museum to have a human being give us a set of directions. So much for Maggie and Steve Jobs.

Once home I checked Google to see what we had done wrong. The google maps route (in blue) takes you east down a paved road lined with houses (Mountain Ave) and then a right turn to go southward on South A Street. Near as I can figure the GPS tried to take us on the south-east diagonal overland route in the upper left corner of the photo. Google does not even name these roads; it's algorithm must have higher minimum standards than Magellan or Apple. We finally arrived and parked the car. I had this barely controlled urge to smash that sexy little GPS voice that announced cheerily "You have arrived!" as if she'd performed admirably throughout.

After verbal directions from a museum employee, this is the route, shown in blue, that we took.

We found the museum to be quite extensive. Its mission was the preservation and authenticate restoration of trolley cars and other rolling stock from the Los Angeles area. This aerial view shows a large quantity of rolling stock and large silver white hangars that house many of the more precious historical cars and locomotives. We had a tour guide who was delighted to unlock those hangars and tell us story after story of the rail cars and trolleys within. There was a lot to see. I will share just a few tales. The pictures are of lesser quality since they were taken with my cell phone, not our camera. To add insult to injury, I dropped our camera on a steel rail shortly after entrance into one of the dimly lit museum hangars and broke it. A spring shot out sideways under the bowels of one of the behemoth railcars.

Here is an aerial view of the extensive Orange Empire Railway Museum.

The museum grounds were far reaching and had lots of areas for exploration.

Historically, safety themes were important. What we think of as cow catchers on the front of steam locomotives in those western rail movies had their counterpart in trolley cars within city limits. The politically correct posters advertised them as safety fenders protecting little girls from injury if they wandered onto the rails. In reality they scooped the drunks off the tracks. And safety features were prevalent in car operation as well. The St. Louis Safety Car was so simple that even a woman could operate it. Imagine that! 

Isn't it every day that you would let your little girl wander in front of a streetcar?

So simple. So safe. A woman can operate it! And does. Amazing!

Because of its proximity to Los Angeles, cars that had been touched by the hand of Hollywood abounded. We saw the trolley cars that had been used in the movies Roger Rabbit (as a model for the animation), Singin' in the Rail, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Meet Me in St. Louis.

This trolley was the model for the streetcar in Roger Rabbit.

Sister street cars 331 and 332 were used in movies Singin' in the Rain and Meet Me in St Louis.

Clang, clang, clang went the trolley, Ding, ding, ding went the bell,
Zing, zing, zing went my heart strings, From the moment I saw him I fell.
Can't you just hear this song in your head when you see this?

The Disney presence in Southern California was also prevalent. The famous Disney animator Ward Kimball, a fellow railroad enthusiast of Walt, donated his 3-foot gauge garden railway to the museum. He'd named his personal railroad the Grizzly Flats Railway. That name carried over to a portion of Disney California Adventure next to the Magic Kingdom in Anaheim and to one section of the Orange Empire Railway Museum in Perris.

Frank is standing next to the engine of Disney animator Ward Kimball's Grizzly Flats Railway.
The railroad ran 500 feet through the garden of his home in San Gabriel, California.

Grizzly Flats is one portion of the museum grounds.

I sat down and took a rest at the gift shop while Frank continued to roam the vast rail yards for maybe just under another hour. Our adventure getting to the place was well worth it. Late afternoon we checked into our hotel near Dan and Carrie and relaxed a bit before going out to dinner with them. We told them tales of our Carnival cruise at sea and of our Perris (perhaps more appropriate named perilous?) journey on land. The next day we had planned to visit a couple other smaller southern California train attractions and then leisurely drive up the coast, lingering a night at the quaint village of Solvang. We woke the next morning, looked at each other and agreed. These destinations could wait for another time. Stop! No more traveling! We decided to drive straight home that day, by the most expedient route.

This almost life size oil portrait of Ward Kimball was right.

It was time to STOP and go home.

After a night on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, four nights in our stateroom on the Carnival ship Inspiration at sea, and one night at the Ayres Hotel in Aliso Viejo, our bed back in Livermore felt so good that Saturday night. Ah, home, at last!