(The following story by Ryan Sabalow appeared on the Record-Searchlight website on July 8.)
DUNSMUIR, Calif. — Katie Paull summed up her hometown’s premier yearly festival, Railroad Days, in two words:
“Choo-choo!” the 8-year-old Dunsmuir girl said Saturday while standing a couple hundred feet from a rumbling locomotive.
Her 4-year-old stepbrother, Zakkary Vance Powell, fidgeted beside her. He was even more excited about trains.
He could barely answer questions before scampering back to the two model train sets rolling along an almost 100-foot section of circular track nearby.
Holding a trainman’s lantern and wearing a striped conductor’s hat and bandana, the mini-railroader loves trains with the passion that only a grimy-faced 4-year-old can muster.
“I like them because they’re powerful,” Zakkary said before running back to watch the small trains puff out tiny blasts of steam as they pulled loads of sticks doubling for life-sized logs.
The two youngsters were hardly alone Saturday in their passion for the scream of whistles, rumble of diesel engines, endless stretches of parallel steel rails and row after row of wooden ties.
Several hundred people packed the streets surrounding Dunsmuir’s Amtrak depot for a glimpse of Railroad Days’ noon parade and the chance to get up close and personal with some of the towns’ bigger historical figures — diesel engines, passenger cars and freight haulers.
The trains, some relics from railroads past and others still-functioning Union Pacific engines, drew crowds of people who walked through the trains’ hulking innards. Others rode Union Pacific Engine No. 6936 as it went around in circles on the depot’s still-functioning turntable.
Others took free rides on “speeder” motorcars — four-seat, gas-powered boxcars — that zipped tourists up a quarter-mile section of track and back.
The town of about 2,000 people, icy cold water, rolling hills and quaint houses, a 45-minute drive north on Interstate 5 from Redding, has a longtime connection with the railroad.
In 1886, the Central Pacific Railroad first came to the area. The railroad became the city’s primary source of jobs and income.
Because of that connection, Railroad Days was established in 1940 to celebrate the town’s railroad heritage.
The festival’s gone through a lot of changes since then, with the celebration nearly petering out during parts of the 1990s.
But Cheryl Petty, the president of the Dunsmuir Chamber of Commerce and a member of the Railroad Days committee, said a recent influx of railroad retirees moving to the area, a volunteer-led $30,000 restoration of the town’s Amtrak depot and help from Union Pacific have put Railroad Days back on track.
“There are just a lot of people who are really enthusiastic about railroads up here,” she said.
Railroad Days continues from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. today, with more train tours, live music, vendors, a small circus and mini-train rides.