All Gone to Look for America (26 page)

So there you go, I’m not going to meet the Terminator after all. Well, not here. Maybe in LA? On the way back to the riverboat I come through the psychedelic underpass again. The syncopated jazz is still playing, and all of a sudden I realise its true purpose. There’s nobody here. Nobody stinking of urine and sleeping in a heap against the wall. Nobody hanging around drinking from bottles. They just can’t stand the goddamn music.

Actually, I know how they feel. On an impulse I plug in my iPod and treat myself to a large dose of nostalgia with Neil Young’s ‘After the Gold Rush’. Most of the time I believe travellers should keep both their eyes and ears open to where they are: to miss out on one sensory input is to get the whole picture wrong. But there are moments, just now and then, when it can be a little luxury to be able to use modern technology to treat yourself to your own, on-demand soundtrack. I didn’t just choose old Neil because of Sacramento’s connection to the original gold rush, but just because listening to that west coast voice whining nasally on about ‘mother nature on the run in the 1970s’ is pure personal self-indulgence.

Ahead of me the
Delta King
sits lazily on the calm blue waters of the
Sacramento
River – they really are blue, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen another river that was blue, and certainly not the Danube – while over on the deck outside Joe’s
Crab Shack waitresses are serving up cold beers. This may be toytown America but right now it’s too good to turn away from.

And then, just as I’m about to unplug again and return to the world of
preproduction
values, the small god of the iPod makes his mischievous presence felt. This may take some believing, but I swear that just as I was about to extract the tight little plugs of my Sennheiser headphones I caught the unmistakable opening chords of REM’s ‘All The Way to Reno’. My next destination.

I kid you not: this is the way religions are born. I’ve only been in California for 24 hours and already I’m going native.

GIVEN THAT THE WESTERN END
of the great railroad project which created America began in Sacramento it is scarcely surprising that this is home to one of the finest monuments to a mode of transport it has all but
abandoned
: The California State Railroad Museum. And it says something for the romance and nostalgia which the railroads still evoke that it draws 600,000 visitors a year.

But just walking through the door it is easy to see why. Standing in front of you – on a par with any reconstructed dinosaur (even Leonardo) – are some of the world’s great locomotives, beautifully restored and most of them available to be explored and in some cases even climbed over. For a start – almost
literally
– there is the magnificent Gov. Stanford, a great black brute of an engine with a funnel like a popcorn machine, a cow-catcher that could carve its way through a
corrida
and a vast, front-mounted lantern the size of a World War II searchlight. It is, even to modern eyes, a stupendous thing: somehow antique, futuristic, impressive and ridiculous all at once. In an electronic age of
ever-diminishing
moving parts, it is outrageously – almost frighteningly –
mechanical
. When we want to praise something we say it has ‘all the bells and whistles’; take one look at a train like this and you see why.

The Gov. Stanford, named after a California governor and one of the men who made the railroad possible (and himself rich), was built by the Norris Locomotive Works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and transported by sailing ship all the way around South America via Cape Horn to Sacramento, where it arrived in late 1863. It would become the first locomotive on the Central Pacific Railroad, the western branch of the transcontinental track.

What makes the Sacramento Railroad Museum special is not just the trains but the staff: this is a railway anorak’s dream job. You can see it in the faces of the mostly male, retired volunteers who beam as they welcome you aboard
their own particular charge: one of the hulking behemoths of the early steam age, or maybe The Gold Coast, a restored, ridiculously opulent
nineteenth-century
dining car with heavy draped curtains, mahogany panelling and tables set with linen, fine china and candlesticks. Or a Streamliner from the 1930s, glistening with polished stainless steel and aluminium (and even air-
conditioning
), one of the few luxuries that survived even in the Great Depression.

Railway enthusiasm surpasses political correctness. A jovial African-
American
man was proud to show me around the St Hyacinthe, one of the plush sleeping cars built by the Pullman Company (founded by George Pullman) which became a global concept. But what surprised me most was the openly genial way he sported the uniform that he explained would have been worn by ‘Negroes, who were only allowed on board these cars as porters’. It was, he said, one of the most prestigious jobs open to African-Americans right up until the civil rights movement of the 1960s. With an African-American
standing
for president, he found no problem accepting that the injustice of the past was what it is: something belonging to the past. The railroad helped change American in more ways than one.

Just how the transcontinental railroad came to be built is a story worth a book of its own
1
and requires at least a brief diversion here. The discovery of gold had changed California forever: by 1850 it was declared a state of the union, even though the rest of the union was half a continent away. Lewis and Clark had blazed a trail across the hostile wilderness but it was not a route that invited the average citizen to follow on horse and cart, though, as we shall see, some did. Since its capture from Mexico, California was the United States’ newest, and with the discovery of gold possibly richest, colony. But it was still that: a colony of a country on the far eastern seaboard. It was far from obvious that the huge expanse of land in between, populated by suspicious and
increasingly
hostile natives, would ever join it.

The 3,000-mile overland route from coast to coast was risky in the extreme and with no roads or clear tracks a long and incredibly arduous traverse. The safer way was not exactly quick either – or particularly safe. It meant
rounding
Cape Horn, a hazardous business at the best of times, and was in total a journey of 18,000 miles that took over six months. It wasn’t cheap either. Clearly, if California was ever really to belong to the United States, something had to be done. Thus was the concept born that would grandly be known as
America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’, a phrase that managed to imply that creating a single country to span a continent had somehow been decreed by God.

The very first railway engines to be seen in the United States had been four British coalmine engines imported in 1829. Christmas Day 1830 marked the opening of the first passenger line at Charleston, North Carolina. What
followed
was an explosion into empty space. Within 10 years the lines of track had multiplied from 23 to 2,800. By 1857 the eastern United States had half the entire world total of railway lines. The man who would make a serious start on the project of a railway line that would cross a continent was a civil engineer called Theodore D. Judah who was brought to California – via the fearful Panama route – by the promoters of the new state’s first rail project: the 22-mile-long Sacramento Valley Railroad which linked the city to the western terminus of the Pony Express. But by the time he had finished their task in 1856 Judah was convinced he could build something a lot longer than 22 miles: a railroad that could cross a continent.

Judah had managed to catch the eye and ear of a young Kentucky-born congressman called Abraham Lincoln, who friends in the Republican Party said was going to do well. Judah lobbied in Washington and in Sacramento and by 1860 managed to put together the business interests of four
California
businessmen (all originally from upstate New York), who were also
supporters
of Lincoln’s campaign for the presidency. Collis Huntington and Mark Hopkins were partners in a Sacramento hardware store, Leland Stanford
operated
a grocery business and Charles Crocker ran a dry goods company. Modest businesses but they had all done extremely well out of the gold rush and had money to spare. Allowing Judah to persuade them to put it into his ‘madcap’ scheme was the best business decision any of them would ever make. They were to become known as The Big Four, eventually controlling a
transportation
and property empire that stretched halfway across America, and would be admired and detested in almost equal measure.

All of them knew in detail the problems of getting from California to the nation’s financial capital, New York, and its political capital, Washington. Huntington had first made the journey at the age of 27 in the early flush of the gold rush. Rather than the epic round-the-Horn ocean trip, he was one of the first to try the Panama ‘short cut’: boarding a steamer from New York down past Florida and the tip of Cuba – an eight-day journey in itself – to a fly-blown port at the mouth of the Chagres River (which then belonged to Greater Colombia). There they had to disembark via native canoes and hire Indians to help them downriver, sleeping on the muddy shores, then trekking
over the mountains for five days to reach so-called Panama City which turned out to be nothing more than a sea of tents in an ocean of mud plagued by
frequent
epidemics of malaria and cholera. From there they trekked on through 24 miles of jungle to the coast to wait for a northbound ship to call. Judah himself had been seriously ill on the same route. In 1863 on his way back to New York to try to raise more funds, he contracted yellow fever in Panama and subsequently died of it that November, only a few weeks after the Gov. Stanford arrived in Sacramento.

What created the political will needed for such a vast undertaking was the outbreak of the civil war between North and South. California sided with the North – providing crucial supplies of gold – though the fighting was half a continent away. But the conflict highlighted the potential of secession in a disconnected nation spread over such vast distances. The North declared it a political necessity for the survival of the union. The groundbreaking for the great project took place at the intersection of Front and K Streets in
Sacramento
, right outside Huntington’s and Hopkins’ store, in January, 1863, a full two years before the war ended. The completion of one of the wonders of the nineteenth-century world was not to be achieved without greased palms, dodgy dealing, and the labour – and death – of thousands of Chinese workers who more than any other group forced the route over the seemingly
impassable
barrier of the central Rocky Mountains.

Boarding the train just after 11 in the morning for what is one of the most scenically beautiful railway journeys in the world, it’s hard to imagine how they even started, let alone breached the summit of the peaks ahead. And I’m not hanging off a cliff in a basket loaded with gunpowder! But in case my
imagination
fails, there are two volunteers from the Railroad Museum on board for the mountain crossing section to give passengers a running commentary on one of Amtrak’s most spectacular routes. The American word for these guys is ‘docent’, which is not a term I’ve ever heard before, but is widely employed to describe these keen, usually elderly, well-informed volunteers. It has the huge advantage of sounding more scholarly than ‘anorak’.

But I am being unfair. The term ‘trainspotter’ is used so widely and
pejoratively
in Britain that we automatically conjure up a vision of some bloke with thick specs standing under grey drizzly skies in the aforementioned anorak, cowl pulled up over his head, myopically recording locomotive serial numbers in a notebook. Maybe it’s the weather – sunshine does wonders for the soul – but the California equivalents tend to be bright-eyed ‘seniors’ – retirees with a spring in their step – conveying a genuine enthusiasm for not
just the technicalities of the railroad but the history and circumstances of its construction.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, you may think the land around here is pretty flat,’ drawls the laid-back voice over the intercom as we pull out of Sacramento past a vista of suburban houses, brown scorched fields, roads and trailers with not a molehill in sight, never mind the mountains we know lie ahead. ‘The elevation above sea level here is just 80 feet,’ and it is so palpably flat that the next thing we pass is an airfield: ‘This here’s McClellan Field, an important military base for more than 60 years, only relatively recently turned over to the local county for development as an industrial site.’ A little further on we pass through a drab landscape of industrial development, but the onboard guide manages even to squeeze an iota of interest out of this: ‘Right now you’re lookin’ at the works of the Blue Diamond Company.’ Ooh, we stare, wondering where they dig up brilliant stones in this unlikely landscape. ‘It has nothing to do with diamonds,’ the docent lets us down gently, ‘but is the largest almond-processing facility on earth, dealing with most of the one million pounds (450 tonnes) of almonds produced in California each year.’ See: anoraky for sure, but interesting too.

We’ve barely left the outskirts of the city and there’s still no perceptible increase in gradient when the docent comes in with what is obviously one of his most practised lines: ‘Okay now, you’ve heard tell of people trying to move a mountain, well right here’s where four men moved an entire mountain range.’ He’s not kidding either. ‘You see folks, when they passed the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, which laid down the financial support for building the railroad, they agreed there would be more government money made available for sections over the mountains. ‘’Cept those congressmen back in
Washington
DC had no idea where the mountains began, had they? So they decided the mountains would begin where President Lincoln said they began. Thing is, old Lincoln, he didn’t much know either. So he asked the state geologist Josiah D. Witney, man they named the highest mountain in the USA outside Alaska after. Crocker, one of the Big Four, took Whitney out here in his buggy and got him to say the Arcade Creek, which we’ve just gone over’ – we crane our necks to look out the window – ‘was where the Sierra Nevada started. Lincoln said that was good enough for him. So there you go, folks, who said faith couldn’t move mountains?’

It’s a good story – and true! – and gets the laugh it deserves. This is a regular scheduled daily train, not a tourist excursion, but the docents have managed to create a jokey school day-out atmosphere. On the other hand, most of my fellow travellers do seem to be here at least as much for the spectacle as the
means of transport. If they simply had wanted to get from A to B they would have flown.

‘Now this here town,’ the docent meanwhile starts up again, as we pass through what seems to me like nowheresville suburbia, ‘was originally known by the romantic name of Junction – because it was a junction – but in 1864 the people who had moved here, followin’ the railroad, were allowed to choose a better name. They called it after the prettiest girl in town: Junction became Roseville. It didn’t make the town any prettier though.’ Another laugh. ‘And more than a century and a half later, if anything, things have got worse,’ this as we pass though a vast wilderness of sidings and freight trucks. ‘Although the local people probably wouldn’t agree: the western freight lines invested $140 million in the 1990s to renovate Roseville as the most important rail yard west of the Rockies.’

Eventually, some miles further on, the land does just noticeably begin to rise and our guide points out we are at a less-than-colossal 100 feet above sea level when we reach the nondescript little town of Auburn: ‘The courthouse which you can just see over there, was built in 1894 and’ – the usual tone of expectant awe – ‘is still in use today.’ The ‘old building’ stuff is gradually
beginning
to lose its amusement value to the extent of becoming comic.