robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

If a lowly streetcar is allowed in this section - out at the Southern California Railway Museum we have and run both on weekends and holidays.

(story of the imagination)
The past, the day is over and a streetcar taking people home is just getting ready to leave a station in the suburbs on a hot August night. The night sky is royal blue velvet with the stars washed out by the city lights in the background. The Motorman is impressing a young lady with how this railway marvel works.

(reality)
Southern California Railway Museum in Perris, CA and the young lady is my daughter who was a trainee Motorman(Motorwoman?)* getting instructions for starting up in a different model streetcar she has never run before. The sky does have the stars washed out but that is the last dregs of sunlight to the west, not the city. This car did run on the Los Angeles Electric Railway from 1906 (built) to 1955 (retired from all service of any type).

7DII, Tamron 10-24 @ 10mm, 1/25 @ f/3.5, ISO-6400 hand held

*She wasn't in her uniform because we were there for a dinner and night operations but as things slowed down the motorman who was one of her instructors invited her to try a model car she hadn't run yet. Second picture shows her in full uniform with the man who was then the Superintendent of Operations and had known her since her first visit to the museum-in a stroller still too young to walk. This is him in his persona of "Jingles the Elf" for the museum's Santa Train and Santa's Work Shop. Jasmine was there to act as an Assistant Conductor and to guide groups of guests with children to ride the train to the work shop to see Santa. The Santa trains started after sundown, before then we did regular operations with a train and streetcars.

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tainkc Loc: Kansas City

Very interesting, Rob. It was pretty much dead when we were there. After a bit, it was just me, my wife and my sister. Still, it was a very nice visit. So, I ask you; does this place get packed on the weekends?

Jay Pat Loc: Round Rock, Texas, USA

Enjoyed both images!!!!
Road on a street car in San Francisco in 2015. Very interesting for me.
The "driver" allowed me to stand next to him and watched as he traveled about his route.
Pat

robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

When the whole world isn't hiding under their desk from a virus a normal weekend day is 300 to about 500 and for events it goes into the thousands.
I think our heaviest was a Thomas The Tank Engine event (done in Nov, two weekends and Veteran's Day) when we hit nearly 40,000 in 5 days.

Not bad for a place that is mostly only known about by RR nuts and is in a small city on the edge of the desert in So. California. For non-Thomas events we often do 3000+ or so per day. Car and truck shows, Civil War Encampments, Railroad themed Swap meets, Music festivals, Steam Punk events etc. etc. For the Civil War guys we run steam trains and do train ambushes etc., the Barber Shop Quartet group that used to come once a year we ran our oldest stuff to fit the Gay 90s feel. And our Steam Punk events always are on the weekend after the big "Dickens Festival" in Riverside - a lot of the same people - just add goggles and lots of brass and do-dads to the Victorian clothing, throw in a few guys who own working steam powered automobiles and you have a Steam Punk event.
With nearly 100 acres we have room for those kind of groups to come and spread out. If it is a free entry event we charge to ride the streetcars and trains, gated events with an entry fee we throw in the rides for no extra charge

Except for the Museum Director, store personnel and the contract security at night everything is volunteers - members and any friends or relatives they can kidnap and drag out. Our daughter first "worked" at about age 7 when she got a whistle, stopwatch and power to supervise the toddler's air bounce. Talk about a power trip- TWEET! "Times up, next group's turn." She loved it.

Forgot, the museum training goes up to FRA certified engineers & brakeman. Some members started coming as kids, took the classes and got jobs with a RR based on their museum training.

Stephan G

"Jingles" is exposing a trade secret. There is no bell on a streetcar. It is all in -er, on- the feet.

My part of the team worked as Santa C. at one of the malls during those holiday times. When I did the Conductor role, I kept a pad of paper, telling the youngsters that I kept making the notations in his Naughty or Nice lists while he motored the car. Some of the times of well-behaved "Youngsters" on board.

Still have my official "Motorman" cap hanging on my wall.

robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

[quote=Stephan G]"Jingles" is exposing a trade secret. There is no bell on a streetcar. It is all in -er, on- the feet.

My part of the team worked as Santa C. at one of the malls during those holiday times. When I did the Conductor role, I kept a pad of paper, telling the youngsters that I kept making the notations in his Naughty or Nice lists while he motored the car. Some of the times of well-behaved "Youngsters" on board.

Still have my official "Motorman" cap hanging on my wall.

Some of the cars the bell is a pull, others it is a pedal and some have both or the pull is an airhorn. And these older ones are all operated standing or with a high stool. So often you have both hands and one foot going all the time between brakes, bell, horn, speed etc. The motorman could get to looking like (s)he was doing some weird exotic dance while on speed. And if you didn't have a conductor you were also talking to the passengers at the same time.

larryepage Loc: North Texas area

Nice images and great museum. I visited with the Santa Fe Railway Historical and Modelers' Society when we had our convention in Orange County in 2008 and the museum was still called the Orange Empire Museum. Our focus that year was all on the Southern California citrus industry. My biggest learning was about the beautiful color graphic labels applied to the wooden orange crates and about the grading system for oranges...all the way from the Primes down through the Juicers and the Cattle Feeders. At your museum we got to ride behind your Santa Fe FP-45. I'll have to post my HDR image of your very nice mineral brown Santa Fe caboose. This was the same trip where we were able to see UP4014 at Pomona.

By the way...very early in the last century, my grandfather left home to go to Dallas, where he went to work for the streetcar operation as conductor. He would have preferred to be a motorman, but was too tall. Never understood whether it was because he was too tall to stand in the motorman's space or if they just didn't have motorman's uniforms in his size. He eventually took the money he saved up from the job and moved to the southeastern corner of New Mexico, to a little place called Ochoa, where he went out into the frontier and lived out a homestead claim. I volunteered for a time for the McKinney Avenue Trolley, which operates on a restored remnant of that line in Uptown Dallas. That's when I learned that you don't reduce the "throttle" (actually the Controller) on a streetcar. You shut it all the way off, then move it to the new, lower setting. Also, when "switching ends," if you don't want to get in big trouble, you never lower the pole that is in use before you have raised the pole at the other end of the car. All that arcing is hard on the sliding contacts in the trolley and on the supply system powering the overhead wire. (Ours was 600 volts DC.)

Thanks for posting these.

robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

That is the way some car controls work, others are much different. "525" in the picture is a "Huntington Standard", much different from a Pacific Electric "Hollywood", a PCC (the streamlined ones that look like buses to most people) or the little Kyoto Japan car we have in the collection.
Just like planes where a pilot has to qualify for each type the museum training does the same thing for the different classes/types of streetcars. I was qualified to be motorman on 4 classes of car, conductor on streetcars and train conductor. Well the FRA reclassified our "conductors" to passenger service representatives and our "brakeman" as fully qualified conductors (to get our brakeman quals you have to pass both courses and the FRA tests). Our engineers also have to meet FRA quals to run anywhere outside the museum core. Any run with a road crossing (our "Main Line" track of aprx 2 miles is a leased section of abandoned RR Right of Way that went to San Diego in the 19th century) or that connects to the RR in Perris must be an FRA certified crew.

https://socalrailway.org/