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We will ADD PHOTOS from the event. Check back over the weekend and beyond! Meantime, here's the story so you won't miss-out...
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We love it most when we can bring you a multifaceted event with music, history, and a whole lot more. This one is genuinely one-of-a-kind, once-in-a-lifetime. So, YES, with the shocking price of gas, it IS more than worth the road trip, and it includes Irish and other 19th century-era music.
Don't just read the title of the festivities and decide it's too specialized for you. It goes way beyond the basic sound byte line of:
Fifteen steam locomotives will gather for this one-of-a-kind four-day event, July 1 through 4, and nearly all will be running.
V&T #22, the "Inyo," was a star at a World's Fair in Canada. When any of these locomotives comes to visit, it draws crowds and makes news. The greatest reunion of 19th century steam in decades includes #22.
The best remnants of 19th century Victorian charm, with their art-embellished gleaming brass, are returning to life in a reunion drawn from four points of the compass. They won't just sit for you to gawk at them like Rose Parade floats parked and silent. These will move, clang and chuff, whistle and breathe fire, and they'll be pulling 19th century passenger cars for you to ride, all four days.
The "GREAT WESTERN STEAM-UP" at the Nevada State Railroad Museum in Carson City will have music from lots of bands and individual artists, including 19th century-era music from the Black Irish band (they've released 35 albums that include traditional songs of America's Irish railroad builders) plus other musicians will bring more variety.
The event will reunite the most famous 19th century trains in the world, for the first time in more than EIGHTY years. That's because when the movies came calling -- starting with silent films in the 1920s -- only one railroad still had most of its 1870s-era steam locomotives. And those were already-ancient, stunningly beautiful, polished-brass-adorned, colorfully-painted, custom-decorated, mechanical works of wonder. They will reunite only for this event.
V&T #12, the "Genoa," is one of the engines visiting from the California State Railroad Museum. For decades, it has been displayed indoors in Sacramento, framed by an equally-ancient iron-pin truss bridge. But for four days, "Genoa" will gleam in the Nevada sunshine after a very long absence.
Hit pause. Think of every colorful Victorian gingerbread wood house you've ever seen, and every picture of a Mississippi River paddlewheel steamboat. These are the surviving trains of that same era. It was a time when machines were embellished with art because they were special. Getting them into places that had recently been rugged frontier was quite a feat, and their operators wanted their presence to proclaim itself with literal bells and whistles.
Our own era is powered by hype over supposedly "powerful" dumb apps that put cartoon cat ears on your friends' pictures. People get excited about ear buds with slightly better frequency range than last year's offerings that isolated you from reality. Thousand-dollar phones that are 5g seem a necessity instead of suddenly obsolete 4g. Even when asked to take reality checks, it's usually by a marketer of more little electronic junk you're supposed to replace in two years. Don't we need to escape the paltry, trivial, claustrophobic, overhyped, and two-inch-screen virtual, to go see full-size spectacle that really did move the world? And, as it did it, brought hand-painted cameo murals, gold-leaf lettering, chuffing and hissing, melodic whistling, and rhythmic bell clanging along for the ride?
When new diesel-powered "streamliners" debuted in the 1930s, 1870s V&T locomotives were used to contrast progress. That, even as Hollywood bought-up the vintage engines for movie stardom. Here, V&T #21 -- which starred in Cecil B. DeMille's 1939 epic "Union Pacific" -- poses with the UP's then-newest passenger train. "Bowker" is among the visiting engines at the four-day event.
These four days go beyond the unparalleled esthetics of another time. The history is as rich as it gets. Everybody knows of Virginia City, Nevada, thanks to Ben Cartwright and his "Bonanza" clan. But all that was fiction, and the actual story is far better.
Virginia City is situated on the side of a mountain. Its streets are stairstepped contours, and tapping the riches of its Comstock Lode of silver -- on the opposite side of the High Sierra from the seaport at San Francisco-- was far more daunting than the nearly all-downslope moves of the California Gold Rush.
What intervened was the first Transcontinental railroad. You may recall our story of the 150th birthday of its completion with a 2019 event at Golden Spike National Historic Park in Utah, and the world's biggest steam locomotive being restored just in time to get there. (There's a link at the end of this feature story.)
Well, once the railroad connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in 1869, the four-month wagon train trek became a four-day train ride, AND, materials could be brought-in to build other railroads.
Among the first of these was the Virginia & Truckee, -- the storied "V&T" -- laying track south from the transcontinental railroad to reach Virginia City and the Comstock Lode. The new railroad made an upside-down question mark on the map to find terrain conducive to the maximum climb the trains could make. Running to Carson City and swinging east, it then climbed north to reach the famous mining town.
Mining booms all come to an end when the sought mineral is exhausted. Today they leave horrible scars from landscapes torn asunder, water courses diverted and polluted, and gaping open wounds of surface mining. Back then, they left Western ghost towns all of us find charming and comparatively small tailings from the tunnels of their underground mines.
The tracks to Virginia City were pulled-up in 1939, when the Comstock mines could not go any deeper. The remainder of the V&T was abandoned in 1949. One can only imagine what a rich property it would be today, we're it still there from Reno to Carson City and south.
But a curious thing happened to help sustain the railroad as the mines were playing out. It had a big stone enginehouse and shop in Carson City, filled with its original steam engines and wood passenger cars.
It so happened thst the first successful movie that told a story was a short called "The Great Train Robbery." It established moving pictures' first elements. Even before there was a Hollywood -- early films were mostly made in New Jersey -- filmmakers wanted steam trains to propel the action.
The V&T needed revenue. The studios needed 19th century trains that looked like they were transported from that era. And so the treasure trove of V&T equipment was saved from the scrapper, and scattered to the four winds of film, and later, television. In nearly every American-made Western that includes a train, what you see is one of those V&T 19th century steam locomotives.
A few were reunited and restored when the California State Railroad Museum opened in 1981 in Sacramento. They will make the trip over the Sierra to join their kin this weekend.
More V&T engines and cars were brought together when Silver State Nevada established its own state railroad museum, following the success of its neighboring Golden State. But nothing like this event has happened before, and more steam locomotives of V&T and other ancestry will join in. That includes an impressive array of three-foot narrow gauge steam locomotives and cars that you can ride, too.
A note about those cars. Hollywood bought things because they looked good, not because they understood or cared about history. One car that will remain on display inside the museum during the event is a holy grail of railroading. Bought from the V&T, it sat beneath oak trees after Hollywood was finished with it. There, generations of woodpeckers pecked thousands of holes and stuffed them with acorns as stored food. Neither human nor bird realized what was being pecked to almost death.
That car was one of the four that was present on May 10, 1869, when the Golden Spike was driven. Later, it was chartered by the Women's Suffrage Movement to take activists to the most notable gathering of the time to push for getting the right to vote for women. The car was eventually sold by the Central Pacific to the V&T, preserving it from ignominious scrapping the first time. Creation of the Nevada State Railroad Museum would do that again, even if the car's pedigree had been lost to history at the time.
So, go, enjoy the spectacle and the daily 1 PM pageantry of all the locomotives outdoors, and make sure your time inside the very formidable museum includes paying homage to that one, still unrestored car that is the sole survivor from the Golden Spike in 1869. The car is too fragile for it to hsve attended the 150th birthday in Utah in 2019. But you can see it now.
2022 is Nevada's turn for a significant celebration of a noteworthy 150th anniversary. And you should not expect another gathering on par with this one for another fifty years.
There are different engines pulling the trains and different musicians performing each day. Check all the schedules and get tickets at
www.greatwesternsteamup.com
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The Nevada State Railroad Museum is located at
2180 S. Carson St.
Carson City, NV 89701
775-687-6953
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There is ALSO a fine re-creation, a restoration of the original V&T that's mostly on its original roadbed from Mound House (east of Carson City) all the way up to Virginia City, and it runs seasonally, behind a steam locomotive. (Your editor worked on it as a college summer job!) It is not affiliated with the museum or this special event. It runs from Virginia City, with SPECIAL TRAINS over the 4th. Check out their train rides here.
The re-created V&T is based high-up in Virginia City, as seen here. It hauls tourists partway down the mountain over the original railroad's route. Separate from the Carson City event, it will operate special trains Friday and Sunday from Virginia City as a benefit to restore an original 1875 V&T locomotive brought home from the Old Tucson movie set. Sunday's 5:30 pm special train is a two-hour ride.
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You can read our 2019 story from the Guide's coverage of the 150th anniversary event for the Golden Spike, a big deal in Utah, here.
It's archived along with our special feature from the same year on trains to the Dixieland jazz and hoopla of Mardi Gras, also a fun read at that same address.
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We will ADD PHOTOS from the event. Check back over the weekend and beyond! Meantime, Happy Canada Day July 1st, and Happy Fourth!
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