Railroad relics

To answer Anil's question, yes, we have some rather cool relics saved from the earlier days of railroading in the Prescott area. Number one, of course, is the actual depot down on Sheldon. Unfortunately, it has never caught on as a proper commercial venue, winding up instead as the office for a big brokerage. However, I'd be willing to bet that one of these days Real Soon Now, a coffee house could make a go of it.

There are the two old small town railroad stations that sit side by side out on Iron Springs Road. The building from Hillside has housed restaurants for some years now, while Drake Station (below) is home to western antiques and memorabilia.

The third station still in service didn't move nearly as far from its original location -- just a few hundred yards from the tracks. It is now part of the Skull Valley museum complex. And well worth a visit (as are the other two station houses.)

We can't overlook the remaining iron work that crosses Granite Creek at the foot of Granite Street and is even visible through the trees from Starbucks at the Depot Marketplace (below). BTW, there's a strange and sad story explaining why the bridge still stands and is now a city landmark.

One More: I had totally forgotten that there is one old rural railroad depot still located at its original site, down in Perkinsville at the end of the Verde River excursion run. Jarart has posted pictures of the old station at Prescott Area Daily Photo.

The Peavine, continued

I'm not the only one fascinated with our railroad history. After discussing plans for my previous post, a friend and neighbor sent me the tables that accompany this post -- thanks, Andy! They deal with various facets of the route, from the big city all the way up to the main line at Ash Fork.

Let's start with the question of elevations. I've turned the table above on its side so that you can read the names of maj0r whistle stops on the line from Phoenix to Ash Fork. It's designed to emphasize the elevation changes that our peavine railroad had to negotiate, starting with Phoenix at 1121 ft. and peaking at Prieta, on the Prescott side of the Iron Springs settlement, at 6148 ft. A bit of a climb!

Here is the stretch from Skull Valley (elev. 4297) on into Prescott (elev. 5370). The old time table showed that it took 1 hr. and 16 minutes to go from Prescott to Skull Valley vs. 1 hr. and 35 min. to climb from Skull Valley to Prescott. Phoenix to Prescott was 6 hr. 5 min but downhill Prescott to Phoenix took only 5 hr. 33 min. Incidentally, the stretch of the right-of-way from Doce to Ramsgate is currently a forest road -- a short outing I recommend; catch it south off Iron Springs Road a mile or so beyond the turn-off to the Iron Springs summer home settlement.

Here's the last of the material given me by the good neighbor -- a picture of all the buildings that made up the Prescott railroad station facilities in 1916. Note that the depot building was actually smack dab in the middle of what would have been Sheldon Street.

My Trip on the Peavine: I'm one of the lucky ones -- I actually traveled from Phoenix to Ash Fork in 1946 on the Santa Fe, leaving the big city about 4:30 PM. Twas a short train, consisting of one box car plus a combo railway express/mail/observation car -- the sort with an open platform at the end of the train, just like you see in pictures of Harry Truman as he made whistle stops when running for reelection. My big disappointment was that it was already dark by the time we headed into the mountains.

Mapping the Santa Fe through Prescott

So just where did the railroad go, back in the day when Prescott was served by the Santa Fe? Before I moved, I managed to snag the 1947 15-minute USGS Prescott quad topo, which shows a much smaller town, including the railroad tracks. Scanned and magnified, the topo does a nice job of showing the route. BTW, the tracks are designated by a solid line with periodic cross hatching.

East of the depot down on Sheldon at the foot of Cortez, the tracks headed northeast up through the Whipple Military Reservation -- now the Ft. Whipple VA, then along Granite Creek toward the Dells where the old right of way is now a popular hiking trail.

Here's a snippet of a map I found at the Sharlot Hall web site, a close-up of the area surrounding the station. A couple of fascinating details: two round houses, one for oil tankers ... and the little dam on Butte Creek (right center) which held one of the early city water impoundments. (It's still there, though hard to find as it is completely silted up.)

Less well known is the course of the tracks through the city west of the depot. Basically, it followed Miller Creek briefly, crossed Miller Valley Road at Rodeo Drive to serve the fairgrounds, then headed northwest to Iron Springs Road, which it followed out of town. More or less the same route as Gail Gardner Way, incidentally.

Look behind the espresso shack on Miller Valley Road; you will see that there's a fence on an extreme diagonal which heads southeast behind the Mexican restaurant and the old stone building.

A short distance further south, you will note a little stub of a street on the east, opposite to the road heading to J&G Sales on the west side of Miller Valley. The stub leads to an unnamed bit of street that follows the old railroad course; there was at one time a spur track all the way to J&G's present building (it shows on the map if you look carefully.) As a matter of fact, the iron rails of the spur were still there, embedded in the road surface when we first came to Prescott at the beginning of the '80s.

And the Santa Fe was still stopping in Prescott three days a week at that time. However, the western half of the route had been dropped in the 60s; the trains came and left via the Dells. Reason: railroads had switched to long piggy-back flat-bed rolling stock which could never have negotiated the old winding tracks between Skull Valley and Iron Springs. Drive all the way out to Ramsgate on the Dosie Pit Road and you'll understand!

The Skull Valley Cafe is back!

Glad tidings -- the Skull Valley Cafe reopened five weeks ago. All dolled up western style, which is a hair on the hokey side; after all, it was a plain pipe racks operation all those years under Helen and Dick when my LH and I breakfasted there almost everyday.

But, hey! I can certainly live with such details as painted cracks and hasps just to have this welcome little out-of-the-way restaurant open again!

There's still a counter plus the small tables. And a side order of B&G for only 99 cents, as well as a much more expansive menu than in the G.O.D. (Good Old Days).

A real innovation is this patio, already occupied on a warm February day.

The decor includes pictures of Skull Valley in older days; the paintings of the store and the pre-upgraded gas station are by one of my favorite local artists, Linne Thomas, who chronicles the remains of an earlier time hereabouts.

The cafe's bulletin board continues to be news central for the countryside.

The real theme, however, is the Santa Fe railroad which still passes through Skull Valley on its run between Phoenix and the main line up north. And, yes, trains still park on the siding so that engineers and other railroaders can grab a bite to eat. Just as I remember from the 80s.

Sunday's customers looked as though they came from all over. In the old days, local cowboys and ranchers, scruffy miners from the Copper Basin, and bikers riding the back roads up from the Valley of Death were the primary customers. When an out-of-the-area Rancher entered, Helen always made a point of introducing him to any other Baron who might be present. And the mid-morning and after-lunch gossip was great! Hope it still is. I'll be back next time I get a ride down Iron Springs Road.

Words & Graffiti: If wordplay is your thing, have a look at Urban Dictionary, DoubleTongued and/or Wordlust. New Scientist, of all places, was where I discovered these sites that deal with the latest slang, lingo -- and made-up words. And if your normally staid exterior hides an inner biker, go over to Hoarded Ordinaries for pictures of a long block in Cambridge MA where street artists and graffiti types own the wall.

Cool Toys for Good Ole Boys

I'll say this for guy toys -- they're both varied and mighty photogenic! This occasion was a recent model railroad swap meet. (For those from parts East or other countries, swap meet is western for flea market.)

One of two elaborate layouts at the meet. The booths featured all kinds of goodies for a good old boy's own layout...

...track...

...rolling stock...

...cool antiques, including my favorite of all railroad cars, the observation car. (Just parenthetically, I believe that American politics started its downward spiral when presidential candidates gave up the old fashioned coast-to-coast whistle-stop campaigning from the platform of an observation car.)

This was the only model of European-style passenger cars that I saw.

Of course, plenty of staging for the complete railroad complex. My favorite was the ready-mix plant (below.)

Even a tunnel assortment. I was struck by the number of women manning booths at the show. More than one was, I suspect, the widow of a modeler, selling off the collection.

Items for the railroad buff, including comprehensive timetables. The guide at the left, for 1969, was priced, I believe, at $1000. Maybe $100, but that isn't what my picture shows. That's a lot of nostalgia in my books, but then a friend's father, like very many hobbyists, had an entire room dedicated to his layout!

In closing -- couldn't resist the Ts. The railroad theme makes for excellent shirts, I'd say.

FYI Links: The swap meet was sponsored by the Central Arizona Model RR Club; there are pictures of several local layouts here. Over 800 links to railroad related web sites can be found at trainweb. And, consulting The Google, I located a layout for the Santa Fe Prescott & Arizona RR. It includes models of Prescott and two other towns.

My Favorite Succulent

Do you ever dig really, really, really deep into a matter, so much so that you have to learn everything about the subject or collect one of every kind? That happened to me with the plant called sedum. It's a common enough garden plant, tho almost never a feature. Rather, the stonecrop is often used as ground cover or as a rock garden specimen. Fortunately for those of us with decayed granite as our "soil," most sedums need good drainage.

Stonecrops come big and small. For example, the plant above is a large succulent, featuring big clusters of pink blossoms in late summer. Most sedums bloom white or yellow, but that is not their strong feature.

Here are two of the more common varieties (above and below.) My imagination was captured by the many leaf forms of the species and so I collected samples from nurseries here in Arizona and when I was last in Memphis and in Victoria BC. (Yes, I am a common criminal who snuck live vegetable matter and wildflower seeds across the border. Bad GrannyJ.) And if I see an interesting new variation in your garden, I'm likely to snag a sprig, since the odds are that it will easily take root -- and you won't notice that it's missing.

This is one of the better ground covers; a nice grey green.

Only one small variation in leaf form distinguishes this pair: the individual leaflets on the plant above are quite orderly, while those on the form below are more helter-skelter.

This is another large form for covering a lot of ground; the similar plant below is, I believe, a native to this area. It really must be, as it is likely to take over any area where it gets a start.

These two different varieties are a brighter green, which leads me to believe that they need more water. In any event, I give it to them and they prosper.

Here are two very small sedum plants which I'm quite fond of. I particularly like the very small compact guy below, though he gets a bit messy after blossoming.

I am by no means alone in this fascination with sedums. Turns out the Brits have, in time-honored British fashion, formed The Sedum Society, the founder of which wrote the vade mecum on the subject, Sedums: Cultivated Stonecrops. It's a production of Timber Press, publishers who must have my number, because they also publish a beautiful and comprehensive book on another of my favorites -- penstemons.

One final, curious note before I close the book on sedums -- have you ever heard of a sedum roof over a shed or larger structure? Another British concept, much like the old sod roofs cultivated by pioneers in the Plains States:

A sedum roof is like a living carpet. Sedums are low-growing succulents - plants with thick fleshy leaves and stems, which makes them particularly suitable for growing in the inhospitable conditions found on a roof. Native sedums, such as Sedum album, can be seen growing in very hostile conditions such as on dry stone walls, cliffs and Cotswold rooftops. Plants on a sedum roof have to be able to withstand periods of low rainfall, strong drying winds and sun, and they have to grow with the minimum of growing medium.

Oops Note: Just in case you haven't had it up to here with sedums, I did find a site with zillions of photos of stonecrops and other succulents. And while I have you by the coat lapels, here are two very interesting links sent me by the SIL this morning: an Arizona drought map and a site for railroad passengers to trade stories.