i am just back from a trip to the Gold Rush Country and Yosemite National Park. just outside the entrance to the Park at El Portal is the northern end of the Yosemite Valley Railway which ran from 1907 to 1945.

There is a 2 Truch Shay and a Baggage Caboose, a double water tank, a Switch Tower, a turntable pit and the station.

I hope some one knows the history of the Baggage Caboose. No lettering at all and a very old coat of primer paint.

The whole site looks very forlorne, it is outside NPS property , so I wonder who is responsible for it?

Ted Miles

I can tell you where to look for information about El Portal, Ted. (It's too long to summarize.) Go to either yosemitevalleyrr.com or yosemitevalleyrailroad.com, they both have a lot of information about this interesting shortline.

Randall,

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll give it a try!

Say hello to those C,A&E cars for me!

Ted Miles

Ted,

In a report in the Pacific Locomotive Assn newsletter "The Club Car" a group of members of the PLA, Yosemite Valley RR Historical Society and Yosemite National Park held a work weekend at El Portal on April 29-30. A rubber roof was put on the caboose, YV #15 along with painting the interior and the south side. The ceiling of the shay was also repainted.

The NPS owns the mini museum and as far as I know it is only through volunteer effort like this that the equipment is maintained.

The Shay is actually a three truck. It was built as the Hetch Hechy #6, later becoming Pickering Lumber #6.

Thank you for the information.

This is a wide spread problem within the NPS. Historic artifacts that happen to be in a natural park as in this case the Yosemite Park.

Thank you to the Pacific Locomotive Association volunteers for going on the road!

I think the Association once owned a Yosemite Yalley Railway car. Was it a steel baggage car?

Ted Miles

Yes, it is still operating on the Niles Canyon line. They have RPO baggage 107 and observation car 330.

RPO/Baggage YV107 and observation car YV 330 are the only Yosemite Valley passenger cars left in existance. There are a few YV cabooses around but no other passenger cars.

Toward the end of the YV operations a locomotive, the 107 and the 330 was the standard off season train. If we could get the #29 back from Mexico we could recreate those trains. The problem is that the 29 is now on display in a park in Vera Cruz, Mexico. It's good that the locomotive is being preserved but it's too bad that it's in a park. It makes it extreamly unlikely that we can ever get it back to California.