My father's family for several generations back worked for railroads, in Missouri and then Marin. My grandfather was an engineer for NWP and then a manager. He had an oil painting that hung in his office of the ferryboat San Rafael. After he retired, it hung in my grandparents house for years. It was later sold to the Marin Museum up in San Rafael, I believe. I have to go up there and see if it is there, one of these days...
My father worked as a fireman for NWP as a teen and young adult. He left and went to work for MMWD after he got married, because he knew that there was no future in the railroad. He sometimes used to sleep at the station in downtown larkspur, I think the sushi place is there now.
Train work was dirty, hard and dangerous. Another thing was the infamous 3rd rail. My mother and her friends used to be terrified of falling onto the 3rd rail, which apparently was an electrified rail that was in between the regular rails. I don't know if it is an exageration or not.
As a kid, when they ripped up the tracks, I collected a bunch of the spikes. They must still be in my mother's basement, somewhere.
I remember walking through the tunnel from M.V. to C.M. around 1968 . We thought it was abandoned but were instructed that in case of a train comming through , to get in between the support pilings and hold on tight , because the train could suck you in due to the vacuum. I remember walking along the train tracks from Larkspur to Corte Madera , and from Mill Valley to Sausalito throught the sixtys. It was really sweet that they ripped out the tracks and paved the pedestrian/ multi use paths that exist today , everybody loves them. It's hard to imagine some old time train buffs would like to rip out our paths and put in tracks again. The trains had their time and place until about 1941, but the days of one circuit feeds all are long gone. I worked with people who worked for NWP in Tiburon , they said there was nothing glamorus about working for the RR. It was dirty , hard , noisy , dangerous , toxic and low paying work. A lot of the work was done by slave labor. I think these few old train buffs who want to bring trains back to Marin have lost their hearing and their memory. Good Riddance !
I remember walking the tunnel from Mill Valley to Corte Madera. Thinking the line was abandoned I took my time only to hear rumbling from the CM side about 100 yds away. running madly towards the noise I was facing a huge locomotive about to enter as I reached the mouth. I ran straight up the sheer wall just outside the tunnel and fell to the ground. The engineer stoped the train and asked if there were anymore fool kids in there."I don't think so."
Some trivia about the Whites Hill Tunnel, in the early '70's I worked as a seasonal firefighter for the county out of the Woodacre station on Railroad, the valley entrance to the Whites Hill tunnel was nearby to the south. After the railroad stopped using the tunnel it was utilized by county fire as a way to avoid the slow climb over Whites Hill, I don't know if all the trucks used it but I know the bulldozer transport truck did. One day enroute to a wildland fire the transport, driven by Tony Nunes was making it's way through the tunnel and about mid way through it must have snagged some of timber used to shore up the earth, evidently this caused a bit of a cave in behind the truck and luckily he stayed ahead of the falling debris & popped out the Fairfax side unscathed & proceeded to the fire.The firemen said that was the last time the tunnel was used as a shortcut, and I was told that the county had converted the Fairfax mouth into a storage facility of some type.
Does anyone remember the fire in the tunnel thru Porto Suello Hill? It was around 61-62?, it was a very big fire that cost the life of at least one fireman. This was huge news at the time because it was an arson fire. I went to school with the brother of one of the convicted arsons. Both guys went to prison for quite awhile. The tunnel was closed for quite sometime. I'm not sure if it is open now, but it did reopen.
You can find the remains of the 134-year-old lower White's Hill tunnel (this was the original route in use before they rerouted to Woodacre in 1904) by going to the end of the road past White Hill School, and walking up the old railroad grade. Look closely forward when the fire road begins to drop (train grades didn't drop) and follow the abandoned old grade into a curve where the short tunnel is. The upper tunnel portals have been covered by fill when they built the new Whites Hill road grade in 1938.
Also, the old south Tomales tunnel is still accessible, but on private property.
In the early '80's, my boyfriend and I walked about halfway through the Cal Park tunnel. We saw silhouettes of people on the other end, so we panicked and ran back out. The tunnel had been covered up with metal, but someone had cut open a door.
Sad to see the old trestle cut down. After Dirty Harry came out, my dad took me on a bike ride out to the trestle. He then walked out to the middle of the trestle and tried to convince me to go out with him. I only made it about 10 feet before I got too scared. That was my father/daughter Dirty Harry moment.....
Are the ends of the old Tiburon tunnels covered over? I always wanted to find out where the end was on the Corte Madera side.
Those were the days goofing off in the Trestle Glen (Reed Lands) tunnel. If I remember the tunnel curved so you didn't see the other end till you were a third of the way in and then you saw a small dot of light that looked so far away. When we got older being in the tunnel when the train comes thru was cool and very loud while hiding in the dark space between the pillars. I only did this once but walking across the trestle that crossed over Tibouon Blvd. was the scariest.
The Corte Madera tunnel caved in and swallowed some homeowners yards above it about 15 years ago.
I grew up walking, running, and riding motorcycles through the Cal Park Tunnel, (known to us at the time only as "The Tunnel"). The weird thing about it was that when you stood at the entrance and looked through, it seemed all light and bright but as you started walking the darkness would very slowly descend until it felt pitch black, cold, and both ends seemed a hundred miles away. It only got better... you'd start to hear things, see things, and assume there was a hobo about to touch your shoulder, so you'd start to run to the other side tripping over the railroad ties or each other. Once to the other side, the only way back home was through The Tunnel...It was AWESOME.
We walked through the Alto Tunnel once as kids but it was so dark, wet, and creepy, plus we thought there was not enough room for us and a train so we freaked out and high tailed it through and came back on streets.
We also found the entrance to a tunnel in east Corte Madera that comes out behind the school behind The Cove shopping center (called Marin Town & Country back then and not to be confused with Town & Country Village) which goes right back through another hill and comes out by Trestle Glen/Blackie's Pasture.
Fun exploring. Did anyone go through either tunnel under White's Hill, the Cal-Park (larkspur landing), or the Puerto Suello Hill (top of Lincoln Ave) tunnels ?
