{"id":914,"date":"2010-03-27T22:09:10","date_gmt":"2010-03-28T05:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/?p=914"},"modified":"2010-03-27T22:09:10","modified_gmt":"2010-03-28T05:09:10","slug":"big-steam-saturday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/?p=914","title":{"rendered":"Big Steam Saturday"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Robin and Sam and I went down to Niles Canyon today for their Spring Steam Weekend<\/a>, and we got to ride behind their Southern Pacific No. 2472 steam engine from Sunol to Niles and back. I was about to describe this locomotive to you as “a very serious piece of engineering,” but then I suddenly had qualms: maybe I was just so impressed by this hulking, churning collection of wheels and pistons and smoke because I’m a train novice, and anybody who was really serious about steam engines would say oh that’s nothing?<\/em> <\/p>\n

So I asked Sam, hey, how would you describe the SP 2472?<\/p>\n

“As a big black smoking monster of a machine that rumbled down the track like Zeus himself was driving it,” Sam said, immediately.<\/p>\n

So there you go. Here’s another picture, with a human in it for scale:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

They had a restored Pullman car<\/a> for the first-class passengers, but our family rode coach, in one of the open-air cars. The scenery was lovely, although I was too busy keeping an eagle eye on Robin to take many pictures. I got this one when we were going through the yard:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Afterwards the boy got to clamber around on some of the cars that were parked on a side track:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

“Look,” I said when Robin grabbed the wheel-thingy, “he’s driving the train!”<\/p>\n

“Yeah, not from that end,” said Sam. “That’s a caboose.”<\/p>\n

Then it got late, so we went home. Robin passed out in the car. It was a long day for a little engineer!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robin and Sam and I went down to Niles Canyon today for their Spring Steam Weekend, and we got to ride behind their Southern Pacific No. 2472 steam engine from Sunol to Niles and back. I was about to describe this locomotive to you as “a very serious piece of engineering,” but then I suddenly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=914"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":915,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914\/revisions\/915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}