We are in the final stages of production of a selection of 8 1/2 inch by 11 inch, 12-month calendars from The Blue Parrot and Private Car Service. Each month features an image and descriptive text. Calendars will be on sale with the price and shipping information to be announced shortly.

The Blue Parrot Calendar features views from Resorts and Theme Parks in California and Florida.

The Private Car Service Calendar features views from various private railcar excursions we have operated.

The Railroad Calendar features a collection of views from railroads, shortlines, museums and model railroads that we have been involved with over the years.

All images are either from the Collections of The Blue Parrot, Private Car Service, and Roger Colton, with additional photographers noted.

We hope that you will purchase one of these to support our operations.

Long time, no write.

Or to put it on grammatically correct terms, yes time has passed since I last sat down and blogged in this space.

I can’t plead at being busy. Still searching for meaningful employment, despite a great deal of promising leads. And there certainly has been no shortage of topics of note to comment on.

Okay, you caught me. I have simply been lazy.

So, let’s rectify that right here and now.

First, yes, the world is a changed place. But you know that by now, even if you have been living under a rock or spending time at the International Space Station. Speaking of which, how about those folk at Space X and their Dragon capsule making the flight from Florida and back again. Takes one back to the heady days of the Space Race. Yet, you can’t deny it was a good show and hopes for future adventures to come certainly are promising.

Second, there is no normal now that we have all experienced Covid-19 and quarantine because of it. Big gatherings, entertainment, sports, travel, tourism, hobbies, and theme parks have taken big hits because of it. Not to mention the impacts on folks working in those areas, many losing their jobs as the result. Not to forget, there are plenty of small businesses that have suffered from it as well. Many having closed their doors for the duration, many having done so permanently. Sadly, I fear we haven’t seen the last of this, no matter how we may wish otherwise. We won’t be clicking our heels and going back to Kansas or anywhere else soon.

Third, too many good people are gone now. Family, friends, artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, and the list goes on and on. Likely, there will be more before we get anything close to over.

Finally for today, we all have people to be grateful for. First responders, medical professionals, delivery drivers, teachers… and so many more. All doing their best to try and keep us going, as we adjust to whatever passes for “normal”, as it changes from day to day. Thanks to one and all, we couldn’t do this without you.

From me? I will try to do my part here by sharing some oldies but goodies from my years online. And I hope to share some new pieces with you, loyal readers.

Meanwhile… enjoy a favorite beverage with folks close at hand. Share a good story, a hearty laugh or even a good cry. Do it socially distant if you must, or across the distance if you can’t. Just do your part to add a little something to someone’s day. Right now, that can help out more than you know.

Until then, keep ’em flying.

Thank Spiro Agnew for the title of today’s opus.

Mr. Agnew, much like Mr. Trump, had an acrimonious relationship with members of the media. His quote may have been misdirected, but it does manage to hit the bullseye in a fashion. Certainly in today’s world of online and instant criticism of just about everything, the world certainly has more than its fair share of “nattering nabobs of negativism” on just about any subject you may care to check into.

Any outlet you care to look at has all of these folks you can shake the proverbial stick at. Twitter, led by the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, is a service built on instant gratifications. You can share you inner most thoughts on the latest and greatest with anyone willing to follow your feed. And while Pres 44 didn’t see the need to go online, even to the point of surrendering his Blackberry before taking office, I fear that going forward we will have some social media czar to oversee the word coming forth from the presidential keyboard. A bad habit to be sure, but one that too many followers have become addicted to, for better or worse.

It certainly doesn’t stop with Twitter. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube… Your dissemination channel of choice allows you to share what you did in the last 30 seconds with a wide and often well-targeted audience. From this corner of it all, it appears that we have gone from what used to be the standard of “get it right before you share it” to “get it before someone else does, even if you get it wrong”. Even more troubling is how getting a message crafted to influence an audience has become the most important thing.

Now, you have to excuse me. I grew up in an era when news and information was disseminated by trusted sources in newspapers, on radio and television, who in turn had to verify the subject with a reliable source. If you got something wrong, you had to retract that statement you made and offer an apology. Publicly! And if that happened more often than not, those trusted sources became not so trusted, often looking to explore other fields of endeavor.

Today, we just get cries of “fake news” and “alternative facts” if something turns out not to be as initially represented. And it’s on to the next news cycle before anyone has a chance to really set the record straight.

Sadly, this does not start or end with politics. You can see it played out in sports, entertainment (movies, tv, and theme parks), hospitality reviews and more on a daily basis. Take for example, Star Wars. There is a vocal group of fans who have used the online presence to spike response to anything they don’t care for in the Star Wars universe. You name it, if they don’t like it, they use the power of social media to share why they don’t like it. Actors, directors, writers, story points, cinematography… all have had their detractors and all of those willing to stand up and share in glorious 4K Technicolor with anyone who will listen just what it is (often in the most excruiating detail) they take issue with. And you can see just how the effect has been as box office takes have dropped with this latest trio of films. So much so, that the rumor mill is at work overtime on what the future holds for all parts of Disney’s Star Wars franchise.

You name it, we got folks willing to share. Especially if they can make a name for themselves in the process. And not just amateurs, either. The professionals at Fox News and other outlets around the greater media co-prosperity sphere of influence have taken the bit in their teeth and are in for the long haul. The 20 mule team has nothing on these folks. Information has become entertainment or infotainment, if you will. If it makes for a good sound byte or Tweet, that is all that matters.

“When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend.”

One of the guilty pleasures of sheltering in place here in the San Francisco Bay Area has been the opportunity to check out various YouTube channels. In particular, one subset of these has been a group of folks who share their travel experiences. While travel by rail has been part of this, the ones I tend to focus on have been the airline travel fans. (I won’t call them geeks, foamers or fanatics out of courtesy; I would do the same thing if I was traveling as they do.)

Over the years, I have managed to travel by air a fair amount. Trips into and out of the airports here (including San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose and even Concord’s Buchanan Field a couple of times) have often taken me to Southern California (including Los Angeles, Burbank, Ontario, Long Beach, Orange County and San Diego).

Among those airlines I traveled with California were PSA, AirCal, Southwest, United, US Air, Reno Air and Jet Blue. Flights beyond the Golden State have taken me to Honolulu, Las Vegas, Reno, Salt Lake, Denver, Dallas, Baltimore, Atlanta, Charlotte, Orlando, Tampa and Chicago. Those included flights with some of the previously mentioned carriers as well as Frontier, Delta, American and ATA.

Internationally, I can count my flights on one hand. In 1959, we flew across the Atlantic from Germany back to New York before traveling cross country in a new Renault sedan delivered to my father’s mother in Reno. In 2001, it was a flight on Delta from SFO to Frankfurt via Cincinnati. The return on that was supposed to be aboard Delta from Munich to JFK in New York and on to SFO. However, arriving at the counter for check in, we found that flight had been canceled and instead made a direct flight on Lufthansa.

So, while I don’t travel every week, a couple of flights here and there each year is about average for me. And while I don’t enjoy all of the elite goodies from frequent flyer clubs or miles, I like to think of myself as more than a novice passenger in the skies.

Many of the flights shown in these online adventures take advantage of First Class or Business Class for travel, and on rare occasions, even in coach with the rest of us mere mortals. On the whole, the folks doing these videos are a good bunch, but at times I wonder why they leave home and family?

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy watching these travels. Just as I enjoy taking a trip from point A to point B with a side trip to Point C and back to point A all over again. I have done my share of business travel but leisure is more my style. I tend to be not so worried about missing connections or late departures/arrivals. Travel is always an adventure in one way or another, so why not roll with the obstacles as they come?

In the brave new world of post pandemic travel, I expect we all will get to adapt to new rules and regulations. Just as we did in the post 911 era, things will be a challenge at times. Yet, I expect wanderlust will make it’s siren call and we will answer, wanting to see the globe, get out and about taking it all in again, even if cautiously to start with.

For those willing to brave the new world, one has to imagine airlines will do their best to entice us to go places again. Low fares will likely be one of the easy inducements, along with extra miles for those frequent flyer programs. After all, investments in aircraft just taking up runway space parked somewhere can only be written off so long. Already, a few airlines have started retirement of older aircraft, especially the Boeing 747’s. And more than a few airlines internationally have begun entering bankruptcy proceedings.

It certainly won’t be the same as it was before. But I hope that when it settles down, I will be back out there flying the skies at some point soon.

From 1906, at Crows Landing, CA on the Southern Pacific between Tracy and Fresno.

One of the joys of being home during the shelter in place for the quarantine for this virus has been the chance to go through some boxes; cleaning out the junk of accumulated years and find some long lost treasures.

One such experience was the opening of a box from years back and the finding of two similar sets of keys. The first ring of keys goes back to 1978 and my first days as a volunteer at the California Railway Museum at Rio Vista Junction, between Fairfield and Rio Vista, on State Highway 12 in Solano County. Initially, a group of young folks went up to the Junction just on a lark, but got involved in all kinds of ways. I became part of the Operating Department, first as a streetcar conductor and later as a motorman, running the electric cars. I also ended up often as the engineer on the electric locomotive whenever we needed to move various cars about the museum.

The museum keys? If memory serves, I had to put down a deposit on a switch key and a system B key. The switch key was a pattern once used by the Key System. The B key offered access to lesser items such as gates and other padlocks. Later keys added to the ring included a key to open coach door or locomotive cab door locks as well as shop door locks and others. (I haven’t been active at the Museum since the late 90’s and have heard that all the locks were changed at some point. Yet, I have all the memories associated with these keys.)

When the opportunity came along to get involved with a steam locomotive, I took it. The museum had entered into a long term lease agreement for four steam locomotives. One was already on display, having arrived on it’s own wheels in 1966. Two smaller locomotives from a lumber company in Oregon were trucked from storage in Oakland near the Bay Bridge. But the real attraction was a 1909 survivor that was to move on it’s own wheels. From the first time I saw her, I was well and truly hooked. And that led to a whole series of mis-adventures in those years and since…

Western Pacific steam locomotive 94 at Olcott siding on the Sacramento Northern mainline in Solano County, at twilight.

Now I have always had an interest in railroads. On my mother’s side, it was her father with his own Lionel trains that struck my fancy whenever the special moment came to set up the trains at his home in San Francisco. A classic prewar steam locomotive and a postwar diesel locomotive were always popular with me.

Genetically, I can find railroading as a career in the family going back to the early days along the Central Pacific and the Transcontinental Railroad across Utah and Nevada. A couple of seminal moments in the 1970’s really amped up my interest. Both are thanks to my father’s mother, who was living with her sister in Reno during this time. As a recently retired school teacher, she probably didn’t realize her role in my interest when she gave me a hardback copy of Beebe and Clegg’s 1949 “Virginia and Truckee: A Story of Virginia City And Comstock Times.” Suddenly, the literary door was open to the world of railroading in a way it had never been before. Visits to the Walnut Creek Library led to other volumes on all kinds of railroads.

Now I had already been exposed to railroading at a young age. My first cab ride in a diesel locomotive had come at the age of 3, when my great grandfather, Christopher Cameron Walker, arranged for a ride around the Sparks yard of the Southern Pacific with himself and my own father. In a bit of a throwback moment, my father had enjoyed many a ride with his grandfather on trips east from Sparks to Carlin (where they stayed with an uncle) and back again. These trips usually involved taking the diesel powered City of San Francisco one way and then bringing another passenger train the other with a steam locomotive, including some of the SP’s famed GS class and cab forwards. Chris was fortunate enough to have recorded an oral history with some local ladies during a Sparks historical event; and I have enjoyed listening to him in detail in the years since I first learned of it’s existence.

That was in 1976. It was the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I had been busy earlier in June after classes ended, with an internship at radio station KSFO in San Francisco. But when the chance came to head off to Reno, visiting my grandmother and aunt for a week, I was all for it. My railroading interest had been groomed by joining the local model railroad club as a member of the Boy Scout Explorer post. Here I found other people as nuts for interested in trains as I was. The real kicker on this visit to the Silver State? I was to be mobile on my own, driving solo in my grandmother’s Ford Mustang.

One place that was essential was the Nevada Historical Society above the University of Nevada’s Reno campus. They were (and still are) the keepers of the original reel-to-reel tape recordings of that oral history with Chris Walker from 1966. I have been back many times since.

A few other places and items of note from that adventure were the sightings of a few miscellaneous items in Reno/Sparks that summer. A former Key System bridge train had made it’s way to storage on a spur off the Western Pacific in Reno. Having sat out in the Sierra weather for almost 30 years at that point, it wasn’t in too bad a shape overall. But it later ended up being scrapped. Another was a former Virginia and Truckee motorcar body. Made of wood, the years had not been kind. It ended up in the collection of the Nevada State Railroad Museum in Carson City, where it collapsed under it’s own weight in a wind event.

Of course, I visited the Sparks yard of the SP again. And I did some early railfanning east and west of town. The real meat of the road trip was to be able to head off to Carson City to see the remaining Virginia and Truckee; the depot on Washington Street and the great stone enginehouse. And that summer saw then opening operations of the revived railroad in service in Virginia City. It was a grand, glorious adventure for a 17-year old train nut enthusiast.

The following summer after high school graduation, I went back to Reno for a bigger adventure. It turned out that I had other relatives who were still working for the SP in Sparks. One was a yard master, out on disability after a third heart attack. I met him for a long lunch at the Nugget (where we met Red Skelton, who was in town doing one of his many shows). We talked about family, the railroad, toured the old station (moved from Wadsworth in the summer of 1904) and yard tower. A visit to the “roundhouse” (a one stall, one locomotive length steel, pre-fab structure as compared to the larger brick roundhouse that had once stood nearby along with the large shop and back shop complex) included spending time with other railroaders who had worked with Chris.

In the end, the advice given that day was to go home, get some college years and then come back to the railroad. Good advice it was too, as the recession of the 80’s saw furloughs and lay-offs of many railroaders nationwide. And it lead to 26 years in a good job that was secure all of those.

A final element from that 1977 visit to Reno was to be gifted with a collection of photographs, newspaper clippings and a set of keys that my great grandfather had carried with him during his years in service. There is a coach key for cabooses and locomotives as well as other car doors. And a couple of well used switch keys from the SP. These were tools he used every day on the railroad and having them reminds me of that.

Over the years, I have added a few other keys including ones from the Western Pacific, Sacramento Northern and Pacific Electric. While I didn’t follow Chris onto the SP, I have my own railroad experiences thanks to him and others in our family. Finding these keys this past week was a good reminder of some fine memories of good people (and bad) and some fun times in interesting places. Here’s to more to come!