Once Upon A Time in Placerville No. 12: Trains and Depots in (Mostly) Postcards

Good morning. Gold Country Sis Tina here. I am going to show you some postcards of the Southern Pacific Depot which was located in Placerville, California, and a few showing trains.

Trains no longer come into Placerville. I miss the sound of them. Now there are walking trails following the tracks. My favorite part of the trails goes from Dimity Road near where I used to work, to Smith Flat, where the Placerville Lumber Yard was located, and where I also used to live and work. It is a pretty, mostly shady, walk, taking you through black oaks, big leaf maples and ponderosa pine, past cute little homes nestled along a creek.

My sister Lori works at Whistle Stop Yogurt, and next door is a coffee shop in a little replica of this station, the Placerville Coffee Depot.

When we moved to Placerville, the "newer" Highway 50 had come through town and the depot had been moved to the other end of town.

 I love trying to see the old houses on the hillside. I bet they got tired of hearing the whistle blow.

Did this young fellow and his father just come home from a trip to Sacramento? I love the house on the hill, but oh, those stairs!

The tunnel the train is passing over is still there, not far from the yogurt shop,  between Main Street and the highway.

This is the building which became the depot in the 1950s, located on Mosquito Road. This little building is no longer there. I worked just past on the left at the El Dorado Irrigation District. A replica train station depot was also built here to provide parking and serve as a bus stop.

 This is the Shay No. 1 moving though Placerville on it's way to Camino.

This is not a postcard. Here the train has just passed the Courthouse and is on its way East between the old post office and highway 50. When I worked at the Courthouse in the eighties, we would be in the middle of a jury trial, and the train whistle would blow, and of course no one could hear what the witnesses were saying, so we would wait, and Judge Byrne would say "That's the l-o-n-g-w-i-n-d-e-d engineer!"

Missing the depot and the trains, once upon a time in Placerville...