On the second day of Dad and Pam’s visit, we went for lunch at Foster’s Bighorn in Rio Vista. It’s an experience to eat with scores of animal heads, and indeed complete animals, looking down at you, or over you. Foster was a big game hunter who stuffed and mounted his trophies all himself, then eventually retired to open a restaurant and bar. (Yes, we have some characters out here in the Delta.
Lunch was just the prelude to our trip to the Western Railway Museum on Highway 12 in Solano County. I’ve always liked trains, though my husband is none too fond of them. Trains were once a major method of transportation in the United States, though it’s hard to believe it now in this land of freeways. (Here in the Delta, of course, a lot of people also traveled by boat, about which more eventually.)
The Western Railway Museum preserves the history of the interurban lines, the streetcars and light rail that connected local communities to each other and let people from small towns (like Oakley, say) get into the big cities to work. The train cars even included authentic advertising. This is definitely a place I’d take any of the nieces and nephews if they visited.
Our highly entertaining guides, Eric and Richard, explained the working of the old electric rail cars and of the new electricity-production facility through which we rode, the Shiloh Wind Farm, whose enormous stately blades turn at 20 RPM. Each one of those turbines can power 2,000 toasters, though quite why you would want to…
