Uploaded January 2015 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
On a trip to Portland in September, 2014, I took a detour to the Northern California coast to ride the Skunk Train at Fort Bragg. On the first day of my trip I passed through Willits where the Skunk line’s tracks to Fort Bragg meet the abandoned Northwestern Pacific’s tracks that travel south to Napa. I stopped at the station to check things out and was just in time for the return of motor car M100 from its daily excursion.
After passing me in the parking lot, the engineer/motorman Jim Baskin invited me to ride with him around the wye as he turned the car around. The vehicle has the look of a school bus (yellow paint, rigid bench seats) and is powered by a small Cummings diesel engine connected to a manual transmission and chain drive to the front trucks. It was a short but interesting trip as we discussed various railroad topics.
On a trip to Portland in September, 2014, I took a detour to the Northern California coast to ride the Skunk Train at Fort Bragg. On the first day of my trip I passed through Willits where the Skunk line’s tracks to Fort Bragg meet the abandoned Northwestern Pacific’s tracks that travel south to Napa. I stopped at the station to check things out and was just in time for the return of motor car M100 from its daily excursion.
After passing me in the parking lot, the engineer/motorman Jim Baskin invited me to ride with him around the wye as he turned the car around. The vehicle has the look of a school bus (yellow paint, rigid bench seats) and is powered by a small Cummings diesel engine connected to a manual transmission and chain drive to the front trucks. It was a short but interesting trip as we discussed various railroad topics.
