All Our Yesterdays – September 2025

    Welcome to a new column, set to run bi-monthly in The Orinda News and here to give readers a look back at Orinda’s past.
    Have you ever noticed an unpretentious little building near Bryant Way as you negotiate your way onto the CA-24 eastbound ramp? And have you perhaps promised yourself that one of these days you’re going to stop and find out just why an old wooden hut with a Chinese hip roof should be rubbing shoulders with the likes of Casa Orinda and Mash Gas & Food?
    It’s actually one of the few 19th century structures still standing in Orinda, a lone witness to Orinda’s short-lived age of steam, which made a brief appearance in the 1890s and had disappeared by the turn of the century.
    It was America’s Gilded Age – a time when robber barons were laying railroad tracks across the countryside as fast as they could, and people like J.S. Emery, president of The California & Nevada Railroad, were jumping on the bandwagon.
    The plan, in 1884, was to establish a three-foot narrow-gauge railroad that would begin in Emeryville, continue east across the Sierra Nevada to the gold mining town of Bodie, and into Utah where it would connect with the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad.
    Formidable plans for something that today would amount to a 1,200-mile car journey.
    By 1886, railroad track had been laid only as far as San Pablo, and it was to be another five years before the majestic coal-burning Locomotive No.3 steamed into Orinda, with engineer H. Aleck Robertson and fireman George Pope at the controls.
    In 1891, the California and Nevada Railroad published a schedule promising “A Sunday Excursion from San Francisco to Orinda.” Day trippers would first catch boats “at the foot of Market Street” and two hours and 38 minutes later, if all went according to plan, they might arrive in Orinda.
    Timetables, even in the high-tech 2020s, rarely deliver quite what they promise, but in the 1890s they were more likely to have been, as Samuel Johnson once remarked about second marriages, “a triumph of hope over experience.”
    After an interminable journey, the train finally arrived at its 18th stop, Orinda Park.
    From there, it traversed a vertiginous wooden trestle above what is now the 18th fairway of the Orinda Country Club golf course, stopped at the de Laveaga station, and then crossed the Lauterwasser Creek before passing the 1896 Santa Maria Church (demolished in 1955).
    It proceeded across a smaller trestle, one lone stick of which can still be seen at the Community Park, until finally stopping at Bryant’s Corner (named after San Francisco Mayor, A.J. Bryant, who owned a summer house in Orinda), where picnickers were rewarded with a dance platform and live music.
    Five or so hours later, the locomotive retraced its steps to Emeryville, going backwards all the way.
    “We have found,” written in an 1893 article in the publication, “Hayseed Siftings” – precursor to the Orinda Times – “that a railroad train is very convenient, even if not always on time. And that a railroad not on time is better than no train at all.”
    And so it was with the California and Nevada Railroad. Crowds gathered for a “rheumatic locomotive” that rarely adhered to the timetable, but was much beloved by day-trippers and picnickers and proved useful to farmers transporting hay and harvests to the Emeryville docks.
    During the rainy season, the carriage roofs leaked so badly that passengers often spent the entire journey under umbrellas. Added to which, at least once a week, embers from the engine set fire to hay fields as it chugged by.
    And then there was the notoriously swampy “Frenchman’s curve” where the train derailed so frequently that the crew kept blocks and a 20-foot lever permanently on hand to jack the wheels back into place – with half the passengers down on the track adding some heft.
    The little de Laveaga train station was moved from its original location when work began on the new golf course in the 1920s. For several decades, it served as a toolshed on the de Laveaga property, until 1999 when Eagle Scout Andrew Stewart, a direct de Laveaga descendant, and his Troop 303 buddies embarked on a 100-hour project to move the 10-foot by 16-foot building to its new location.
    Now it sits near a freeway on-ramp and is part of the historical walking tour offered by the Orinda Historical Society.
    Sadly, the California and Nevada Railroad never made it all the way to Bodie. In fact it never progressed beyond the 23 miles of track running from Emeryville to Orinda.
    Grading work from Moraga Way to Glorietta began in 1893, but the entire enterprise was so beset by disaster that the dream was allowed to die.
    By the time the Gilded Age was over, so too was the railroad that had delivered so much fun and frustration. Curiously, though, when Orinda’s brand new BART station opened in 1976, it was found to be only a quarter mile from the terminus of the Victorian locomotive No. 3.
   
President of the Orinda Historical Society, Alison Burns is also author of the Arcadia book, “Images of America: Orinda.”