Virginia & Truckee is back from the dead, and it’s awesome

The odds of reconstructing a long-abandoned but legendary railroad from scratch are long, even in a gambling state like Nevada. But odds makers could have never foreseen the myriad funding that came together to rebuild a good chunk of the Virginia & Truckee branch between the state capital of Carson City and the mining town of Virginia City, where Mark Twain once ran the Territorial Enterprise newspaper.

On Monday, I was among 20 photographers who boarded a Trains & Travel charter with V&T (former Longview Portland & Northern) 2-8-0 No. 29 as power and two Lackawanna “Boonton” coaches tastefully painted green and yellow and named “Gold Hill”  (with gold lettering) and “Silver City” (with, appropriately, silver lettering) for communities the V&T served.
 
We traversed the two miles of railroad between Virginia City and Gold Hill that Bob Gray, and now his son Tom, have run as a tourist railroad since 1976, and then we proceeded onto the rebuilt V&T south toward Mound House. The rebuilt V&T reopened last year in mid-summer, and this will be its first year for full operations starting Memorial Day weekend. Monday’s outing was the first opportunity anyone has had to get out on the line and photograph it.

It’s a modern railroad, looking nothing like the original V&T with its 56-pound rail and little ballast. Today, it is 120-pound and 132-pound rail and shouldered ballast. It’s a 2 percent climb all the way to Gold Hill, and the best way to describe the sensation of riding this railroad through the sagebrush is to step into a model railroad of the old west, complete with wild horses. At tunnel No. 2, we saw the blending that is going on between the old and the new: The portal shows two dates, the original construction in 1869 and its reconstruction in 2009.
 
Imagine if you could bring back the New York, Ontario & Western in the northeast or the East Tennessee & Western North Carolina’s line to Boone, N.C., in the South. That’s the equivalent of what’s been done in the Silver State: A gamble that has paid off richly.

Read much more about this fascinating railroad and its resurrection in the August 2010 issue of Trains.