What were you doing 81 years ago?
If you’re Bill Provines, it was your first day on “the best job I ever had.” Provines, now 98, worked summers as a fireman for the Mt. Tamalpais & Muir Woods Scenic Railway—in the sweaty cabs of steam engines that twisted and turned while taking elegantly dressed tourists to the top of Mount Tam. And Provines remembers it all, in vivid detail.
Today, walking from sun into shade in Mill Valley’s lower Blithedale Canyon, he recalls the sound he heard as his train rolled through this turn: “The clanging of the bell reflected off the corner of that building and straight into the cab where I sat.” In a grove of trees near downtown Mill Valley, he draws his toe along a ridge of cement and stirs up another memory. “This was the edge of the service pit, where they would climb under the locomotives to work on them.”
“Anyway, we left here and headed for the top,” he goes on. “Thomas got off at the summit, saying he had business to take care of. He asked if I’d be OK. Charlie Stocker, the white-haired engineer, said, ‘I’ll keep an eye on him.’”
Provines remains proud of his work in the gritty steam engines of the railway. He spent summers from 1926 through 1929, while still a student, working seven days a week in the hot, cramped cabs and “loved every minute of it,” he insists. Specifically, he loved the “somewhat sweet smell of the warm fuel oil,” the “heat that’d come off the boiler” and the “pulsing of the engine you’d feel as it worked its way up the mountain.”
At age 18, Provines was responsible for controlling the steam pressure required to power a Shay locomotive up the steep mountain. “If you were careless or inattentive, that quaint-looking steam locomotive could become a bomb with enough force to leave a crater in the mountainside or, in no time at all, rip through a train station,” he matter-of-factly recalls.
“I’ve never forgotten it,” he adds. “Railroading is the kind of thing that gets in your blood.”
Fred Runner is a historian for both the West Point Inn and the “Crookedest Railroad in the World.”