The Yosemite Mountain Sugar Pine Railroad (YMSPRR) is a historic 3 ft (914 mm) narrow gauge railway with two operating steam train locomotives located near Fish Camp, California, in the Sierra National Forest near the southern entrance to Yosemite National Park. Rudy Stauffer organized the YMSPRR in 1961, utilizing historic railroad track, rolling stock and locomotives to construct a tourist line along the historic route of the Madera Sugar Pine Lumber Company.
Service began with the purchase of three-truck Shay locomotive No. 10 from the West Side Lumber Company railway of Tuolumne, California. Built in 1928, No. 10 was recognized as the largest narrow gauge Shay locomotive—and one of the last ever constructed. After his retirement in 1981, Rudy Stauffer was succeeded by his son, Max, as the railroad's owner and operator. In 1986, the YMSPRR purchased Shay No. 15—also a former West Side Lumber Company locomotive—from the West Side & Cherry Valley Railroad tourist line in Tuolumne.
The two steam locomotives operate daily during the summer months, while the railroad's Model A "Jenny" railcars, capable of carrying about a dozen passengers, typically handle operations during the off-season.
Read more about Yosemite Mountain Sugar Pine Railroad: History, Motive Power, Points of Interest
Famous quotes containing the words mountain, sugar, pine and/or railroad:
“We are wearied of our huts
And the smoky smell of our garments.
We are sick with desire of the sun
And the grass on the mountains.”
—Unknown. The Grass on the Mountain (l. 11–14)
“They give us a pair of cloth shorts twice a year for all our clothing. When we work in the sugar mills and catch our finger in the millstone, they cut off our hand; when we try to run away, they cut off our leg: both things have happened to me. It is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)
“When the chopper would praise a pine, he will commonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump; as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The worst enemy of good government is not our ignorant foreign voter, but our educated domestic railroad president, our prominent business man, our leading lawyer.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)