Then and now: Train travel into the basin

Trains used to come from Truckee to Tahoe City. Photo/Lake Tahoe Master Framing

The old railroad line is now a bike path. Photo/Google Earth

The black and white photo is hand-captioned “Engine #2 Along the Truckee River 1911.” Southern Pacific replaced the original narrow-gauge rails with standard gauge in 1926.

Those rails were removed permanently in 1942 for scrap iron needed during World War II.

The color photo shows today’s bicycle path on that historic rail bed, running along Highway 89 near Tahoe City.

The two (blurry) sepia tone images are single movie frames from a 16mm travelogue filmed in 1930 (Lake Tahoe Historical Society Museum). The train would loop near Tahoe Tavern, meet the steamers Tahoe and Nevada on a pier at Tahoe City, and then make the 1-hour, 15-minute return trip to Truckee.

— Bill Kingman