Tioga Pass Trip : Ride from Los Angeles to Fullerton HD

Watch in High Definition! Here's the first part of the ride on the Tioga Pass Private Rail car coupled to Train 572. For those who haven't seen the preview or forgot, here's a refresher: The Tioga Pass is a Private Rail Car based out of Los Angeles and owned by Norm Orfall, who runs the car on Amtrak trains (particularly to San Diego) multiple times a month. On this particular trip, Bill, the owner of another private rail car, the Overland Trail, had a chartered party riding from Santa Ana and San Juan Capistrano to San Diego and back. Bill is quite a character and wears a full conductor's uniform on all of his charters. The Overland Trail is a lounge car and has a large open seating area, a bar, and a barber shop. However, the Overland Trail does not have a vestibule and side doors. Since it is a single level car, it also can't be reached from the bi-level Surfliner cars. So, in order to board the car, it needs another car that has a vestibule and side doors to accompany it. Bill asked Norm if the Tioga Pass could be used as a companion car on that trip to San Diego and back. Norm agreed, and because Bill was giving him compensation for the cost of the trip, he decided to make the Tioga Pass available for passengers on that particular trip for a lower than usual price. The Tioga Pass is a business car built by Canadian National in 1959. It includes a kitchen, 4 bedrooms, a dining area, a toilet and shower room, a smaller toilet room, the large observation and lounge room, and the open air vestibule and platform on the rear. The car can either receive power from a coupled train's HEP, a diesel generator on the car, or a backup battery. Norm runs the car on several scheduled trips each month and you can buy tickets for them, or charter the car for yourself at http://www.ridemytrain.com/schedule.php.

My dad, our friend Dave (who also knows Norm and has ridden his car many times) and I rode up to Los Angeles the previous day, slept over on the Tioga Pass in Amtrak's 8th Street Yards, and rode it from Los Angeles to San Diego while coupled to the Overland Trail and Southbound Amtrak Pacific Surfliner Train 572. Several more people boarded at Union Station and the car had about 15 people on it for the trip. The private party for the overland trail did not board until Santa Ana, so I took some video inside of it, which will be included in a later segment. This video is of the first segment of the ride between Los Angeles Union Station and Fullerton Station. It was shot straight out the back of the car on the rear platform giving an unhindered, uninterrupted view of the tracks behind the train as we wiz along at up to 75 MPH! Future segments were not filmed in their entirety, but I did on this particular segment because there is so much to see for the first 30 minutes of the ride. This is a sort of reverse "at the throttle" (Pentrex) style video. I know that some of the footage is the camera moving around, but I didn't want to make lots of cuts in the video. Please keep in mind that I had to hold onto a handhold with one hand and cradle the camera with the other hand to avoid being thrown off. I added a few captions when we passed points of interest such at 8th Street Yard, the Redondo Flyover, San Pedro Junction and Hobart Tower, Hobart Yard, Commerce, DT Junction, Los Nietos, Norwalk, Buena Park, and Fullerton. Apologies also for the near constant commentary by me and everybody else, but the rear platform can accommodate up to 15 people and everybody in the car took advantage of that. You can hear the BNSF Detector at Milepost 144.45 report no defects as the train passes over the diamond at Hobart.

Along the way, we saw the following trains:

Train 1: Our Train, Southbound Amtrak Pacific Surfliner Train 572. F59PHI 454, cabcar 6951, and the Overland Trail, and Tioga Pass.

Train 2: A Surfliner trainset sits in Union Station.

Train 3: Southbound Metrolink Antelope Valley Line Train 262 arrives in Union Station with an all Rotem Car trainset. Hyundai Rotem cabcar 642 leads and F59PH 873 trails.

Train 4: A Westbound BNSF Stack train passes just past Basta. BNSF ES44DC 7500 leads. BNSF C44-9W 4317, and ES44C4s 6611 and 6899 trail.

Stay tuned for the remainder of the trip to San Diego!

Visit http://www.bnsffan.webs.com/ for more awesome railfanning stuff.

Enjoy!