Rail Festival Is Fillmore’s Ticket for Fun

The children were in 1840s heaven.

They couldn’t decide whether to pan for gold, gawk at gun-slinging “robbers” or pretend to chug through the fields atop a tractor.

So they did it all. Hundreds of children, pulling their parents by the hand, skipped through the Fillmore Spring Rail Festival, pointing, waving and staring in wonder.

The fifth annual festival, organized by the Santa Clara River Valley Railroad Historical Society, brought out train and engine buffs both young and old.

The five-hour steam train rides Saturday from Fillmore into nearby fruit-laden citrus orchards were packed with people. Fathers lifted daughters and sons into the seats of 20 vintage tractors in bright greens and reds. And the steaming barbecue grill had a continuous 20-minute line.

Sean Rose, 4, had come with his father and grandmother to see and ride the trains. He stood, frozen in place and wide-eyed, when four “robbers” ran through the train car with a group of swaggering sheriffs and marshals in hot pursuit.

One of the robbers tried to hand-cuff Sean, who had a herculean grip on his father’s thigh. But Sean’s tiny hand slipped right through the handcuff.

“I don’t think he’s distinguishing between the good guys and the bad guys,” said Annette Rose, his grandmother. “We came for the trains. He’s a real train buff.”

Just then the steam engine let out a big belch and Sean reached up to his father to put him on his shoulders for a better view.

“When we came a few days before, he saw a different train and said, ‘Oh that’s only a diesel,’ ” said his father, Jack Rose. “He loves the steam engines.”

Jim and Kathy Radek, both 53 and self-described train junkies, came from Hawthorne for the festival. “We go all around chasing trains,” Jim Radek said. “All the way to Indiana and Arkansas we follow the tracks if we can, camp near them and watch the trains go by.”

He said they ride the Metrolink commuter trains for fun, and he has 50 albums filled with train pictures.

The Southern Pacific railroad opened this line in 1887, allowing trains to transport freight between Saugus in Los Angeles County and Montalvo in Ventura.

These days freight trains on the tracks are rare and a murder mystery tourist train is the main rail user.

Tim Grush, a spokesman for Fillmore & Western Railway Co., which runs the train ride, said the trains appeal to people partly because of nostalgia. “The train’s allure is that you can see how people would travel when traveling was half the fun,” he said. “This is how life was over 100 years ago.”

And if you weren’t a railroad fan, there was plenty of other antique machinery to see.

Larry Lindgren, a Santa Paula citrus farmer, brought two tractors and said such machinery was as much a part of the landscape in the 19th century as trains.

“People had to have power and this was the way they got it,” he said pointing to a whirring, spinning series of single-cylinder engines, belts and metal contraptions linked together to manufacture a rope.

Lindgren said the Topa-Topa Flywheelers, the group that collects and showcases antique tractors at local festivals, was impressed with the crowd turnout.

“We were particularly delighted to see so many little kids,” he said. “They see these tractors on the field; now they have sat on them and pretended to drive, which puts them one step closer to understanding how agriculture works.”

There were several new activities at this year’s festival, including “You Can Be an Engineer,” a fund-raiser for the historical society’s railroad restoration efforts. For $40, would-be engineers were able to drive the Sespe, an 1891 steam engine. A real engineer accompanied the novices.

The historical society also showed off its latest acquisition, a bright yellow and gray 1956 Pullman sleeper car which had been on display by the tracks at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Barbara for more than 25 years.

The festival continues today from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Organizers expect more than 5,000 daily visitors.