Park’s Train Hobbyists Get Their Walking Papers

Has a dispute between railroad hobbyists and Los Angeles parks officials derailed an ambitious plan to construct a 1 1/2-mile passenger train track between Griffith Park’s Travel Town and the Los Angeles Zoo?

City Recreation and Parks administrators have booted out members of the Southern California Scenic Railway Assn. who spent 16 years helping maintain Travel Town’s tracks and rebuild an antique motorized trolley intended to carry visitors to the zoo.

Officials terminated last month the association’s permit to work at Travel Town and ordered the nonprofit group to remove its equipment from park property by the end of February.

Angry hobbyists assert that their ouster is the “final blow” to the long-proposed zoo train, which would have ferried Griffith Park visitors between the zoo’s parking lot and Travel Town.

They also contend that the city may be attempting to seize their group’s main assets -- two prized cabooses that they say they loaned to Travel Town but are now inaccessible to them.

For years, the association members gave visitors rides in the two red-painted cars, which were pulled around the Travel Town property by a small switch engine.

Parks officials deny the association’s assertions. They say the zoo train idea is still being considered, although the Scenic Railway Assn. won’t be involved in its construction or operation.

Officials say the city is willing to give up the two cabooses, even though they believe the cars actually belong to the city.

Travel Town administrator Linda Barth said the association’s permit had been terminated because bickering within the group had begun to hinder its effectiveness at the 50-year-old transportation museum.

“It dissolved into chaos. They weren’t doing any work anymore,” she said.

Scenic Railway members, meantime, have begun removing the collection of track and wooden ties they intended to use to build the zoo railroad. They are taking it to Fullerton, where they hope to help launch a new railroad museum.

“Those who are thinking of volunteering for the city of L.A. should know about this situation,” said Sue Kientz, the association’s board chairwoman.

“Those who rode the free Travel Town ride may want to know what happened to those people who cared to donate one weekend a month to give free rides to them and their children for all those years,” she said.

Kientz is a Pasadena resident who works with computers at JPL and became interested in trains after riding the New York subway system and the St. Charles Avenue trolley line in New Orleans.

Members of her group, she suggested, have been railroaded by the city because “they didn’t need all of us” at Travel Town.

The Scenic Railway Assn. -- whose 80 participants paid a minimum of $25 a year in dues to support their Travel Town work -- counted 118 members as recently as two years ago.

Members underwent monthly training to learn to operate Travel Town’s 44-ton diesel switch engine, used to pull the association’s 1928 Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe caboose and 1961 Southern Pacific “bay window” caboose. Over the years, they say, the two cars carried more than 100,000 visitors on short demonstration rides around the Travel Town grounds.

The training was based on traditional railroad standards. Newcomers to the association started out as “engine helpers” and advanced to become “brakemen,” “conductors,” “engine service engineers” and, finally, “train service engineers.”

During their years as city volunteers, group members claim to have re-laid more than two-thirds of Travel Town’s 3,000 feet of track and installed about 1,000 feet of new rails for the train rides.

Most of the association’s efforts went toward restoring a 72-year-old motorized trolley called the M.177 that was donated to the city in 1957 by the Santa Fe Railroad.

More than $115,000 and “over 12,000 person-hours of grueling volunteer labor” was pumped into the M.177, according to association president Gordon Bachlund, an engineering company project manager who lives in Monrovia.

The trolley refurbishing is about 60% finished.

The group’s goal was to eventually use the trolley to ferry visitors to the zoo. The proposed line was dubbed the “Crystal Springs and Cahuenga Valley Railway.”

Association leaders say their relationship with the city began souring a few years ago after an internal Scenic Railway squabble spilled into the Parks and Recreation Department.

Things deteriorated after that, with Bachlund acknowledging in a 2001 association newsletter “the increasingly unfriendly circumstances at Travel Town.”

In a swipe at parks officials, he wrote that work on the M.177 was delayed when “Mrs. Barth queried several of us individually about the paint we were planning to apply to the roof, and that exercise in nitpicking, feckless bureaucracy cost us even more time.”

Kientz blasts the city in the group’s latest newsletter for creating “a subtle ‘annoyance’ campaign” that was designed to cause the disintegration of the association. That campaign, she suggested, helped camouflage parks officials’ decision to scrap the proposed zoo railroad line.

“How sad,” Kientz wrote. “M.177 will have nowhere to go now.”

Barth, who has managed Travel Town for 17 years, said the city and the Scenic Railway Assn. enjoyed an “excellent relationship” until about five years ago, when the group started charging a $1 donation for its caboose ride.

“They collected around $40,000. It wasn’t clear where the money was going,” Barth said. “I have fat files of letters trying to get documentation on expenditures. Individual members of their board began fighting. It kept going on and on.”

The city finally decided to organize Travel Town’s volunteers so they reported directly to Recreation and Parks administrators instead of to a third party. Barth said the association’s criticism of her had no bearing on that decision.

Although the city feels the two cabooses were intended to be permanently donated to Travel Town, “I don’t think it’s in the city’s interest to get in a cat fight” over them, Barth said. Construction of a new locomotive shed has temporarily made the cabooses inaccessible, but the Scenic Railway Assn. can take them, she said.

“The primary purpose of Travel Town is not to provide a place for a club to drive cabooses back and forth,” Barth said.

The zoo train, which is expected to be included in a new Griffith Park master plan, will cost about $1 million, she said. No funding is available now, but professionals will lay tracks for the line along the south side of Zoo Drive when the day comes to build it, Barth said.

So the railroad hobbyists -- who say they accounted for all of the donations they collected for the city -- are packing up the last of their tons of rails and other equipment and hauling it off to Fullerton.

Last week, an association member using a forklift in the Travel Town parking lot was stopped by a parks administer who pulled up in a car and questioned him about the earlier removal of buckets of leftover train paint.

The official wanted to know if a qualified toxic-waste expert had handled it. Yes, the association member replied.

When the official drove off, the volunteer grinned. He’d simply gotten a friend to take away the unused paint, he admitted.

“What’s important is, it’s out of here,” he said. So is the Southern California Scenic Railway Assn.