A Train and a Passion Keep on Chugging

The train cars are full and the fake western town deserted as Engineer Poppy clangs the bell. It is late winter at Long Beach’s El Dorado Regional Park and the afternoon sun is fading. About 30 passengers climb in as Engineer Poppy hollers “All Aboard,” for the day’s last ride.

The El Dorado Express chugs out of the station and around plastic farm animals as the engineer’s campy patter -- a standard on novelty trains -- begins. He is Henny Youngman in overalls. His one-liners end with a train whistle.

“Over there is our version of Lake Michigan,” Engineer Poppy says, pointing to a man-made duck pond. “I hear they got all their ducks lined up.”

Tooooooot, toot-toot!

Since 1995, this cheery-looking red train has been taking people on 15-minute rides around the eastern flank of the park. The train travels about 1.5 miles, and is open from 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday through Sunday.

Yet it remains relatively unknown to many locals. It isn’t widely advertised, nor visible, given its location more than a mile inside the park from the Spring Street entrance.

The father-son team of Tony and Greg Ruvolo run the train, with assorted relatives helping out.

Tony’s mother or daughter-in-law may sell tickets and old train magazines.

The Ruvolo men take turns as engineer, as does Tony’s cousin, Carlo San Paolo, who played Engineer Poppy one recent Sunday.

The family-run business is rewarding but hardly lucrative.

“On a day like today, it looks like it’s really cranking,” Tony Ruvolo says. And, indeed, the train is full all afternoon, with tickets $2 for adults, $1 for children.

“But there are days when we go home with $8. We don’t do this for the money.”

Father and son simply love trains.

From the first time Greg saw a train, “he took to them like ducks to water,” says Tony Ruvolo.

When Greg was 11, he and his father ran a train at the Pike waterfront amusement park in Long Beach. That lasted from about 1971 until the park closed in May 1979.

During that decade and right up to 1995, Tony Ruvolo also played drums in the house band at Cattleman’s Wharf, the late Disneyland-area restaurant that featured a kitschy, water-filled moat and theme dining rooms from movies such as “Gone With the Wind.”

The band got its big break in 1977 in a television musical-comedy show on Channel 9. It was called “The Larry Tatter Show” after its bandleader. But the show was yanked after a week.

As many an entertainer knows, the performing arts can be a fickle employer.

So along the way, Tony Ruvolo bought a hair salon in Cypress, where he still works a few days a week as a stylist.

Like its owners, the train has a quirky history. Built in 1947, it featured two cars and a steam engine that took three hours to warm up, Greg Ruvolo said.

Until the late 1960s, the train carried passengers through two Orange County parks.

By the early 1980s, it was moved to a mock western town in Colton, where it circled the place as cowboy gunfights were staged.

Colton Piano sponsored the Wild West town, which was sometimes used as a movie backdrop, Greg Ruvolo says.

At some point, the train broke down and was parked at the edge of town, rusting and forgotten.

Tony Ruvolo drove by it every day for a couple of years. He was wistful for his days on the Pike train.

When his son asked if he was interested in returning to the rails, they bought the train and spent years refurbishing it, replacing the train’s streamliner look with a western appearance.

Since its debut at El Dorado Regional Park, Greg, 41, has had to find ways to supplement the modest train income to support his wife and two children. He shares a portable fencing business with the park’s concessions operator. He installs phone systems.

And on Fridays, he arranges birthday parties beside the station (the package includes birthday cake, train whistle party favors and train tickets).

On Saturdays and Sundays, Greg is usually on board as the train’s engineer.

But Engineer Poppy is in the engine this Sunday, looking every bit the part, even though he still has his trucking company work shirt on beneath the overalls.

As the train slowly leaves the station, Andrei Kvapil, 7, sounds like he’s ridden these rails before.

“He’s just getting the engine warm,” says the Long Beach second-grader, “then he goes fast.”

The train travels behind the “town,” which engineers sometimes call Hickyville, with its brightly painted old western facade, complete with schoolhouse, saloon and jail.

Through a sheet-metal tunnel glowing with twinkling lights and vintage railroad gizmos, the train rocks gently. Minutes later, it slows to switch tracks.

It is 10 minutes past closing time, and San Paolo, the engineer, suggests passengers look east, where they can wave to their own shadows.

On the return loop, the train enters what the engineer calls “the El Dorado rain forest,” provoking giggles.

The “forest” turns out to be a tiny grove of trees a few yards from the whooshing 605 Freeway.

At the bend returning to town, the engineer points to a pile of dirt that he calls a “gold mine, the only gold in Long Beach. But it mostly has spiders.”

Tooooooot, toot-toot.