SilverRail: A RailCon

Many of my friends are spending this weekend at Con-Volution in the Bay Area, but Lisa and I attended a railroad convention instead. We spent all day today in Carson City at the first ever SilverRail Railroad Photography Exhibition. This amounted to a one-day railroad fan convention with maybe as many as 50 people attending, with dealers in the lobby of the Brewery Arts Center Performance Hall (a converted church), and the programming being a series of presentations on various rail-related subjects. For example, there was a presentation about the last days of electrified freight operations in Marysville-Yuba City on the Sacramento Northern. (The wires came down a few months before I was born in 1965.) There was another about the obscure Mina Subdivision of the Southern Pacific (now Union Pacific) Railroad, which branches off the mainline at Hazen, ten miles east of Fernley.

( Full Day in Carson City )

This was the first SilverRail fair, but I hope it will not be the last.