🚂 How did tiny trains climb these hills?

You're riding through Marin County, and Marin is lumpy, with hills everywhere you turn. About a hundred and fifty years ago, people built a train line right through these lumps. It was called the North Pacific Coast Railroad, and its tracks were skinny, only three feet apart, about as wide as a doorway. So how do you squeeze a train through all these hills? Skinny tracks can hug the curves. Let's follow one passenger.

It isn't a person. It's a giant redwood log. Up north near a place called Cazadero, workers load our log onto a little steam train. Off it chugs, almost ninety-three miles south, which is nearly a hundred! The railroad carried redwood lumber, dairy products and passengers, so our log has plenty of company. Try counting how many curves your car goes around in the next minute.

Our log is having the bumpiest field trip of its life. Then the tracks run out of land at a pier in Sausalito, with the bay in the way. Time for a boat! The log leaves the train and rides a ferry across the water to San Francisco. The skinny tracks were gone by the late 1930s. But some of the old train routes became roads and bike paths, so today people still travel along the trail the little trains carved through Marin.