Niles Canyon Railway

05/22/2026

Come visit us this weekend during Railfair at Ardenwood Park and the home of the The Railroad Museum at Ardenwood - SPCRR. We will have our new tent setup along with our velocipede on display. Please stop by and say hi!

We have SO MANY exciting friends coming to Rail Fair next weekend! In addition to our model train layouts and our own museum displays, other museums from across the region will be sharing exhibits of their own.

NEW THIS YEAR: Transit! Representatives for ACE, Gold Runner, and CA High Speed Rail will be at Rail Fair. Stop by and say hi and see what's new with your local and state transit network.

Advance tickets are available! https://spcrr.org/rail-fair

05/21/2026

Just feels like a good day to watch our Clover Valley Lumber Co. #4 depart from our Niles Station as it crosses over Mission Bridge on its way into the canyon. Always fun to watch our engineers find our cameras. In this case, just a iPhone leaning up against a signal mast. Our train rides return in June to Sunol on the second weekend. We hope you will join us!

Reel courtesy of Christopher Hauf Photography

05/20/2026

After successfully completing the required Student Conductor training runs at the end of the May 9th operations, Gabriel Gleeson (pictured at center) was promoted to Conductor
by Trainmaster, Mark Miller. Gabe is very active with the Steam Department as well the Operations Department. Congratulations for a job well done!

Photo courtesy Steve Knoeck

05/19/2026

This past Saturday we found our Museum General Manager replacing the bushings on the bucket mount on our new to us Caterpillar front loader to get the back to round from their delivered worn oval shapes. While we do not have an extensive collection on heavy equipment, we do have a fair amount and are always seeking people interested in helping us maintain and operate it. Interested? Drop us a comment or a PM so we can help you get started. We should be able to show some pictures soon of the new Cat in action as it will help us with ballast loading along with material handing with the forks that came along with it.
05.16.2026

05/18/2026

We found a familiar face in the crowd this past Sunday as we helped celebrate Charlie Chaplin Days in Niles with departures of our weekend rides from our Niles Station. The man himself came for a ride and entertained our riders before and on our 10:30AM departure. We heard he had been at the Niles Film Museum that weekend which is another great local museum in Niles which people can visit. Downtown Niles offers many unique museums, shops, dining and more! A visit to the Niles Main Street Association will provide you more info on how to can make a day out of riding our Niles Canyon Railway and visiting the many businesses of downtown Niles. We have several offerings for June including our first Beer on the Rails train, weekend train rides, and Ride East rides using our M200 motorcar. Please visit our website for more details. And thanks Charlie for the visit!
All images courtesy of Christopher Hauf Photography

05/15/2026

Time for another as we dive into the John Semf Collection to find this print marked as processed in April 1999 of Steptoe Valley Mining & Smelting Co. #3 pulling our museum made 'Chrysocolla' passenger car as it waits for a switch to be thrown at the start of our Sunol Depot yard. Very early operations on our Niles Canyon Railway featured this combination. The #3 is now part of the collection of the Nevada Northern Railway.
John Semf Collection
Niles Canyon Railway
April 1999

05/14/2026

Do not miss your chance this June to Ride East! as our M200 motorcar will depart EASTBOUND from our Sunol station twice a day during all of our June operating days. More information and tickets at the link below.

Hop aboard our fully restored, self propelled ex-California Western M200 railbus for a unique experience of riding EAST of our Sunol station toward Pleasanton. During our June operating weekends in addition to our regular Sunol/Niles train rides, we are offering this unique chance to Ride East!

05/14/2026

We love it when our docents have a hype squad in our train crews! So like Tom here, are you known to rock a microphone? Then maybe we have a volunteer opportunity for you to helps us with. On each regular weekend train and even our special train rides and Train of Lights, we have a docent on board that uses our state-of-the-art on train PA system to announce both safety and useful info (like where to find the bathrooms and snack bar) to our passengers. They also share historical tidbits of info as the train travels down the tracks. We are in need of more docents for our trains and if this is your type of thing, we would love to hear from you. The scripts and info are already written. We just need people good at getting that info out over a PA. Interested? Drop us a comment or a PM here or jump over to our website to learn more as we still have openings for this year. We will leave a link in comments. Thanks!

05/12/2026

A nice day to tighten bolts... On Wednesdays, our Maintenance-of-Way crew goes to work on a variety of projects. One undertaken on a regular basis is to break out our long track wrenches and work our way along the railroad checking and tightening even bolt at the joints in our track. Last Wednesday, they started in Niles and began to work their way east. We have more wrenches and would love more hands to help. We will leave a link in the comments to our website where you can learn more.
Images courtesy of Steve Knoeck

05/11/2026

With the cab of Southern Pacific Railroad EMD SD-9 #5472 open while the Mars light was being repaired, we jumped in to grab some extra 360 degree photos for a project we are hoping to work on soon to better share some of the details of various pieces of our railroad equipment. While we were out grabbing the photos so as not to be seen in them as, well, the camera sees everywhere, this new engineer jumped in the seat to familiarize themselves with the cab and the controls. We think a booster seat might be needed, but glad they stopped by. It is a really neat locomotive. Go ahead and take a spin around the engineer's view of SP #5472!
05.09.2026