Sacramento’s most well-known holiday train wasn’t due to run for three months, but Robert Smith was busy doing an electrical upgrade for it.
Smith, a California State Railroad Museum Foundation employee, was inside the Southern Pacific Railway Workshops at the Sacramento Railyards. The foundation and California State Parks employees use the former boiler and erecting shops for maintenance and storage of historic trains, including ones that Smith had been tasked to work on.
“We run these cars on the Polar Express and everything is fed electrically off the last car on the train,” Smith said. “So we’re upgrading the connections to make it a little more reliable.”
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