Railtown 1897
— — the steam the camera kept coming back for.
Not only on a wall.
“The 1897 Sierra Railway roundhouse still works the way it was built. Six stalls, a hand-cranked turntable, the smell of coal smoke and oil. Locomotive No. 3, an 1891 Rogers ten-wheeler, has rolled through more than two hundred films and television shows since the studios first came up the foothills in the 1920s. High Noon, Petticoat Junction, Back to the Future Part III. On steam-up Saturdays the whistle carries down Fifth Avenue and the town of Jamestown stops to listen for a beat. Tuolumne County keeps its working trains where it found them. — from the studio
Railtown 1897, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Railtown 1897 State Historic Park sits on a 26-acre site at the south end of Jamestown, a Gold Country town in Tuolumne County, California, at about 1,400 feet of elevation in the western Sierra foothills. The site is the original headquarters and shop complex of the Sierra Railway of California, chartered in 1897 to move lumber, ore, and cattle between the foothill towns and the Central Valley mainline at Oakdale. California State Parks took over the property in 1982, and the volunteer-run park preserves the working roundhouse, the 1910 belt-driven machine shop, and the steam locomotives that still rotate on the hand-cranked turntable.
The park grounds and roundhouse tour are open Friday through Sunday for most of the year, with a small day-use fee that covers a guided walk through the shop floor and the locomotive bays. Steam-powered excursion trains run on a published schedule from spring through early autumn, usually April to October, pulling vintage coaches on a six-mile loop through the foothill oak country toward Chinese Camp. Off-season weekends a diesel sometimes substitutes for the steam locomotive. The park is roughly a four-hour drive from San Francisco by way of Manteca and Highway 108, and about thirty minutes south of Sonora.
Hollywood has been bringing cameras to the Jamestown roundhouse since 1919, and the count of feature films, television episodes, and commercials shot on the property is now well over two hundred. Locomotive No. 3, built by the Rogers Locomotive Works in 1891 and acquired by the Sierra Railway in 1897, is the most-filmed steam engine in motion-picture history — it appears in High Noon (1952), the long run of Petticoat Junction in the 1960s, and Back to the Future Part III in 1990. The park has earned the informal title The Movie Railroad and is a National Register of Historic Places site.