#walking trail

Andi, Joshi, Aaron, and idk on the walking trail

Awesome shot

The Virginia Trail is one of several parks I'd been saving for a day when I could take a long walk and do the whole trail. Then in the middle of day scheduled to be exhausting, I was gravitating toward Roseburg Square because it's my happy place -- as a kid, I used to walk here with my grandfather, along the Tidewater Southern railroad tracks that have been replaced with a walk-jog-bike path. I even went to the little zoo that used to be there.

I figured the point of this park project is to identify interesting spots to hang out or walk, so darn it, I was going to get a cup of froyo at the Yogurt Mill and sit on the benches along the Virginia Trail at Roseburg.

It's delightful. The flat spot with benches has a plaque commemorating when it was the Motor Car Shed for Tidewater Southern. I don't recall the shed at all, but there are a lot of sheds around here. As a child, I would not have questioned the existence of one more shed.

Not remembering the little track maintenance cars is something I am kicking myself for. Speeders are hella cute. They were largely replaced by specially equipped pickup trucks in the 1990s, but they now show up at railroad museums sometimes.

You would think a railway named Tidewater Southern would be, idk, in the tidewater south, but nope. It linked Stockton with Turlock and points south, via Modesto. I had not known that in the 1910s, there was streetcar service from Modesto to Stockton. They can revive that any time, please.

Since Tidewater Southern ran street cars, they had overhead wires. What I did not realize was that the trains running down the middle of Ninth Street had been electrified until they switched to diesel. Until the mid-1960s, Ninth Street was US-99, the major highway from Canada to Mexico. I don't mean that it was Business-99. It was the actual highway, with trains running down the middle.

Dad remembers the separated channel being dug for US-99 when he was in high school in the early 1960s. In 1972, the highway was decommissioned and became CA-99. By that time, it was substantially freeway-ized through Modesto, though the second-to-last stop light (the one in Keyes) wasn't removed until the 1980s.

Ninth Street remained a major street -- it's the easiest route from downtown to places like the community college west campus -- so everyone my age has a memory of sitting in the left turn lane, waiting for a gap in traffic, while a freight train is bearing down on you from behind.