The Nevada Northern: It’s Worth a Trip To Ely

I last time I was in Ely, Nevada I was riding motorcycles with my Dad. I had a Honda XL600 and he was on a Suzuki 450 twin street bike. This must have been in the mid-1980’s because my XL600 was a 1983 model and the bike wasn’t that old at the time. We were traveling east on The Loneliest Highway, Nevada’s Route 50, and made a turn south onto, if not The Loneliest, a damn lonely Highway 93. In doing this we skirted Ely having never seen the main part of town or even realized it existed. The impression that there was nothing at Ely except a gas station and a sandblasted alien curio shop stuck with me for the next 35 years. Until I recently turned east off of Highway 50 onto 93 heading north: There was a whole town with streets and a downtown area! So not nothing after all.

Ely, Nevada has a cool, working train museum just a few blocks off the highway. Look, I love trains. I like riding on them. I like sitting nearby when they rip down the tracks at speed. I like waiting at crossing guards, how the train takes precedence. I like how engineers will still blow the whistle when you ride alongside on your motorcycle making that whistle-blowing arm motion. I like the wheels of the train flattening the pennies I put on the tracks. (If they don’t shake off.) I like riding motorcycles on old railroad right-of-ways and rotting black ties full of termites. I mean, my bathroom towel holders are bent railroad spikes, man. The older the train the better; steam trains are at the top of the list. You get dirty just looking at a steam engine. I like a train that sets fire to the countryside and consumes coal and water like a Saturn Five consumes rocket fuel. I guess I just like a train, you know?

Inside the Nevada Northern Railway yard you can wander through the old workshops where huge machinery worn smooth by decades of human interaction await the call. And the stuff still works! Lifetimes have been spent spinning these wheels. The day I visited the action was kind of slow, even the shop cat was nowhere to be found but I did see new bronze axle bearings waiting to be finished.

The star of any train museum is the Steam Engine. For all the reasons mentioned above. Imagine cross-country travel cut from 3 months to 3 days. Telegraph lines ran alongside railroad tracks sending messages thousands of miles at the speed of light. (minus a few relay stations) For their time and impact on society, these smoking water-spewing monsters make the Internet’s capabilities look like two rusty baked bean cans and a length of string.

Things used to be a lot snowier in the west, miles-long snow sheds were built in the Rockies and where the sheds petered out giant snow blowers cleared the tracks. This one looks to be in pretty good condition. I can spend hours poking around this place daydreaming about being alive in that era. Maybe I could have been the one spinning those wheels or repairing leaking heat exchangers.

Check in with the Nevada Northern (https://www.nnry.com) and be sure to get a ride on the old trains. They still operate on a schedule, just not when I was there. There’s a gift shop full of cool train-a-phernalia and cold drinks. I walked for hours but I’ll be going back to Ely again. I want to ride!

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Want more railroad stuff?  Hey, here’s a great railroad story about Old No. 463.  How about the Chattanooga Choo Choo? And another one about Golden Spike National Historic Site.  We’ve got two more train stories coming up real soon about the railroad museum in Sacramento and Big Boy (Ol’ No. 4014), too, so stay tuned!