We went to Celebration in the Oaks at City Park just before they closed at the end of the Christmas season. One of the highlights of the walking tour is the Model Train Garden, which re-creates several historic New Orleans neighborhoods and has (I think) five train lines running, including Southern Pacific and Southern Railway passenger trains, a Union Pacific freight train, and a New Orleans Public Belt Railroad engine towing freight cars. The garden has been lovingly restored after Katrina by a group of dedicated model train enthusiasts. The floodwaters did not come up to the level of the tracks, I've been told, and the models of New Orleans houses had been brought inside before the storm came, so the garden didn't have to be completely re-created from scratch...but it was a huge job anyway.
Oh, did I mention? The garden includes three model streetcars, two of the old 1920s olive green ones (I think the designer is called Perley-Thomas) and one of the new red and yellow ones. And one of the old ones bears the number 952.
I spoke to the man who was in charge that night, and I told him, "I know the secret of number 952." He did, too. I said, "It's running on the Embarcadero line in San Francisco." Yes, he said. And then he told me something I didn't know: New Orleans traded it to San Francisco for one of their cable cars. He indicated the cable car was being stored somewhere in City Park. As for that model with the number 952, it's not in honor of the one we sent to San Francisco. That's just a coincidence. Oh well!
Now I am curious. We have a San Francisco cable car right here in New Orleans? But what on earth could we do with it? Those little cable cars that climb halfway to the stars run on cables under the street, going up and down very steep hills. It's not like we have any hills in New Orleans.
Except...we do have a hill in New Orleans. One.
Oh, I can see it now. A San Francisco cable car running up and down Monkey Hill in Audubon Park. Legend has it that Monkey Hill was created by the Works Progress Administration back in the Depression so the children of New Orleans would know what a hill is. I did my fair share of running up and down Monkey Hill when I was a child. Today, it's in the middle of the Audubon Zoological Garden. Probably not the ideal location for a cable car.
But hey, I can always dream, can't I?
I left my streetcar in San Francisco...and came home with a cable car.
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