The Antidote to Amtrak: The Napa Valley Wine Train

Imagine traveling in an elegant dining car, full of handsomely dressed passengers, sitting down to tables laid out with white linen, beautiful china and silverware, as you enjoy a meal of chicken prosciutto, baked and stuffed with layers of sauteed spinach, wild mushrooms and provolone cheese with sun dried tomatoes and wild mushroom sauce. Lush fields of California grapes slowly roll by at about ten miles an hour. A few cars ahead, a pair of champagne, burgundy and grapeleaf green Alco FPA-4 locomotives are cutting through the air with their classic blunt noses, with the odd belch of black smoke as a reminder of their turbocharged engines.

Sound like something out of the 1950s, long since vanquished by generic Amtrak Amfleet cars that resemble airplane interiors serving "Amfood" of styrofoam hamburgers and Diet Cokes? Actually, it's a scene that's recreated everyday on the Napa Valley Wine Train.

The Napa Valley Wine Train Incorporated was formed in 1984. It purchased 21 miles of track and 125 acres of right-of-way land for $2.25 million in April 1987 from Southern Pacific, which had owned the line since 1885, when it purchased the Napa Valley Railroad, which had been founded in 1864. The line, which now includes 36 miles of track runs from Roctram (south of the city of Napa) to north of the Krug Winery, which in turn is north of the city of St. Helena, with stops at Yountville, Oakville, Rutherford, and St. Helena. Passengers on the Wine Train roll by 26 different wineries on their trip, which typically lasts about three hours, returning back to the downtown Napa station from which it departs.

Lou Schuyler, the NVWT's first employee and currently their chief engineer, worked this line when he was employed by the SP. Now in his mid-80s, he says that by the early 1980s, the SP "was giving all their business to the piggyback service. And when they got most of their businesses on the piggyback service, that's when they applied to the ICC for abandonment."

So in 1984, Schuyler gathered nearly 9,000-signed petitions asking the Napa county supervisors to purchase the line. After a public vote, the measure was defeated, but in 1986, a private group, Napa Valley Wine Train, Inc., raised funds to buy the line.

The railroad's chairman and principal shareholder is Vincent DeDomenico, who made his money as the principal inventor of Rice-a-Roni, a product sold by the Golden Grain Company, a business owned by DeDomenico's family until Quaker Oats purchased it in 1986. Golden Grain also owned the famous Ghiradelli Chocolate Company of San Francisco. Today, DeDomenico is vice president of the US chapter of the Confrerie de la Chaine des Rotisseurs, one of the world's foremost wine and food societies.

Article Author: Ed Driscoll

Visit Ed Driscoll's author page — Ed Driscoll's Blog