Dispute over lease agreement puts East Bay’s Tilden Park Steam Train in jeopardy

By John Ramos

A dispute with the East Bay Regional Parks District over a lease agreement is jeopardizing one of the most beloved children’s attractions in the East Bay. The owner of the Tilden Park Steam Train says it cannot continue to operate without a long-term commitment from the district.

Whenever he rides the steam train, 5-year-old Daniel likes to be first in line so he can grab the seat just behind the engine.  He said he’s ridden the train so many times that he’s lost count.

“I don’t know, maybe a lot,” he said.  ” I rode this so much that I don’t know how many.”

Daniel knows the journey so well, he’s like a tour guide, pointing out different sights along the ride and hoping for something to happen that he said is very rare.

At $4 a ticket, the train is a popular outing for kids and their parents to do again and again. 

While other entertainment venues have suffered since the pandemic, the steam train is booming. That’s where the problem comes in.  

The operation needs to make some investment to maintain and expand its infrastructure. But owner Ellen Thomsen says that’s not even possible right now.

“We’ve always had long-term leases with the Park District, 20 years at a time, and for some reason, the last go-around, for the last seven years, we haven’t been able to get a lease,” Thomsen said.

She said they’ve had a draft proposal submitted for a long time and doesn’t know what the issue is.  

“But during [those] seven years that we’ve been trying to get a lease, the staff people that we’ve been trying to work with have changed 12 times. In seven years,” she said.  “And the new people that come in start reneging on stuff that was settled a long time ago.”

Because the operation, officially called the Redwood Valley Railway, has been operating on a month-to-month basis for seven years, Thomsen said they can’t even get permits to make any capital improvements to the operation.

“There’s a lot of maintenance things we have to do that have to be permitted,” she said.  “And we can’t do any of that now until we have a lease.”

Thomsen says she would hate to have to find a new home for her railroad, which for her has been a lifelong labor of love. The little trains, begun by her father Erich Thomsen in 1952, now run through a mature redwood forest planted as saplings by the railroad.

Dave Peterson is a retired airline pilot who, for the last four years, has worked the controls of the authentic scale-model steam locomotives.

“Well, I’ve been coming here since I was a little kid,” he said, as the train chugged along the 1.25-mile track.  “We’ve had people here who are grandparents who were kids when their grandparents brought them.”

There are four engines in all, each capturing — in miniature form — the romance of the mighty “iron horse” that propelled a nation into a new age of steel and steam.  Meanwhile, Daniel captured the dream of keeping that history alive by one day owning his own locomotive.

“Because I like trains and I’m planning to make a train myself,” he said. “Yeah, I think so.”

Thomsen, who just turned 70, says she is asking for a ten-year lease, with another 10-year option.  She says she would like to establish a nonprofit that can operate the railroad for the next 70 years.  

The Parks District declined to speak about the dispute but offered a statement saying it is committed to the railway’s continued operation with capital improvements that are “fire safe and meet all fire code requirements.” 

Whatever caused the lease negotiations to go off the rails, parents and kids alike hope the two sides will work together to get it back on track.