Chapter Notes: Puget Sound and Pacific (Destination Unknown) · 1:32am Mar 11th, 2022
Centralia’s a good place to bathe, get some food, and then head west. The Pacific’s not that far anymore; it’s even within a few day’s flying distance if Sweetsong can’t find a train.
Special thanks to AlwaysDressesInStyle for pre-reading, penguincascadia for local Washington information, and TomRedlion for some railroad-specific information and Centralia-specific information!
Tiki bars became started becoming popular in the 30s, spurred on by an interest in the South Pacific. “Don the Beachcomber” and “Trader Vic’s” were two trendestters (in Hollywood and Oakland, respectively). They typically had Pacific Island décor (Hula girls, tiki masks, black velvet paintings, etc.) and exotic cocktails, over the next couple of decades they started popping up everywhere. By the 70s, though, people were interested in other things, and the style fell out of favor.
More recently, there’s been a revival of tiki bars (Detroit, for example, had a Trader Vic’s until the 70s, and now it’s got them again) and other tiki themed restaurants.
The Tiki Taphouse falls into that category; not only do they serve a wide variety of craft beers—and I would imagine cocktails, although I haven’t been able to find a cocktail menu for them online*—but also “Island-inspired pizza.”
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*perhaps this ‘menu not found’ is related to their address.
The Spamango Bay is a Hawaiian pizza with a twist, and it’s possibly not the strangest flavor combo on the menu (your opinion may vary).
Here’s a brief article (with video) about the restaurant.
“Barley wine” is a specific type of high-proof beer—despite the ‘wine’ in its name, it’s not wine since it’s made from grain, not fruit. It gets that because it has a similar proof (alcohol content) to wine. They’re typically made with barley (hence the other half of the name) but they don’t have to be.
Historically, beer was also sometimes called barleywine. Interestingly, back before there were hops to put in beer, brewers tried mixes of herbs (or other plants) to flavor the beer; this was known as gruit. The commonly-included herbs included heather, ground ivy, horehound, mugwort, sweet gale, and yarrow. Other ingredients could be added to taste or for other purposes . . . in some of the early Northern states in the US, pine was often added for the vitamin C, since getting citrus fruit in Maine in the wintertime wasn’t going to happen.
AlwaysDressesInStyle questioned why in the story it was spelled barleywine and not barley wine. Truth is, even in the Wikipedia article that mentions it, it’s spelled both ways in the same sentence.
The barleywine that Sweetsong is drinking is called Etymology by Fort George Brewery, and both they and the Tiki Taphouse call it “Barleywine,” so that’s the spelling I went with.
[I can’t find that beer mentioned on Ft. George’s web page or their blog*; however, it’s in a photograph of Tiki Taphouse’s beer menu (on Facebook), and it’s also mentioned on untapped.com with recent dates (early March 2022).
[*But I did more looking, and I found it mentioned on their Twitter!]
Source
The Puget Sound and Pacific Railroad is a short line in western Washington. Running on former Northern Pacific trackage (Northern Pacific—>Burlington Northern—>BNSF—>PSAP), the line originates in Centralia, runs up to Elma, and then goes east to Puget Sound or west to Grey’s Harbor. BNSF and UP locomotives are run across the line as well, although PS&P crews operate them.
The railroad was founded in 1997, originally by the ParkSierra Railgroup, which was purchased by RailAmerica, and then Genesee and Wyoming, their current owners, in 2012.
The color scheme of their locomotives is a common color scheme for Genesee and Wyoming owned railroads. I’m not going to list them all; there’s 122 that they own wholly or partially both in the US and abroad. Much like Kansas City Southern, they discovered that the best way to expand their empire wasn’t to build a new railroad, but to purchase already-built ones.
While railroads don’t always go where their name says that they do, from scanning down the list of Genesee and Wyoming railroads, it seems that short lines often pick the geographical location or a town or two the railroad serves (or a combo of those), which leads us to them owning both the Chattahoochee Bay Railroad and the Chattahoochee Industrial Railroad (presumably serving different locations in the same Chattahoochee); a few have more whimsical names, such as the Wiregrass Central Railroad. Since I know you’re curious, that runs from Waterford (Alabama) to Enterprise, Alabama. They do not, as far as I can tell, haul wiregrass . . . whatever that is.
[While this isn’t relevant to the story, several Michigan shortlines were acquired in the RailAmerica purchase. While I do understand the advantages of having a single corporate paint scheme for the locomotives, Michigan rails got a lot less colorful when the blues, yellows and whites of the Mid-Michigan Railroad and the Huron and Eastern were replaced with orange, yellow, and black.*]
Finally, I had to make a minor change in the last chapter. TomRedlion pointed out that what I had thought was a lumberyard was actually a garbage transloading facility. Looking at the site with this new information, I don’t know why I ever thought it was a lumberyard. Such is the benefit of hindsight.
In some ways, this is a minor departure from the previous song choices, and in some ways it’s not. Great Big Rolling Railroad was written as part of an advertising campaign for the Union Pacific Railroad in the 70s. Bill Fries got the proposal, noted that 1969 had been the 100th anniversary of the Golden Spike and decided to write a song for them.
Their president loved it, and according to Union Pacific’s own heritage page, “It became the basic music track for all Union Pacific TV commercials and even a nine-screen circloramic slide show for the Spokane World's Fair.”
You’d be forgiven for not knowing who Bill Fries is. He went on to write award-winning TV commercials for Old Home Bread, and the success of the songs in those commercials led Bill Fries to change his name and his career; in 1975 he released his first album under the name of C.W. McCall.
*While I’m unfamiliar with many of the railroads Genesee and Wyoming currently owns, I would imagine that there was a huge variety of not only paint schemes on those railroads, but also the equipment they operated would have been more eclectic and less corporate. For example, the original Huron and Eastern rostered 5 GP-9s (100-103, 105) and one GP-7 (104); of those, 100, 102, and 103 looked the same, 101 had a big snowplow on the front, 104 had a chopped nose and no dynamic brakes, and 105 was set up to run long-hood forward. Bells, horns, warning beacons, and side-skirts were also different on the units, since they were all purchased used from various different railroads. Paint schemes were similar but not identical across units.
Also, while it didn’t make the cut in the blog post, Bill Fries’ co-worker, Chip Davis, not only wrote songs for C.W. McCall, but Chip also founded Mannheim Steamroller. And, since no record label was interested in Mannheim Steamroller, he also started a record label.
I read that the ancient Egyptians had barley wine instead of beer. (i.e. poor folks drank it because they couldn't afford anything better.) Greeks had retsina which was carried in pine sap coated wineskins.
When I was young & foolish, I drank some.
It's an acquired taste. (Translation: it's horrible & you have to build up a tolerance.)
That last picture reminds me of a mineral line to the coast on the north east of Eanglad, UK. For some reason it does a big loop that origionally was close to the coast, but in the last satelite view I saw of it, was trying to pull a Canterlot on the cliff edge.
Trader Vic's may have been disappearing for years, but there's one in the Hilton in downtown Atlanta, and I've eaten there on several occasions.
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AFAIK agriculture and alcohol making marched pretty much in lockstep. It’s a way to preserve the grains or fruit for later, and it’s often safer than drinking the water. I learned from a Townsends video that green beer used to be a thing, it was mildly fermented and so it was bubbly and refreshing, but didn’t keep as long as a proper beer.
Same can be said for lots of things, honestly. Coffee’s pretty horrible and I got used to that.
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More than a few lines like that, especially close to coastlines or unstable cliff faces. Just a few days ago, Tom Scott did a video about the rockslide warning system a Scottish rail line has--it was invented in the 1800s and is cable-operated (if a rock breaks the cable, the signal changes) and they still use it because nobody’s come up with anything better.
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I’d never heard of it before I was doing research for the blog post. I did know about tiki bars although I can’t remember if I’ve ever been to one. I don’t think I have.
"*perhaps this ‘menu not found’ is related to their address."
?
[goes to page]
Oh. :D
Thanks for writing. :)
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Whereas kumis is delicious from the first swig!
Honest! How could fermented mare's milk be bad?
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