http://www.agsem.com/cmcmahon.html

The story begins in 1978 when I was recuperating from heart surgery and my wife was having therapy for her cancer. We had time to wander around Vista and explore for whatever we found interesting. We ran across this small railroad down in southeast Vista at the Green Oak Boys and Girls Ranch, not operating but it looked good from a distance.

Time passed. Frances died. I was retired and I had joined the engine museum sometime earlier, so I got involved with doing things out there. I took on the job of assembling the Corliss engine on Steam Engine Row and in my spare time I chased around looking for abandoned farm machinery.

I remembered the railroad at the Boys and Girls Ranch and decided to check it out. I found it dismantled and on the way to the scrap yard. I found the director of the ranch and made a deal with him. I traded a pretty good farm row-crop tractor for the whole pile of locomotive, tender, three closed cars and all of the straight track. They wanted to keep all of the curved rails to build a horse corral.

I loaded the engine and tender on my trailer and displayed it at the June show of 1983 with a sign saying, “Would you like to see the Lonesome Polecat Engine run here at the Show?” One hundred fifty people signed to say they would and some even said they would help to do it. I convinced the Board that it would be a good attraction and with their permission and help I would build a passenger-carrying railroad.

It was not until October 1983 that it was ready to be operated. The first operation was the Dedication Ceremony to honor the memory of Nicole Novitsky, my granddaughter who had died a few months earlier at age five and one-half years.

The Dedication was held on the loading platform by the track. The Reverend Ralph Haynes of All Saints Church did the Blessings. I blew the whistle and rang the bell and off we went with 20 people aboard, all the way around the track, almost to the platform when the passenger cars derailed. Many hands from the enthusiastic spectators righted it and we finished the run.

The early history of the railroad is that it was built about 1956 for the pleasure of Los Angeles inner-city kids who were brought out to the country for recreation and biblical education. The Church that ran the camp also rehabbed skid-row drunks and used these men to do the maintenance of the camp.

One of these men was named Tex, the minister in charge, who was a railroad “buff.” Together they decided to build the RR, scrounging rail from an abandoned quarry just south of the camp and from local junkyards and auto wreckers. They laid almost one mile of track. Tex engineered the project and operated the train. Sometime later he left and the train suffered from lack of maintenance and stopped operating.

That’s where I come in, the story repeats. I moved to San Diego with my new wife Mildred, my successor died, others took over. Lack of maintenance finally stopped the operation, a tree fell on the locomotive, and there was talk of disposal. But thank the Lord, my friends Larry Thompson and Gary Clare showed up to save the project for a few more years.

Thank you, Larry and Gary, and all the others who helped in the beginning and on through the 20 some years of operation. *The name “Guajome and Sometime Lately Railroad” came to me in a dream. I thought it was funny and discarded it, but the next night the dream repeated and I liked it, so that’s what it became. Roughly transliterated it refers to the geographic location and to its irregularly scheduled method of operation.