Here I go again...but this is another good one that should spark some responses: Remember the trains in Tiburon? The Northwest Pacific Railroad ran trains and had a wheelhouse there near downtown for over 80 years from the late 1880s through the late 1960s. As a kid growing up, we used to love to run along the tracks and sometimes try to jump onto the empty flat cars as they were moving along at a slow speed. An interesting bit of trivia about the Tiburon spur, and I bet very few know this: the first ever federal prisoners that were sent to Alcatraz in 1933 were actually brought through Tiburon in two specially designed rail cars. The windows were sealed tight, and armed guards were posted heavily throughout both trains because some of the depression's most notorious desparados like Public Enemy Number one, Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, the infamous Chicago gangster Al Capone (who spent 12 years on the "Rock" before dying of syphilis), and "Machine Gun" Kelly (who was the first to utter what later became a famous nickname "G-men", as he said "Don't shoot G-men, don't shoot!" when he was captured,) were all on that train. There was great concern among law enforcement authorities that some of the top gangsters still at large would try to sabotage the train and "spring" their buddies. That obviously never happened though, and part of the reason was that at the time, Tiburon was literally off the beaten path. Even in the 1960s, as a kid, I used to meet people from other parts of the Bay Area, and when I told I lived in Tiburon, they give me a puzzled look and said: "where is that?" This was before Tiburon was pounced by avaricious Real Estate developers and ruined! Anyway, the railroad was a big part of my childhood because you could always hear the train going "clickety-clack" from our house about a quarter of a mile away on the hill. The 4:30 whistle was also a Tiburon staple for years, as it roared each day at 4:30 PM like a fire alarm, and indicated that it was the end of the workday for the Tiburon railway workers. The whistle continued to blow up until the late 1970s, I think because long time residents liked the memories it brought back. Now a beautiful bike path runs along where the tracks used to go, and although it's probably a good thing that diesel belching trains are no longer chugging into Tiburon, I love the memory of those trains! Growing up with things like the sway backed horse Blackie, (died in 1966) the trains, the "Goat lady" (Rosie Veral), and "Papa Hugo" (an old man who was one of the original owners of one of the earlier markets in Tiburon, " Monagani's"...he had this wonderful old car that he had built himself and he used to drive it downtown and it would rumble along at only 20 miles an hour and cars would back up behind it!), were precious memories. They made living in Tiburon in the 1950s and 60s a truly small town experience, and a small window into what the world of the Bay Area was like in those days!