No, it doesn′t look like a railroad, in fact, it looks more like a house built in the Southwestern style. So, why is it called the Railroad House here on this website?

The Railroad House was built some time during the early 1900′s, possibly as early as 1910. The builder had acquired two wooden railroad box cars and had them hauled onto the property, installed on concrete blocks side by side and then bolted the two box cars together to form one structure. Each box car was forty feet long and ten feet wide and when bolted together gave the house the dimensions of twenty feet wide by forty feet long. After the the structure was secured, a new roof structure was constructed over the box cars with an elevated facade in the front of the home.

Once the home was under roof, next in the project was to install wiring, plumbing and gas into the structure. Once the utilities were installed, then windows and doors were installed in the outside walls. Then, both the interior and exterior walls were finished and the interior flooring and fixtures were added.

Some time later, the front and side porches were added with the front porch having an overhead cover with terracotta roof tiles. This feature only made the southwestern style look even better. Then, sidewalks were installed, one from the street to the front porch steps, one around to the right (north) on the yard side and one around to the left (south) on the driveway side. Also, a large rear patio at the base of the rear entrance was included.

Once all the above work was finished, then with only a few exceptions, it look much like you see in the above photo.

Then, shortly after the railroad house became one hundred years old, Richard and Kim became the new owners.

By the time the above photo was taken, the home had already had most all of the old knob and tube wiring updated to modern romex, new wood floors installed, new double pain windows installed and many other interior improvements done.

However, the sidewalks had been left to the elements for many decades and truly needed to be refinished. Richard called me and asked if I would come to Yucaipa, California to help him with some work on their new home. I agreed and arrived by the end of February 2014, at which time, I would help Richard with any task that he requested. We put tar on the asphalt driveway entrance, trimmed trees, hauled trash to the dump and many other jobs.

During the time the jammer was parked at the Railroad House, Richard and I installed an RV station with electricity, water and even sewer.

Sometime during my stay at the Railroad House in 2014, Richard approached me with the idea of doing repair work on the concrete sidewalks around the Railroad House. We did a walk about to look at the condition of the sidewalks to see what it would entail.

The following photos are what the sidewalks looked like before I returned to begin the repairs.

I answered Richard and told him that I would do the repairs, however, the repairs would have to wait until another year during the early spring because by the time he had asked me to do the work, the temperatures were already becoming much to warm for me to work comfortably.

I had made plans to arrive in the spring of 2016, and by the end of March, I had begun work on the concrete sidewalks at the Railroad House.

By the second week of April 2016, I had completed restoring the cracked concrete to a new smooth surface. The following are the before and after photos.

To see more photos of the work, click on the Concrete link above.