TECATE, MEXICO — The air is already laced with diesel fumes as the conductor shouts, "All aboard!" The engineer sounds the whistle, and the locomotive lurches forward.
Squeals of delight emanate from the passenger cars. This train ride is a first for many of the children. The adults share their excitement because they are setting off on a unique international adventure.
One or two Saturdays a month, nearly 250 passengers -- kids and grown-ups -- climb aboard the 1930s-era passenger cars in Campo in eastern San Diego County for the one-hour trip to Tecate, a town that provides a tranquil alternative to bustling and crime-ridden Tijuana, about 30 miles west.
Volunteers from the Pacific Southwest Railway Museum, which runs the trips, have restored the cars to their original appearance. Until they were retired in the mid-1980s, the cars trundled across northern New Jersey for more than five decades, carrying New York City commuters.
But now there's not a single suit-wearing, briefcase-carrying businessman in sight, and no one is forced to stand. (The original rattan was, thankfully, replaced with vinyl-covered foam about 30 years ago.)
The engine chugs along at 15 mph. Train aficionados, including Bob and Sandy Schussler, share the history of this stretch of track, which until the mid-1950s carried passengers traveling east from the coast.
"We are preserving the legacy of railroading in Southern California," says Bob Schussler, a former Marine who, with his wife, has spent more than a decade as an active volunteer with the museum. "I don't ever want to hear a little kid ask his father, 'Daddy, what's a train?' "
He tells visitors that the international railroad was built in the early 1900s to connect San Diego with the crop-rich Imperial Valley. Trains leaving San Diego traveled south into Tijuana before turning east. They remained on Mexican soil -- which was both flatter and cheaper than the land a few miles to the north in California -- until they were about 10 miles east of Tecate. Today's excursion trains travel on the same tracks that were laid nearly a century ago.
The point at which the tracks cross the international border, inside a 600-foot-long tunnel, is one of the highlights of this train trip.
"The Mexican border is about 20 feet from the far end," Bob Schussler says.
"The border is delineated by a white painted stripe," he continues, while shining the beam from his powerful spotlight along the rock wall.
