The locomotives and cars are very thoroughly provided with brakes: first, the Westinghouse automatic air brake; second, a water brake; and, third, a powerful hand brake to each locomotive and car. The efficiency of this equipment is attested in the operation of the road without accident or injury of any kind. The locomotives are always operated on the lower end of trains, and the maximum speed allowed is eight miles per hour.
The ride up the winding cañons and through the superb scenery traversed by this road is a treat of which one never tires. The point of view, the direction, and the character of the landscape are continually changing. With no deep cuts, no tunnels, facing first one and then the other and finally all the points of the compass, sweeping around spurs, with distant views of land and sea, and near views of great beauty; then facing the steep sides of the mountain, its geology and flora affording interesting pictures; then over trestles with the branches of the bay, redwood, madroño, oak, and manzanita just out of reach—all these form beauties and attractions possessed by no other road known to the writer. A faint idea of the appearance of the road and of the scenery may be had from the appended photographs.
The Double Bow.
The Meteorological Station.—The advantages of Mount Tamalpais as a meteorological station have long been recognized, and many efforts have been made to utilize them. It frequently projects many hundreds of feet above fogs which cover the adjacent shores, and during these periods one can look out upon an ocean of rolling, fleecy clouds which break upon the mountains around its base and visible from its summit. This freedom from obscuring conditions gives an opportunity to more freely observe and study meteorological phenomena, and caused the Weather Bureau to make a series of preliminary observations in 1897, and, these resulting favorably, a fully equipped permanent station was subsequently built. The results have fully equaled expectations. The advantages of the location may be briefly summarized as follows:
1. It is close to the coast line, and is so elevated that it is not seriously affected by the local indraught of air through the Golden Gate and adjacent gaps in the Coast Range. This local indraught is a disturbing and often a misleading factor in all observations taken near and south of the Golden Gate for at least a score of miles. The elevated station on top of the peak eliminates the source of errors based upon observations at lower stations, and enables the forecast official to determine the effects of the local disturbances, and thus to give observations taken at or near sea level their true weight at the proper time.
2. No station in the United States has so full and free a projection into the lower third of the vapor-bearing stratum as has the station on this peak. No other station furnishes, as it does, an opportunity to study the distribution of vapor in the lower third of that stratum of the atmosphere, the physics of which is most important to human life and industries.
3. In studying the phenomena connected with the occurrence of fog, this station furnishes highly valuable data that could be obtained from no other; and, again, enables the student of weather lore to correct misleading impressions and deductions based upon observations taken below the one-thousand-foot contour above sea level.
On the 16th of June, 1899, the observations taken on Mount Tamalpais marked a difference of about thirty degrees in temperature over those around its base. In San Francisco, at Point Lobos and at Point Reyes, the temperature was down to 48°, while on Mount Tamalpais it was 79°, thus marking an approaching change in weather conditions, and giving the Weather Bureau the first opportunity of using the vertical temperature gradient in forecasting.
As a station for furnishing the data for a study of the problems of the physics of the atmosphere Mount Tamalpais is of further importance, as it stands near the easterly limits of the great area of high pressure which, during summer, lies over the North Pacific and which dominates the climatic phenomena of California for the greater portion of the year.