The town of Bagby no longer exists. It lies beneath the waters of Lake McClure, drowned in 1966 when the New Exchequer Dam sealed the Merced River canyon and the reservoir crept over the streets, the foundations, the memories. But before the water rose, a rescue party arrived for three structures that had no business surviving into the modern era: a two-story wooden stationhouse, a pair of thirty-foot water tanks banded in iron, and a turntable built of heavy timber and iron rods - the last manually operated gallows-frame standard-gauge turntable left in the United States. These remnants of the Yosemite Valley Railroad were disassembled, trucked to El Portal at the western entrance of Yosemite National Park, and reassembled on National Park Service land, where they stand today as monuments to a railroad that once carried visitors seventy-eight miles along the Merced River to the threshold of one of America's great landscapes.
On May 15, 1907, the Yosemite Valley Railroad's first full-length run departed Merced with twelve passengers aboard, bound for El Portal. The route hugged the Merced River for seventy-eight miles through the Sierra Nevada foothills, threading a canyon that stagecoaches had struggled to navigate for decades. Before the railroad, reaching Yosemite required days of dusty, bone-jarring travel by road. Now visitors could leave Merced in the morning and arrive at the park entrance by afternoon. Bagby, roughly midway along the line, became a critical operational stop - a place where locomotives took on water and, when needed, reversed direction on the turntable. The station's narrow two-story design reflected its tight footprint between the tracks and the river. Downstairs: a waiting room, an office, a freight room. Upstairs: living quarters for the stationmaster and his family, complete with kitchen, bedroom, and an enclosed porch overlooking the canyon.
The turntable is the ensemble's most remarkable survivor. Built at Bagby and put into service in 1929, it operated until the railroad's final run in August 1945. Its central gallows frame - a sixteen-foot timber structure braced by a king post truss of one-inch iron rods - supported the weight of a locomotive while crews pushed the platform by hand around a circular rail just eight feet in diameter. No motors, no hydraulics: brute force and leverage. The water tanks are equally practical and equally beautiful. Two wooden cylinders standing on twelve-by-twelve-inch timber framing, thirty feet high overall, capped by a gabled standing-seam metal roof. Their wood staves are held tight by iron bands, the same coopering technology that kept barrels watertight for centuries. Steam locomotives were thirsty machines, and at every stop along the Merced River canyon, water had to be lifted and stored for the next engine through.
The Yosemite Valley Railroad's decline was written in water and fire. In 1937, a catastrophic flood tore through the Merced River canyon, destroying thirty miles of track and twisting rails into useless ribbons of steel. Rehabilitation loans from the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads kept the line alive, but the damage was compounded by the loss of passenger traffic to the automobile. By the 1930s, most visitors were driving to Yosemite, and the railroad that had opened the valley to tourism was being made obsolete by the same impulse that had built it - the desire to get there faster, more conveniently, on your own terms. A fire in Merced destroyed the tool shed and several passenger cars. The last scheduled run rolled through in August 1945, and the Yosemite Valley Railroad passed into history. The tracks were pulled up. The stations fell quiet. Only Bagby's structures survived.
When the federal government approved the New Exchequer Dam in the early 1960s, the town of Bagby received its death sentence. Lake McClure would submerge everything. The National Park Service moved the stationhouse, water tanks, and turntable to El Portal in 1966, adding a caboose acquired from Santa Barbara to complete the display. On April 13, 1979, the ensemble was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Today the stationhouse serves as a facility for the Yosemite Conservancy, its hipped roof and three-room ground floor looking much as they did when passengers waited for the next train to Merced. The turntable and water tanks stand nearby, rusting with dignity. They are easy to miss on the way into the park - most visitors are already focused on the granite walls ahead. But these quiet wooden structures remember a time when the journey to Yosemite was the adventure itself, when the whistle of a locomotive echoing through the Merced River canyon was the first sign that something extraordinary lay around the next bend.
Located at 37.6745°N, 119.7858°W in El Portal, just outside Yosemite National Park's western entrance along the Merced River. The structures sit at the bottom of the Merced River canyon at approximately 2,000 ft elevation. Nearest airports: Mariposa-Yosemite Airport (MPI), approximately 25 miles west; Fresno Yosemite International (FAT), 75 miles south. Best viewed at low altitude following the Merced River canyon. The old railroad right-of-way is partially visible as a cleared corridor along the river.