Locomotive #18 used to run on the McCloud River Railroad in northern California. In 2005 it was bought by the Nevada Commission for the Reconstruction of the V&T Railway to run from Carson City to Virginia City, even though they didn't have any tracks at the time. So they sent the engine to the Sierra Railroad in central California to hold onto it for them.

Finally last year, in 2009, the tracks were finished and the engine came to Carson City. But first there were some repairs that needed to be made before it could be used for regular service, and then this spring it was leased to a film company to be used in a Hollywood movie (Water For Elephants, coming to theaters in 2011). Now, at long last, the engine is back in Nevada and in good running order, and is ready to fulfill its purpose of hauling passengers along the Virginia and Truckee rails.

Today, July 24, 2010, was the first day the engine was in service. These are photos of the engine and passenger cars at the station.

Shred Day this Saturday July 24th from 9 a.m. - 12 p.m. at 451 Eagle Station Lane, in Carson City for Greater Nevada Credit Union clients. If your business is interested in hosting your own "Shred Day" please contact an Offsite representative and help your clients dispose of their personal, financial or other sensitive information!

Contact Info:
Bus: 775-888-9933 or email: sales@offsitedatadepot.com

Usually when a restaurant closes, it's gone for good. If times are good a new restaurant can move into the space, like when Super Burrito took over the old Burger King location. If times are bad the building stays shuttered, like the old Sizzler in north Carson, and the nearby Golden Dragon which has been closed and abandoned for 20 years now. And in rare cases the restaurant can make another go of it in a new spot, like when Cafe Del Rio failed three times in Carson City before finally making it up on the Comstock.

But when a restaurant closes it's usually gone for good, and they almost never reopen in the same location. But that's just what might happen with the Station Grille, which closed two years ago. The building has sat empty ever since, in a good location on south Carson Street right next to the mall. The restaurant is owned by the Carson Station Casino across the street, and there just weren't enough customers coming in to justify keeping it open. They've been trying to sell the building, but there haven't been any takers. And now the Carson Station is finding itself on better financial footing, so they think they're ready to reopen the Grille and give it a second go. I hope it works out!

Flickr user AgentADQ has put up some pictures of the July 4th fireworks show in Carson City this year.

Photo by Flickr user AgentADQ

There are also pictures of the V&T running up on the Comstock, and the Nevada State Railroad Museum from that same day.

Photo by Flickr user AgentADQ

For more, go see the whole set.

Move Saves Atlantis Approximately $6K/Month

CARSON CITY, Nev.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Until recently, Reno’s Atlantis Casino Resort Spa leased secure warehouse space for storing administrative documents and gaming receipts. When it came time to destroy outdated documents, they hired a shredding service to come in about once a month to perform secure document destruction. In an ongoing effort to save costs and increase efficiency, the casino looked at other options and services.

“These days, every business is taking a harder look at their bottom line. Like the Atlantis, companies from many industries are starting to figure out that they can save a significant amount of money while actually improving their records management by outsourcing to a professional records center like Offsite.”

Effective in May, Atlantis signed an agreement with Offsite Data Depot in Carson City for secure document storage, electronic inventory and document destruction.

Ron Rowan, Atlantis Casino Resort Spa CFO, said, “Transitioning to Offsite has resulted in greater document security, convenience for our team and lower expense for our company.”

Gerd Poppinga, Offsite’s Director of Operations, added, “We inventory and track every record electronically to guarantee an audit trail. We arranged all labor and transportation for the document move, and worked with Atlantis’ staff to ensure an accurate inventory.”

Brian Olson, co-owner of Offsite, mentioned, “These days, every business is taking a harder look at their bottom line. Like the Atlantis, companies from many industries are starting to figure out that they can save a significant amount of money while actually improving their records management by outsourcing to a professional records center like Offsite.”

About Atlantis Casino Resort Spa

Atlantis Casino Resort Spa, a hotel casino in Reno, Nev., features 61,000 square feet of casino space, 1,000 guest rooms, eight food outlets, two espresso and pastry bars, a 30,000-square-foot health spa and salon with year-round pool, two retail outlets, an 8,000-square-foot family entertainment center, and over 5,000 square feet of banquet, convention and meeting space.

In gaming, Atlantis features nearly 1,450 slot machines, 38 table games including blackjack, craps, roulette and more, race and sports booking, a 24-hour keno lounge, and a poker room. For more information: www.AtlantisCasino.com.

About Offsite Data Depot

Headquartered in Carson City, Offsite Data Depot offers Nevada businesses secure records storage and management services, including certified document destruction, document imaging and hosting, online computer backups and email filtering. Customers include city and state government agencies, gaming facilities, law enforcement services, title and insurance companies, physicians and healthcare facilities. Visit www.offsitedatadepot.com for more information.

Contacts

PRowrite Public Relations
Christel K. Hall, APR CBC
775-267-9232 (Editorial)
or
Offsite Data Depot
Brian Olson, 775-888-9933
Permalink: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100712006713/en/Atlantis-Casino-Resort-Spa-Offsite-Data-Depot

Around here the water goes just as fast as it comes. After peaking a month ago, the water levels in the Carson River are dropping quickly, already exposing sandbars and uncovering the smaller channel that the river actually follows nine months out of the year.

Here's a photo from June:

And here's one from today:

That's just 30 days. By late September you'll be lucky if you can get your knees wet walking across the river.

Last week a few preliminary designs for the downtown renovation project, formerly known as the "Nugget Economic Development Project", were unveiled. I hesitated to comment on them because normally I like to keeps things positive, I don't want to say anything bad. But these plans just leave me feeling cold all over and I can't stay quiet. This project is at a fork where it could either be really successful, or a fall-down flop. And they seem to be heading toward the road to Flopville.

First is the name. I didn't think it was possible to come up with a worse name than "Nugget Economic Development Project", but they did: "Carson City Center". It's a blah name that evokes a thousand other generic early century redevelopment projects, and in Nevada it's already associated with both a theme-free mega resort in Las Vegas, and a motel that's just two blocks away from the Nugget. Strip mall developers are able to come up with better names than this, and these people should be able to too if they spent more than 30 seconds on it.

But even worse are the designs that they put forward for the layout of the project. There are three different "designs", which it looks like they developed by having a two-year old move Legos around a board. All three designs are centered around tall, monolithic buildings separated by wide streets, and they vary only in the actual placement of the buildings. Like in grade school when you would have little paper cut outs of a couch, TV, and easy chairs, and use them to pretend to arrange furniture in your house. There's not a single thing about any of these designs that makes me think, "Hey, I want to go there." Instead I look at them and say, "How dreadful." Let's break them down.

We'll start off not with the "best"; let's call it the least bad. This design typifies much of the uninspired sameness that designers P3 Development were able to come up with. The eight block area is still split up into roughly 8 blocks, but at least in this design things are offset a little bit; that's what makes it the least bad. But it's still replacing street grid with street grid, replacing square parking lots with square buildings. This is not what we want to do. Points do go to this one for the large grassy area in front of the library. Some kind of park like setting is essential for this project. I also like the offset, and how Telegraph Street leads right into the front door of the library. I've said that Telegraph is the key to whatever gets built on this space, and should be treated as the entryway to this project from Carson Street. Putting the library here serves as a "weenie" to pull people in from the main street.

Between this design and the last one we're kind of skirting around a few good ideas that need to be explored more. This one loses the offset that I like, but it does incorporate the grassy area into the grounds of the Laxalt Building. Double extra points for recognizing Laxalt as one of the most awesome buildings downtown, and trying to incorporate it. They're just not doing it enough.

This one loses points, though, for relocating the library away from the park and shoving it into an office building. Housing takes the place of prominence at the far end of the park, which I don't think is the right way to go. In fact, all these designs have the housing as a separate Lego piece that keeps getting shoehorned into whatever empty space is left over. I think that's the wrong way to go, and if you want to reach for a true urban feel you need to make the housing more integrated. Like retail on the ground floor with residential above. People making a conscious choice to live downtown probably don't want to live in a Soviet style housing block.

Again, it's like they're shooting darts blindfolded and they just can't hit the bullseye. The library is back in the grassy area, but the Laxalt Building is disconnected again, and the offset is gone, making Telegraph a through street. This brings up one of the biggest problems I have with these designs; they're too car-heavy. Nobody drives through this part of town now unless they're looking for a parking space at the Nugget or the Capitol complex. And these plans do involve parking garages at either end, which is necessary if you're removing this much parking from the town, and expecting even more people to come to the area. But with the parking gone, the need for wide streets is gone too. And I would argue that there is no need for cars in this project at all.

We have a chance here to do something truly different, to tear out several blocks of existing street grid and start over. If we want to make this a destination we need to make it attractive, and that means making it walkable, making it human scale. There shouldn't be straight lines, there should be meandering spaces that pull you in. There shouldn't be narrow streets "so that sidewalks could be widened". There should be no streets at all. I know it's a radical concept, but maybe if people have to walk around this neighborhood they'll be more engaged with it and spend more time and money here.

I could be approaching this from the wrong angle, but I'm looking at this as a tourist destination as well as a downtown core. We want people to come to Carson City, and we want them to go downtown and not be disappointed. I think about all the towns I've been to, all the tourist areas, and nearly all of them involve getting out of your car and exploring on foot. Old Sacramento has tons of interesting shops and restaurants, and you really can't get a feel for the place unless you get out and walk. Car traffic is allowed here, but pedestrians definitely have the right of way. In Seattle the Pike Place Market and Seattle Center (home of the Space Needle) are large public areas, one a shopping center and the other a park, where you have to park your car and go by foot. San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf is another area that packs in the tourists, and you have to walk to get to it. Carson City could also learn something from theme park design, places that are specifically built to be people magnets. Right next door to Disneyland is the Downtown Disney shopping district, an outdoor mall that's entirely pedestrian. Also in Southern California is Universal's City Walk, a large area with movie theaters and shops and restaurants that people can go to and make a whole evening out of. Carson City doesn't have enough people to do anything on that kind of scale, but a smaller version of those places is what we should be looking at. Closer to home we have Heavenly Village at South Lake Tahoe, another prototype that Carson City should be trying to mimic.

Give people a reason to come downtown, give them something to do. make them feel like they can come down and spend five or six hours without getting bored, and this project will be a success. Making it a bunch of disparate parts that have no connection to each other, which is what these designs do, is a sure way to see the project fail. I just hope everyone wakes up and notices this before we go too far down the wrong path.

Look back at my post "Future of Downtown" from a few years ago for more complaints/hopes about Carson City's future.

The 4th of July is always a big weekend at the Nevada State Railroad Museum. That's when they pull their special collections out into the sunlight, like V&T Engine #22, "The Inyo", one of the oldest running steam locomotives in the country. This year they have a new star to bring out, the McKeen Motor Car that they just spent 14 years fixing up. And they have other running locomotives, #25 and #8, although #8 has been down for repairs for a couple of years now. Saturday I went down to the museum and got pictures of all the various equipment they had on display.

Here's the whole story on the motorhome fire I put up pictures of a couple of days ago. From the Record-Courier:

A U.S. Marine, who recently left the service, and his family lost most of their possessions in a fire at Sunrise Pass Road and Kincaid Avenue on Thursday night.

East Fork Deputy Chief David Fogerson said the Marine, his wife and four children had all their property in a roughly 28-foot long fifth-wheel trailer.

Fogerson said the family left to go into town and when they came home the trailer was on fire.

The Red Cross is helping out this family, and I'm sure they will accept donations if anyone wants to help out.

Construction on Phase 3 of the Carson City Freeway is well underway. This is kind of Phase 3a, since all they're going to do right now is build the bridges at Koontz and Clearview, and grade parts of the roadbed along Edmonds. But they've been working on all that for a month, and it's coming along nicely.

Koontz and Clearview are going to be just about the only places you can cross this section of the freeway. So they're closing the two streets down, one at a time, and building bridges over the new roadway. I thought Clearview was going first, but it turned out to be Koontz.

Koontz is closed and they've already started digging out the roadway. The freeway here will be below ground in a trench, so the bridge won't go up and over; instead the freeway will pass beneath.

A peek into the tench show the supports for the bridge have already started to be formed. This project is going to be going on for a long time, since they can't start on the Clearview bridge until Koontz is finished and open. They'll probably do Koontz this year and Clearview next year. And maybe by then they'll have the money to start on the rest of the freeway.