Lights, Camera, Locomotive: A Walking Tour of Niles

Niles isn’t just a charming town hidden in the Bay Area hills – it was Hollywood before Hollywood existed.

On this walking tour, you’ll discover how this rowdy railroad junction became the world’s first movie capital, where Charlie Chaplin perfected his Little Tramp and cowboy stars invented the Western genre.

The tour starts at the Niles Depot Museum, the 1901 train station marking the Transcontinental Railroad’s true finish line. You’ll walk along Niles Boulevard past the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, housed in the original 1913 Edison Theater. Along quiet residential streets, you’ll see preserved Essanay Cottages where actors bunked together, and Victorian homes where railroad elite rented rooms to movie stars.

You’ll hear about how Niles transformed from a frontier town with 18 saloons into a thriving film studio. I’ll also share stories about bank robberies that were stopped by costumed cowboys, ghost sightings in the Hotel Wesley, and how Joe’s Corner operated as the town’s unofficial bank during Prohibition. The tour ends back at the Niles Depot Museum.

On this 60-minute tour, you’ll have a chance to:

• Stand beneath the hillside Niles sign that reminds visitors that this town was in the race for movie capital
• See the Western Pacific 467 caboose, with its distinctive bay windows beside the depot
• Visit The Florence, a dive bar that’s served locals since the early 1900s and survived Prohibition
• Examine the heavy steel door of the Old Niles Jail where brawling railroad workers sobered up
• Find out how Broncho Billy Anderson built a glass-roofed production facility where the fire station now stands
• Read the plaque marking the First Post Office, where the postmaster earned just $12 annually
• Discover the Solon Brothers Service Station with its attached diner, now an Italian restaurant
• Touch the rivets on an 80-ton heavyweight passenger car that once carried railroad executives

By the end of this tour you’ll have a sense of how a canyon town built by railroad workers became the birthplace of American cinema – and survived when both industries moved on.