This Train Ain't Bound for Glory

Model railroads are most fun when there’s action, and that means we want to model prototypes with lots of trains moving around. I chose the Vasona Branch over other SP branches because I assumed the canneries and dried fruit packing houses along the tracks could generate that action. However, I also wanted to include the photogenic locations in the Santa Cruz mountains: redwoods, oak, chaparral, and creeks in narrow canyons. I knew that industry was sparse up in Los Gatos Canyon, but just how sparse?

There aren’t a lot of sources to tell us how busy the railroad was. Maybe we’ll find a quote in a newspaper about last year’s revenue, or maybe we’ll find some railroad paperwork or photos that suggest train length. But that sort of information is rare; I’ve never had that sort of information for the Vasona Branch, but I’ve always been curious.

Luckily, there is one potential source. When railroads wanted to shut down a branch line, they’d need to ask permission from the Interstate Commerce Commission to make sure they weren’t leaving customers in the lurch. The ICC decisions on abandonments give us at least a small view into an under-performing branch.

I’d always been curious about the abandonment proceedings, but assumed the details would be in a dusty book in a university library’s off-site storage. I’d asked around when I was visiting the California State Railroad Museum last week, but the likely books were stored off-site. Some poking around showed that some local libraries might also have some of the ICC decisions, but none of the places were easy to access. I knew rough dates of abandonments, and web sites like abandonedrails.com even provided the ICC “docket number” to help with searches - the abandonment of the Los Gatos - Olympia portion of the line in 1940 was ICC docket #12815.

It’s also the 21st century, so there’s a good chance some of those documents are on-line. So I tried a few searches with different keywords in different permutations: “interstate commerce commission”, “abandonment”, “los gatos”, “South Pacific Coast”.

Pay dirt. The abandonment decisions for SP’s Boulder Creek branch (1933), Le Franc to New Almaden (1933 also), Los Gatos to Olympia (1940), and Campbell to Le Franc all turned out to be on-line, with links below. None of these are particularly compelling reading: no stories of murders, or heroic rescues, or amusing encounters with grizzly bears, but just some dry stories: “This railroad no longer has a reason for being there, the folks living nearby don’t need it, and the railroad doesn’t want to run it.” They’re also not full of railfan facts such as locomotives and engineers. However, they still give us a sense of what the railroad was like.

From the Southern Pacific Company Abandonment of theSanta Cruz branch from Los Gatos to Olympia:

“The line proposed to be abandoned is an intermediate segment of the branch connecting San Jose… with Santa Cruz. It was built by the South Pacific Railroad in 1870-1880 and acquired by the applicant in 1937. The main track is laid with 90 pound rail. The aggregate curvature is about 3,598 degrees, with a total length exceeding 8 miles. There are approximately 13,137 feet of timber-lined and masonry-lined tunnels… Motive power is limited to the consolidated type of locomotive…. the line serves an area mainly devoted to summer homes and resorts; there are no industries except for a limited amount of fruit growing, which is not dependent on the railroad for transportation.”

But then we start getting some of the color. “As protection against embankment slides and washouts, a pilot was sent ahead of the early morning train.” As model railroaders, having a pilot train running to watch for redwoods across the track would be quite the thing for operation. Saturday excursion runs generated most of the passenger numbers, so I should run more Sunshine Specials to Santa Cruz.

And then there’s the traffic numbers. I knew that the Santa Cruz Mountains were quiet in the 1930’s, but oh how quiet! There were only six carloads of outgoing freight between 1935 and 1939. Each year, there were only 40-70 cars inbound (except for 1939, when 392 carloads came in for Highway 17 construction.) Most of the traffic was through service: thousands of passengers, mostly for the Sunshine Special excursions. The line also carried 500-1500 carloads of sand from Olympia and “oiled crushed rock” (aka asphaltic rock) from near Davenport each year. Even with the mountainous route, shipping via Los Gatos Canyon was faster and less expensive than going the long way through Watsonville and Gilroy. The Southern Pacific admitted the costs were higher on the new route, but they'd be able to handle more cars per train. The shippers were disappointed at the loss of the short route to San Francisco, but resigned to pay an extra 0.25 cents to 1.5 cents per hundred pounds to ship their product via Watsonville. That’s all model railroad scale: about five loaded cars a day across the railroad, and one car a day ending up on the railroad.

The reports also list population, highlighting how much the Santa Cruz mountains had depopulated. Only around 1300 people were living along the line in 1939, with 500 at Alma, 150 at Aldercroft Heights, 40 at Call of the Wild, 50 at Wrights, 35 at Laurel, 196 at Glenwood, and a huge 240 at Zayante. The numbers are probably larger now, but the land’s still pretty empty.

If you go and compare those freight numbers to San Jose, it’s easy to see why the SP dumped the Los Gatos canyon line. Compare with San Jose proper. A 1940 labor law case argued that several of the dried fruit packers tried to sponsor their own union to avoid the Longshoremen’s Union getting into their business. In between stories of companies directing favored employees to organize “the right way”, there’s details about fruit volume. J.S. Roberts, on my layout, generated 1,750 tons of fruit in 1939- as much as the Los Gatos - Olympia section carried in a full year. Abinante and Nola and Hamlin Fruit generated similar traffic. Sunsweet and Del Monte would have generated 300 cars a year each in dried fruit from San Jose. It’s not hard to see how SP made its money.

For me as the modeler, these facts stress how I should keep the Santa Cruz Mountains quiet: occasional freights full of sand-laden gondola, but otherwise no sizable industries generating traffic, and a bunch of rusty sidings that may not see a train again.

Oh, and I need to model that pilot train checking the line.

Raw numbers for the Los Gatos - Olympia service:

Passenger Traffic: 


Year	Local Passengers	Through Passengers
1935	81	5,482
1936	120	4,842
1937	129	4410
1938	135	4427
1939	26	3389

Freight Traffic:




Year	Local	LCL	Bridge Traffic
1935	39 carloads / 1984 tons	20 tons	14 carloads / 229 tons
1936	31 carloads / 1557 tons	8 tons	0 tons
1937	69 carloads / 3758 tons	22 tons	416 carloads / 21,075 tons
1938	36 carloads / 1451 tons	26 tons	01,133 carloads / 64,426 tons
1939	392 carloads / 21225 tons	37 tons	1,517 carloads / 92, 554 tons

Only 6 carloads of freight originated on the line from 1935-1939. Six.

That was fun; let’s check another!

Here’s the abandonment report for theBoulder Creek to Felton branch, torn up in 1933. “The marketable timber supply in the territory has become exhausted, there is no other manufacturing industry in the territory, farming is of no importance.” Rock and stone were the main freight being shipped, but only around 100 loaded cars or so were coming off the branch. “The only inbound carload traffic of regular nature is an occasional car of coal.” The report lists that service had declined to a weekly freight, with cars, buses, and trucks taking away business that had been for the railroad.

Or the New Almaden branch. The New Almaden mines had been shut down for years; the only traffic from the line between 1931 and 1933 was “137 tons of tomato juice”. “ The weekly mixed freight just encouraged the locals to jump in the car to get around.

Or the Le Franc branch: surrounded by orchards and vineyards, but the locals all deliver their produce by truck. From 1933-1936, the SP handled less than twenty carloads a year, and handled it all with a yard locomotive.

Again, none of these documents contain essential facts for our model railroads, but they do tell a bit about how the railroad declined, and who remained to use it during its last years. When visitors come by, we can point at a tank car, look sad, and say “137 tons of tomato juice - that’s the only thing that railroad shipped in its last year.”

Pro tips for finding similar documents: try several searches, and poke through a couple pages of search results. Use quotes around groups of words such as “Interstate Commerce Commission”. If you find a book with other railroad-related legal reports, check the index or start using keywords, and you might find some interesting gems. Abandonment reports sometimes turn up in the “Finance Reports” volume, though that wasn't true for all the cases here. If you decide not to practice your Google searching skills, check for a university library with ICC reports, or visit a county law library that has access to HeimOnline - that database apparently has all the government publications. Santa Clara County's law library provides free access if you visit.

Movie Night XI: Let's Go to the New Idria Quicksilver Mine!

It's hard to be interested in San Jose history and not be caught up by the whole history of mercury mining. San Jose's New Almaden quicksilver mines were the biggest in the Americas; there's not many signs of the mining up in Almaden Quicksilver County Park, but at least it's easy to get to with a bit of hiking.

But for a raw look at mercury mining, New Idria's the place to go. The New Idria mines are a couple hours south of Gilroy, hidden away in a difficult-to-reach portion of the Coast Range. That isolation also means that some of the buildings left over from mining have survived... and that the mine tailings were never cleaned, and still spew significant amounts of mercury and other metals into the San Joaquin River.

Getting to New Idria's difficult and unpleasant, but we can enjoy the trip by tagging along with some young'uns with exceptional video and photography skills, a healthy disregard for danger and death, and a snarky sense of humor!

That's Why I Scanned Those Plans

When I scanned all those SP engineering drawings a few weeks ago, I did all that work in hopes others would discover interesting facts or tidbits about the locations, or would share stories about the locations.

It must have worked; read the Dome of Foam's E. O. Gibson story of the Great Almaden right-of-way sale as immortalized in this drawing of the SP's abandoned right of way.

Thanks, E.O., for turning a relatively plain map into a nailbiter of a story - I won't be able to pass that neighborhood without remembering your great-uncle!

Campbell Depot News from the Campbell Interurban Press

The Campbell station on my layout wasn't the first Campbell train station; that honor goes to the early South Pacific Coast station built around
1886. The South Pacific Coast - the narrow gauge line from Oakland to Santa Cruz that broke the SP's monopoly on freight in the Valley - was building a new branch line down to the mercury mines at New Almaden, and the station appeared the same time, perhaps as a handy place for a train order operator, though there must be a good reason why the station was at Campbell rather than down by where the branch peeled off around modern-day Camden Ave. [Oops, just checked the SP valuation map for Campbell, and it shows that the New Almaden branch peeled off at the far end of the Campbell siding. Timetables also show that Campbell was a train order station in the 1930's, so my guess is that the Campbell station got its location because (1) it was close enough to where the New Almaden right-of-way started that it could serve as a train order and register station for the branch, and the existence of the Campbell family ranch and upcoming subdivision made it a fine spot for the station itself.]

The tiny depot that the narrow gauge built shows up in at least one photo, but it must have been replaced within a few years by the larger stick-style depot that my model represents.

I learned a bit more about the depot last week. I hadn't yet explored the Campbell library, and found they had copies of the Campbell Interurban Press newspaper on microfilm. After the fun of searching old newspapers and back issues of Western Canner and Packer on Google News and Google Books, stepping through the rolls of microfilms had a much more twentieth-century vibe. Two hours took me through the entire 1928 to 1932 roll. In the Tuesday, July 23, 1929 issue, I found some history about the Campbell Depot and its long-time agent, Charles Berry:

Charles Berry, 43 Years as S.P. Agent, to Retire Aug. 1

Charles Berry, one of Campbell's pioneers and first and only agent for the Southern Pacific company at this point, will retire Aug. 1 after a most faithful and conscientious performance of duty for the past 45 years.

Charley came to Campbell in April, 1886 as the young S.P. agent when but 21 years of age and sold tickets from the small "6x18" depot when the Almaden line was being laid. That building is still doing duty at Castro.

In December, 1890, he was married to Miss Gertrude A. Bell of Portsmouth, N. H., who has many times been his only assistant at the station. He purchased the first lot sold in the Campbell subdivision, that being the site of the present Kimmel house on South Central. At this time most of the valley was hay and grain fields with but little fruit. F.M. Righter shipped the first fruit from this station, some ten boxes of apricots.

As a bit of comparison, the first month's business was $5.10 for tickets sold as against an annual monthly shipment of 25,000,000 tons of gravel and fruit today.
Mr. Berry was elected to the school board at the time for and against the creation of a high school district and he, winning out, sided in the beginning of our high school. He served on the board for 13 years. He has always been a worker for…

An article the next year (August 19,1930) showed that the Campbell Chamber of Commerce found the depot I model not modern enough for Their Fair City, and managed to corner the division superintendent and lobby for a modern station:

Campbell Will Not Get a New Depot, Report

The Campbell Chamber of Commerce, in their efforts to secure a new depot for Campbell, met last week with E. R. Anthony, division superintendent of the Southern Pacific, who came to Campbell Friday evening.

Mr. Anthony was not at all in favor of spending any money for railroad improvements in Campbell, stating that the patronage of the railroad did not warrant the expenditure. He remarked on the competition of the bus and truck-freight lines.

Chamber of Commerce committeemen felt that Improved facilities would serve to increase railroad business here, but Mr. Anthony told them, bluntly, that there would have to be some guarantee of that before the company could see its way clear to spend the money necessary to make the required improvements free.

The railroad- or industry- related articles in the newspaper were few and far between, but the coverage of the local social scene and the Sea Scouts was pretty impressive. Fast-forwarding through four years of small-town newspapers is worth doing occasionally, but definitely choose a day when you can handle the tedium. Luckily, the Campbell Interurban Press was only weekly, and stepped down from eight to four pages as soon as the depression hit Campbell.

A final story from the Interurban Press highlights just what we can - and can't - trust about Sanborn maps. The Campbell map from 1930 shows that the area between the depot and Campbell Ave. was described as "Park", which immediately made me think of the tended gardens that the SP had around other depots in California. Unfortunately, it wasn't so; in March, 1930, the Interurban Press railed against the SP Park, that unkept piece of land that had become the dumping ground for old machinery and dead cars. So be careful with Sanborn maps; not only can they be occasionally inaccurate on track diagrams, but they can make a neighborhood seem much more pleasant than it was in real life!

Watch this space for more news from Campbell; I've got other tidbits worth sharing.

[Photo shamelessly stolen from www.campbellmuseums.org.]

[2/14/2014: corrected location of original station. I'd mistyped "Campbell"; the Campbell Interurban Press actually reported the tiny original station was at "Castro".]

Hard Times in San Jose

As much as my layout might show a busy, productive valley in 1932, the truth wasn't always as nice. As I've mentioned before, the market for fruit was so bad in 1931 and 1932 that the Hunts Cannery in Los Gatos didn't even bother to open both years (after canning six million pounds of pears the previous year), and the Drew Canning Company co-operative in Campbell (represented on the layout) paid the Olson Family $15.21 in December 1932 for their 1931 harvest of eight tons of apricots. Getting paid a year late and $2.00/ton must have hurt; Mr. Olson held onto the letter and showed it to anyone for years afterwards who suggested he should join another co-op.

These two photos from the Library of Congress show pea pickers in the San Jose area in 1939. Both were taken by Dorothea Lange. The caption on the second is 'Idle migrants. Foothills north of San Jose, California. "If the sun shines tomorrow and nothin' happens, we'll pick.".' I suspect car encampments of migrant workers were a frequent sight in the Valley in the 1930's. Some day I'll comb through the contemporary newspapers looking for stories.

[Professional research trick: if you ever see interesting photo reproductions available on Ebay, and they don't look like family photos, go poking around the Library of Congress and other museum sites for the same photo. For an even easier search, just type in the photo/auction caption into Google. I found these photos when tracking down some photos of the "Mine Hill School, Englishtown" at New Almaden; the photos at Ebay looked suspiciously like Historic American Building Survey materials, and a bit of poking found the original photos available for free.]

Photos of New Almaden

San Jose State's Digital Collections department has been preserving some great photos from the 1930's taken by John C. Gordon, and I've been watching their feed of new photos in Google Reader to watch when new photos appear. They scanned a bunch of photos of the New Almaden mercury mines in their last installment, and several capture the feeling of rural life in Santa Clara County in the 1930's.

Here's two photos of old hotel buildings, both probably in the town of New Almaden near the reduction works. The Hacienda Hotel, the first photo, is most likely the current home of La Foret, New Almaden's very fine game restaurant. (They're also New Almaden's only restaurant, so if I want to get some casual food after a long hike, I usually have to head back to civilization. The Burger Pit on Blossom Hill Road is my particular favorite.) I'm not sure about the second hotel building; perhaps it was on the other side of Alamitos Creek near the current Hacienda entrance to Almaden Quicksilver County Park.

This photo shows some of the remains of the Englishtown settlement on top of the hill, and gives some hints on modeling abandoned and collapsing buildings. When the mines started in the 1840's, most of the mining was close to the surface and on the other side of Mine Hill. The initial miners were from Central and South America, and the settlement on the other side of the hill became known as Spanishtown. In the 1870's, the mines started going deeper (eventually down to about 300 feet below sea level, or 2000 feet below the summit of Mine Hill), and Cornish miners used to hard rock and deep mines took over. Their settlement was Englishtown, pictured here. If you go hiking in the park, you'll probably sit on a picnic bench under that eucalyptus.

There's lots of other great photos in the collection of San Jose in the '30's; check them out.