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 XXVI: Buy a Bit of the South Pacific Coast!

And for all you fans of the Santa Cruz branch of the SP who have a bit of money burning a hole in your pocket, be aware that the south end of the Summit tunnel (the Laurel end) is up for sale at $1.6 million for 110 acres. (That's less than what you'd pay for a 3 bedroom, 2 bath rancher on a 6000 SF lot in Sunnyvale!)

Property listing for 23411 Deerfield Road available on Redfin, or check out this video showing your potential new home. Note that if you plan on laying some track and running some trains, you'll need to rebuild a wooden trestle immediately in front of the tunnel. And if you do run some trains up there, invite me over.

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Spotted by Derek Whaley, and originally posted on Santa Cruz Trains. If you haven't already checked out his Santa Cruz Trains" book, go get a copy.

Before the Cannery, the Winery

One of the big themes in the Santa Clara Valley has been the changes in industry, both in the recent and distant past. If you’re looking at modern Silicon Valley, you’ll find that the seeds of Google and Apple were planted back in the 1920’s when vacuum tube makers located out here to get far away from the patent holders on the east coast. Vacuum tubes led to high-power radio and microwave; high power radio’s material scientists had all the skills to make semiconductors, semiconductors led to microprocessors, which led to personal computers, software, and eventually to hipster chicken day care. (Making Silicon Valley gives a nice overview of Silicon Valley's early history, if you're curious.)

For the agricultural Santa Clara Valley, we see a similar progression. The cattle ranches of the Mexican-era ranchos became wheat fields as the anglo farmers exported huge amounts of wheat to Europe. The wheat fields turned into vineyards. Various setbacks turned the vineyards into orchards; the orchards brought the canneries, which in turn replaced the orchards with manufacturing, can-making, and other industry. If you wander around, you’ll find signs of that past, whether a cannery now holding a microbrewery in San Jose, a grain shed in an empty field in Tres Pinos , or a remnant of a former winery in the middle of suburban Sunnyvale. Each economic or technical change created a new set of successful businesses, but caused hardship for the folks stuck on whatever was the previous boom.

I also run across those reminders of change in historical research. When I was tracking down the history of the Hunt Brothers cannery in Los Gatos, I found a reference that the new cannery was using buildings left over from the “Delpech Winery”. The name was new, but some research turned up two familiar stories: an immgrant making wine just like in the Old Country, and the fall of the wine industry and rising of the fruit industry in the Santa Clara Valley.

Amedee and Germaine Delpech

The immigrant in question was Amedee Delpech, an immigrant from Lot in southern France. Amedee came to California in 1876. It's unclear what Delpech did upon arriving, but I can suspect the common story: he worked for several years, saved up a bank-roll, then either bought or leased land for his own farm. All the good land in the Valley was already taken, so Delpech, like the new Italian, Portuguese, or Yugoslav immigrants, was pushed up into the marginal foothill lands. In Delpech’s case, he landed on a small amount of acreage at Patchen, at the summit of the hill between Los Gatos and Santa Cruz. Hints from land sales suggest his farm was on Summit Road, just west of the current Highway 17.

Amedee planted his land in grapes, and quickly set to work making wines and brandies. In 1888, Delpech presented his wines at the 6th Annual Viticultural Convention in San Francisco, offering up a Sauvignon Vert, White Pinot, as well as mission and peach brandies, all from the 1886 and 1887 vintage. (His nearby neighbor, E. Meyer in Wrights, was meanwhile making some lighter red wines -Carignan, Ploussard, and a Zinfandel-Mataro blend.) For the 1892 and 1896 voter registration, he listed his occupation quite solidly as winemaker. By 1903, he'd moved up in the world; a city directory listed him as a “Wine Manufacturer.”

Possible location of the Delpech vineyard at 22231 Summit Road. Perhaps that's even the Delpech barn?

It was an odd time to be in the wine business; although Santa Clara County had been a center for wine-growing, the trade had been in decline since the 1880s thanks to a glut of wine on the market and the plague of phylloxera. The disease hit the Santa Clara Valley just before Delpech decided on the Los Gatos expansion. Cupertino, for example, had been a center for vineyards. (Vineyards were preferred over fruit because it only took three years, rather than five, to start getting marketable crops.) Between 1895 and 1905, phylloxera hit Cupertino and decimated the vines. By the end, half the vineyards were gone, often replaced with fruit trees. The effect was also seen in the wineries. The California Wine Company along the narrow gauge railroad at San Fernando Street became Griffin and Skelley's dried fruit plant in the early 20th century. Zicovich’s Winery, a competitor in the wine and brandy trade, burned down in 1899 during the Great San Carlos Street Just West of the Railroad Tracks fire. There's no indication it was rebuilt.

The boom-and-bust of wineries can be seen ins the statistics. Wine grapes occupied less than 1,500 acres in 1876, but took 12,000 acres in the 1890's and at the turn of the century. Phyloxxera cut grapes to 6,000 acres in 1904, and although it recovered a bit, there were only 7,500 acres of grapes in Santa Clara County through the 1940's. (Ernest P. Peninou, A Statistical History of Wine Grape Acreage in California, 1856-1992).

Gustav Hueter's Mountain Springs Ranch. See if you can spot the rolling tree stumps! From Los Gatos Public Library, Linda Ward collection.

Delpech also apparently continued to expand his vineyards. In 1899, he managed to annoy his downhill neighbor by rolling tree stumps onto his property. The neighbor, Gustav Hueter, the San Francisco varnish king, appeared to be a bit high-strung, suing his downhill neighbors over water rights in Sheppard Gulch creek, and spending more on the lawsuit against Delpech than he claimed in damages. Delpech, in his defense, declared that his workers brought the errant stumps back:

In the Superior Court defendant Delpesch contended that although some of the rolling stumps had invaded the premises of Heuter they had done no harm except to bend over two madrone and three tanbark trees, and furthermore it was claimed that when a hired man of Delpesch had learned that some of the stumps had gone beyond their legitimate moorings they hitched onto them and hauled them up the hill again where they were blocked up to prevent their rolling tendencies.

If you ever thought the early landowner's life in the Santa Cruz Mountains was easy, just imagine trying to haul a bunch of huge redwood tree stumps back up a hill before your cranky downhill neighbor got annoyed. Almost makes wrestling a bear sound fun.

Hueter turns up in a couple other news stories, including one about some drunken yahoos shooting up the stuffed bear he placed at the entrance to his property on the Old Santa Cruz Highway. Then, in 1905, 65 year old Hueter was shot and killed by his thirty-three year old wife after he threatened her during a fight. The grand jury discovered that Kate Hueter had been overly friendly with the Los Gatos doctor which had spurred the row. Hueter had been in the process of contracting for oil drilling on his property to see if the Moody Gulch oil strikes might be repeated on his land. Hueter's land is now the Redwood Estates development.

By 1898, Amedee, was beginning to appear quite successful. His wife Germaine, and daughter Marguerite, had moved to San Jose, living in the Liberte Hotel (San Pedro and Post), then at 312 El Dorado (now Post) St - just about the time his daughter, Margaret, would have been starting school. They also had a small lot near the railroad tracks in Alma, bought in 1900, and another lot in San Jose downtown. Amedee was also active in politics, serving as a delegate for James G. Maguire for governor in the 1898 State Democratic Convention.

1900 was also the time for Amedee to try to grab at the gold ring of business. That year, he started building a winery in Los Gatos, at the intersection of the Saratoga Road and Santa Cruz Ave, with Jacob Lenzen and son designing the building, and Z. O. Field building the structure. The winery itself was incorporated in early 1903 as the “Los Gatos Winery”, with A. Berryman, P. J. Arnerich, J. J. Stanfield, and J. Bazus as directors - all proud burghers of Los Gatos business.

But even as the winery was built, its future fell into doubt. Amedee Delpech died suddenly in August, 1903:

"Amedee Delpech the well known winemaker of Los Gatos died at his home in that city on Wednesday from an attack of pneumonia.  The remains were forwarded to San Francisco today and the funeral will take place in that city on Friday at 2 o'clock under the auspices of the I. O. O. F. of which he was a member.  He was a native of France and was 52 years of age."

His friends in the Franco-American Lodge of the I.O.O.F. described him more explicitly in an obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Prominent Vineyardist Dead
Amedee Delpech, one of the best-known vineyardists and wine men of this county, died at his home near Los Gatos today. He was a native of France, aged 52 years. The funeral will be held in San Francisco tomorrow under the auspices of the Franco-American Lodge, I. O. O. F., of which he was a member.

His wife, Germaine, had the task of settling the estate; a sequence of real estate sales showed up in newspapers for the next couple years, selling the property at Patchen to Joseph McKiernan in 1904, and selling the downtown San Jose land in 1906. She later moved to San Francisco, “four children and one child still living.” Germaine ran a candy store for a bit, worked as a dress maker, and held a couple other jobs. In 1928, she lived in the Marina district.

The new winery itself spent a few years in limbo. At first, there was talk about the Los Gatos Cannery using the building for dried fruit packing in the 1906 season. The Los Gatos Fruit Growers’ Union, associated with George Hooke, claimed to have secured a lease for the 100 x 150 foot building, “half of which will be floored immediately and a model packing house will be arranged. Whether the union will pack its own fruit or not will depend on the prices offered in the bins by packers.” (August 27, 1906 San Jose Mercury News.) Another article claimed that quite substantial work was already in progress. After that, little can be found on the Los Gatos Fruit Grower’s Union.

That same year, George Hooke, the owner of the Los Gatos Canneries, decided he didn’t have enough excitement in his life, and decided growing a new cannery would be more fun than running the old one. Hooke sold the Los Gatos Canneries to the Hunt Brothers Packing Company, and left to manage new canneries in Watsonville and Sunnyvale. The Hunt Brothers needed to modernize the very victorian plant in the middle of Los Gatos’s downtown; by the next spring, Hunt decided that the best solution would be to build a modern plant, and saw the Delpech cannery as the perfect location - a huge space, easy rail access, and an existing building ready for reuse. Hunts also brought in their own people; Hooke had claimed Hunts would keep the existing management in place, but the manager and other staff were replaced within a year by Hunt veterans.

Hunt Brothers Making Extensive Improvements for New Canning Plant” - April 16, 1907 San Jose Mercury News.
“Very few people realize the vastness of the improvements that are underway at the Hunt Brothers big cannery at the corner of Santa Cruz Avenue and the Saratoga Road. The immense winery building that was erected by the late A. Delpech has been ceiled overhead, and a floor three feet above the ground, and ventilator and light shafts installed at convenient distances. At the north of the main building boilers are being installed, and when that is completed a suitable building will enclose it. The southwest corner of the lot has been covered with a high one story building that will be used as a receiving room, and as the fruit is processed it will finally be placed in the large warehouse alongside the track, the foundations of which are already laid. This building will be eighty feet wide by a length of two hundred and twenty five feet, and on the east side of it for the whole length is the spur track adjoining the main track of the Southern Pacific Company... Their superintendent C. C. Van Eaton has made his home here permanently. All the operations of moving from the old plant, which they purchased from the Los Gatos Canneries, has been made under his personal supervision. He brings with him skillful assistants in several departments who have been with him a number of years."

And with that, Delpech’s dream of a winery in Los Gatos instead helped the canning industry expand - the industry that chased the vineyards out of the Santa Clara Valley. Delpech’s would eventually see wine again; after Hunt Brothers closed their doors in the early 1930’s, the building was sold to Paul Masson (then owned by Seagrams), who used the former cannery for storage.

Delpech's winery and the Hunt buildings were torn down in the late 1950s; a strip mall took over the land in the late 1960's. If you go to the site of the old Delpech winery today, you’ll find a rather nice little wine-bar where you can enjoy some very good wines, and wonder what Amedee Delpech would have thought.

Amedee Delpech's story isn't that uncommon. There are shades of it in my great-grandfather's own story - immigrant comes to the United States, buys his own (marginal) land, and makes a home, vineyard, and farm. Delpech's story also matches Paul Masson, another French immigrant. Masson, who came to work for Charles LeFranc in his Almaden vineyards, later created his own winery that became world famous - probably just the ending Amedee Delpech was hoping for.

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Photo of Amedee and Germaine Delpech courtesy of Sandy Herve. Mountain Springs Ranch photo from Los Gatos Public Library; they have several other photos of the Heuter property.

Wrights Bridge 2: 3d Printing All The Details

The crossing of Los Gatos Creek at Wrights was always an odd scene. I really loved how the scenes on either side had turned out; the area around the Wrights station had the right look of California hills and trees hanging over the tracks. The area around the summit tunnel also gave the right look of diving into a dark redwood forest.

But the bridge scene - well, it just looked like mediocre work. The bridge didn’t look prototypical; it neither looked like the actual SP bridges along the route, and to be honest didn’t look particularly realistic for any railroad. The stream scene had never been completely landscaped and still showed bare spots and unrealistic slopes. It was also missing water in the stream bed, details on the bridge and in the surrounding area.

Now, some of this could be fixed; I’d done decent scenery elsewhere, and had my methods figured out. I’d use a gray-brown paint for the dirt color, sprinkle over sifted and sanitized dirt from our garden (“downstream from Los Gatos canyon, so really prototypical!”). I used yellow ground foam and static grass for the grassy areas, and a mix of Woodland scenics foliage and Supertrees for the larger trees. For water, I’d use the remainder of a jar of the Woodland Scenics decoupage stuff. Details also weren’t hard - just a matter of looking at photos and figuring out some debris to put here and there.

I’d have a harder time matching the prototype details. Prototype photos of the actual bridge, as well as other bridges through Los Gatos Canyon, always had a very specific Southern Pacific look. The piers were cast concrete, with rounded edges and gently angled sides. Bridges often had walkways hanging off each side with outriggers and cross-bracing from dumping pedestrians into the creek if they leaned too hard against the railings. Bridges often had very obvious concrete abutments.

None of these details were things I could buy - the standard SP look just didn’t match the store bought pieces. I could buy piers, but they’re not going to exactly match the SP shape. The handrails on the bridge are not available for love or money, and would need to be scratchbuilt. The bridge abutments? At least those would be easy to scratchbuild from some styrene with a bit of work.

3d printing to the rescue

The 3d printer sitting there in the corner seemed like the perfect item to solve some of these problems; the piers, abutments, and bridge details all came out of the 3d printer.

Drawing the pier using SketchUp's "Follow Me" tool. I drew the oval base and a single cross-section of the pier, then dragged the cross-section around the oval.

The Piers

I started off with the piers because the SP’s booklet on the bridge showed the exact plans. The cast piers were 15’ 2” wide at the top and 5’ thick. There was a 4” lip at the top of the pier. A 1 in 24 slope on all faces made the pier 16’ 3” wide and 6’ 9” thick at the bottom. The pier’s curve on each side had a 2’ 10” radius, with 8’ 6” spacing between the two half-circles.

With all these measurements, making a 3d model of the pier took only around 30 minutes. Sketchup has a feature called “Follow Me” where you can select a cross section, and move that cross section along a line in another plane. Sketchup automatically creates a shape using that profile. For the pier, I drew the oval (for the top of the model), then drew a cross section of the base - hollow to use less material with printing. With “Follow Me”, I had a rough pier done. The pier printed from the top to the bottom. I tweaked the design to get the wall thickness right, but soon had two piers ready to paint and install.

I could have added form impressions on the design, but decided against it - I assumed I could fake some with paint when the model was done.

The Abutments

The abutments came next. I needed the abutment to serve two purposes: they needed to mark the limits of the roadbed, but they also needed depressions to hold the 4x12 beams that sat atop the trestle bents on either end of the bridge. I could have done these in styrene sheet, layering multiple pieces to get the shape I needed, but once I had the 3d printer running, sketching out a quick design and sending it to the printer was quick.

The Wrights bridge has wooden trestle bents leading to the steel truss bridge in the center. I made these from scale 12 x 12 wood; I’d done this kind of work before, and didn’t mind switching to stripwood and white glue for the project. My big surprise was that getting these short trestle bents right was a bit of a challenge.

In the past, I’d sort of eyeballed how quickly the trestle bents spread out; this time, with the drawings from the “Southern Pacific Lines Common Standard Plans” (published by Steam Age Equipment Company a few years back), I knew the precise arrangement - piles on 2’ 4” centers, 12x12 cap, and three 8x18 stringers under each rail. I also knew the piles sloped out at 1 in 12 and 3 in 12.

My first couple attempts to do these by hand failed miserably -I couldn’t get the slopes quite right, and the short pieces were hard to cut and fit. I finally 3d printed a template to help me cut the pieces to length and hold them in place while gluing, and ended up with decent parts.

Handrails installed

The Walkways

Finally, I moved on to the walkways. The bridge itself was a Micro Engineering plastic model; Micro Engineering’s bridge track had appropriately long ties for the trestle and girder sections of the bridge. Getting those handrails and walkways on the bridge, though, didn’t have an obvious solution. The ties weren’t long enough to hold a walkway at the correct length. The individual posts, with cross-bracing sticking out from the bridge and in both directions along the bridge, were complex and tiny shapes that would have been tough to scratchbuild, especially because they had bits sticking in all directions - they weren’t just something that could be assembled flat on the workbench. Because these parts stuck out from the ties, there also wasn’t any good way to glue them onto the plastic ties. Worst of all, building the handrails out of stripwood seemed awfully fragile for an operating layout; I didn’t want to do hours of handwork only to have me break them off while track cleaning.

The 3d printer again called out to be used. For the problems of attaching the walkways and handrail, I realized a 3d part could both stick between the ties, and have a gluing surface to attach to the outside of the ties. The 3d printer could handle the multiple supports (as long as I oriented the parts right.) I could add the walkways and handrails as separate pieces, and add notches for the stripwood to align with the part.

Handrail part. Large projection fits between ties in bridge tie flex track.

Again, an hour of sketching gave me a simple part that worked. I printed a couple dozen of the supports, then sanded each to fit between the ties, superglued them in place, and the next day attached the walkway boards and handrails. Apart from some fiddling to get the supports attached (because of different tie spacing), assembly went quick and easily.

The Conclusions Rebuilding the bridge at Wrights started off as a straightforward process - redo some scenery based on some new facts I'd learned as part of research. Although I've used 3d printing for many projects, I was surprised how going to the 3d printer was my first choice for the piers, walkways, abutments, and pier template. If I'd been sending my parts out for manufacturing at Shapeways, I can't imagine asking for so many parts. But with the 3d printer already on my desk, the 3d printer becomes the tool of choice.

Movie Night XXV: Wrights Bridge

While we're talking about the new bridge at Wrights, let's check out some video of trains rolling through the new scene!

Replacing the Wrights Bridge: Part I

Sixth Crossing, Los Gatos Creek

I love research because it convinces me to throw away perfectly serviceable parts of my layout.

Wrights, located at the top of Los Gatos Canyon, is a key scene for my model railroad. It has a photogenic location at the top of Los Gatos Canyon, with the tracks suddenly jumping across the canyon to dive into a tunnel. Photogenic structures - the old general store, tiny station, and abandoned warehouses - fill the scene. A siding, originally intended to go to the Sunset Park picnic grounds in the 1890’s, provides a way to hide a reverse loop at the top of the layout.

Original scene

The Wrights scene is also one of the earliest bits of scenery on my layout. During the first nine months of building, I focused on getting track laid all the way to my upper level so I could confirm that I knew how to build my two-level benchwork. Once the track was in, I decided I ought to do the messy scenery on the top level first; I’d hate to dump plaster on a good-looking scene below.

The resulting scenery was a mix of good and bad. I matched the rough terrain of the location deep in the canyon, and captured the look of both the redwood-covered hills above the tunnel and the creek deep in the canyon. I reproduced the wooden trestle from narrow-gauge era photos. I also made the model a bit "more interesting" with trestle bents that weren’t perpendicular to the rails, and a split-level concrete foundation matching an odd trestle bent I’d seen on Jack Burgess’s Yosemite Valley railroad. I also rushed construction of supports for the road bridge just upstream of the railroad trestle, plopping down plaster onto the hillside and shaping it to look like a massive concrete block supporting each bridge end.

Of course, then I started reading more about the actual location. Later photos showed a different bridge - a wooden truss bridge - in place of the trestle across the creek. I found some maps hinting that the road from the new Wrights station, on the other side of the creek, dipped under the bridge to make it to the road bridge and the road up-canyon to farms in Austrian Gulch and beyond. Adding that road was one of the few improvements to the scenes since 2006.

Then, last year, while searching up at the California State Railroad Museum, I found a little stapled set of blueprints, set up like Powerpoint slides. (I wrote a bit about those blueprints and maps I found back in August.) I’ve been claiming (without proof) that the booklet must have been the work of some summer intern in the engineering department. That intern had remarkably good lettering skills...

That booklet showed pictures and drawings of the actual bridge… which didn’t look anything like the actual bridge I’d made. Now, that’s not uncommon; I’ve found plenty of scenes on my model railroad that turned out not to match reality. In some cases, I ignore the mistake. Perhaps I needed to swap two scenes to fit my garage, or perhaps I believed the difference wasn’t noticeable. In other cases, I'm annoyed by the difference - but not so annoyed by the mistake that I’d do something about it.

And in some cases, I get annoyed enough to rip out completed, decent scenery, just to match details that the summer intern sketched out a hundred years ago, and stapled in a cool little booklet.

The Prototype

For the railroad, the bridge at Wrights was the “sixth crossing of Los Gatos Creek”. Los Gatos Canyon was an awfully narrow place to survey a railroad, and the railroad reached the headwaters by bouncing from bank to bank to keep grading costs low. Two of the bridges were just above downtown Los Gatos in the narrows at Lexington Reservoir. The third was near Alma. The fourth was near Aldercroft Heights. The final two crossings - just below Wrights, and just above Wrights - were the fifth and sixth crossings.

The South Pacific Coast Railroad laid all that track back in the 1870’s in their attempt to break the SP monopoly and get access to the lumber traffic from the Santa Cruz mountains. The SPC was narrow gauge - smaller trains and bridges kept the fledgling railroad’s costs low. Their original bridges met their “cheap” image, with most bridges being trestles with piles driven into the unstable soil holding them up.

The sixth crossing of Los Gatos creek, up by Wrights, was originally a trestle built on pilings by the South Pacific Coast. The tracks, on the east side of the canyon, suddenly made a right turn, cut across the creek and rolled across a filled-in gulch before diving into the mile-long summit tunnel. Photos from the 1880’s and 1890’s show a trestle that looks like it would have caught ever bit of debris rolling down the creek in the winter storms.

The SP leased the line in 1887, planning to make the line into a solid, first class railroad… eventually. When the plans to standard gauge the line started in earnest in the early 20th century, the SP widened the route and put in some slightly more solid bridges. SP finished dual-gauging the tracks to Wrights by 1903. The Wrights bridge, according to the intern’s slide deck, was replaced in the same year with a straining truss wooden bridge, built just as the tracks up to Wrights were being standard gauged. The intern described it as:

Old Structure. 80 ft. Straining Beam Deck Span on frame piers, with concrete footings with trestle approaches. Designed for narrow gauge track and equipment. Constructed 1903.

The plans to complete the standard-gauging of the line from Los Gatos to Santa Cruz got interrupted on April 18, 1906 as the Great San Francisco Earthquake hit the region. Landslides buried the track on both sides of the mountain, and the summit tunnel at Wrights was cut in the middle.

After the earthquake, the Southern Pacific spent three frantic years rebuilding the Santa Cruz branch. In Wrights, the railroad cleared and widened the summit tunnel, moved the station across the creek, and standard gauged the line. They didn’t replace the bridge, though, leaving the 1903 improved crossing in place.

And then we come to the project described by the intern. In 1915, the SP finally got around to improving both the 5th and 6th crossings of Los Gatos Creek. It wasn’t quite a new bridge; the intern noted that the new bridge was “Second Hand 50 ft Deck Plate Girder from the Santa Clara River (Montalvo Bridge). (Our 1915-vintage Sixth Crossing bridge was very lucky to get replaced and yanked out of Southern California. The bridge that superseded it was washed out to sea when the St. Francis Dam burst in 1928. Cue obligatory music.) The old wooden piers disappeared, replaced by a pair of concrete piers placed on the existing concrete foundations. Even if the bridge wasn’t local, the concrete was; gravel for the new piers came from Campbell, and the cement came from Davenport.

Road crossing under the bridge

The SP spent $6,556.98 on that new bridge: $3500 in labor and the rest on material, spreading the work over fourteen months from November 1914 to February 1916. The intern even broke down the costs - $1500 for the piers, $600 for the pilings for the trestle approaches, $700 to install the new steel bridge, $700 for the trestle approaches themselves, and $200 for ties and guardrails for the bridge. They also accounted for the corporate expenses - $500 for falsework, $300 for use of the work train, $600 for rental of equipment, and $180 to haul the materials up to Wrights.

Now, I just needed to figure out how to build that bridge to match the intern's drawings.

Coming up next time, I'll talk a bit about how I built the scene, and how many of the key parts of the scene were actually 3d printed.

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Excerpts from blueprints were taken from "Sixth crossing of Los Gatos Creek Near Wrights", a booklet created by the Southern Pacific Coast Division engineering department to describe the project. Original in the California State Railroad Museum library, Sacramento.

Research Road Trip: Road Routing Proof, and More Projects

As much as I care about modeling prototype scenes accurately, I also realize I'm using the historical research just to help me figure out what to build as part of a hobby and relaxation. The model isn't meant to be a perfect representation of history; sometimes, I'll build stuff because it's fun (ex: the Goleta gas station sitting on Meridian Road) or because a particular model might not be perfectly accurate, but it still gives the sense of the Santa Clara Valley I'm trying to share.

Back in 2009, I talked about my notebook of location sketches that I used to remember photos of particular locations. I was using my map of Wrights at the time to redo the scenery around there; my big question was how the road went between the Wrights depot and the (still-existing) road bridge. I'd guessed at the time that the road dipped under the railroad bridge. I wasn't sure if it was perfect, but (1) it was plausible, (2) I wanted to improve the scene, and (3) I wasn't going to get better information any time soon. I rebuilt the scene anyway, and it's a nice scene.

1911 Wrights map

Six years later, I know the answer about the road for certain.

I did another day trip up to Sacramento last week. It's a bit of a long slog, but I enjoy getting the chance to search through old archives, look at original documents, and get a better understanding for how things had been. It can be boring work, but the occasional revelations and surprises make for a satisfying day.

I had a bunch of other goals for that visit, but found some time to look for materials on some of the stations along the Los Gatos brach. One of the stops was at the California State Archives. Most of their archives can be dry - corporate records, transcripts from California Railroad Commission cases, etc. They've also got microfilms of some railroads drawings from the early 20th century, probably collected as part of some state law at the time. I poked around in several of the maps along the Vasona branch - Foyle (location of the brickworks on Fruitvale Ave.), Vasona, and Wrights. One of the finds was particularly cool - the April, 1911 map of Wrights in their collection shows "Depot Road" passing under the bridge, in pretty much the same way I guessed. Woohoo!

Cover of Wrights bridge rebuilding brochure

Plan of rebuild of 6th crossing of Los Gatos Creek near Wrights

This was just one of many discoveries that day. The California State Railroad Museum had a handful of other docs to highlight the details - the 1914 equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation talking about a rebuild of the bridge crossing Los Gatos Creek (with shape of piers and cost) also showed where the bridge crossed the road. (Congrats to the Southern Pacific; their intern from 1916 did a great job on the brochure!) A 1938-era map showed the road passing under the bridge, even as every other building in the vicinity had been removed. A 1938 map showed the Wright station removed.

It's great knowing that I got that detail right. Some might ask "why did you build it if you weren't certain about the arrangement?" To be honest, my guess about its location wasn't too far off the mark. Although I could have held off on modeling Wright until I got that detail right, I'm really glad I didn't wait six years but instead built something that was mostly correct. It's more fun to have an operating layout with fun scenery than to have something that's 100% accurate.

The maps also showed a bunch of interesting details that are worth adding. Several maps showed a freight house on the "Sunset Park" spur just before the tunnel; the 1910-era maps also showed packing houses that (sadly) aren't visible in later years. All the maps show wooden "bulkheads" along the creek keeping the hillsides from eroding into the creek.

The last map also highlights some cute little details that never made it into photos. About a hundred yards down the track, the map shows a "shed made of bridge stringers", and an old narrow gauge car body on blocks next to the tracks, joined to a small frame building. (An annotation mentions the buildings were sold to "W. E. Hughes".) Those buildings would be neat details to add to the layout. The photos of the Wrights bridge also points out my trestle-style bridge isn't quite correct; to be accurate, I really need a 50' steel girder bridge "from Santa Clara River (Montalvo bridge)", along with some large concrete piers to hold it up, and some timber trestle on either end.

And on top of all that, the maps highlight little bits of history that aren't relevant for modeling, but do highlight the place I'm modeling, and life in the Santa Cruz Mountains at the beginning of the last century. The 1911 map shows that one of the packing houses was used as "Dance Hall and Packing House", highlighting how buildings shared multiple purposes in rural towns.

The 1911 map also contains an unnatural fascination in running water for the town:

Note: All properties shown excepting that marked Nick Bowden are owned by Matty. Cottages 1, 2, 3, 4 & 11 are occupied only in summer. Each has 1 3/4" faucet. Cottages 6, 7, 8, & 9 are occupied only in summer. They get water from the one faucet shown. The saloon, hotel, & livery stables are rented and run by B. Borrella. The saloon has 5 3/4" faucet shown & 1 toilet. The hotel 7 3/4" faucets & 1 toilet, the livery stable 2 3/4" faucets and 1 1 1/2" faucet. The blacksmith shop has 1 3/4" faucet. Cottages 5 & 10 are occupied permanently, each has 1 3/4" faucet. The grocery store is rented & run by Chas Squires, & has "1-1" & 1- 3/4" faucet. The chinese store has 1 3/4" faucet. The dance hall has 1 3/4" faucet. The Earl Fruit Co. packing house has 1 3/4" faucet. Nick Bowden's place has 1-3/4" faucet.

That accounting of faucets might say something about whether water would be available for other development; one of the later maps at CSRM showed that the railroad water tank was filled from small dams along some of the ravines north of town, which couldn't have supplied much water, and must have been dry during summer. If I had a thirsty locomotive in the middle of summer, I'd be unwilling to trust there was any water in that tank.

None of that matters for building the model (except for the notes about both Earl Fruit and the freight house existing), but it does hint at Wrights being a quiet rural village that would have been near-empty during the winter.

Excerpts from 1911 Wrights Station map from the California State Archives - ask for the "Aperture" cards, and check the card catalog in the research room to see what's available. The excerpts from the Southern Pacific "S.P.C. Bridge Renewal" brochure from the California State Railroad Museum's archive. They've got a similar brochure for the next bridge downhill towards Los Gatos that I haven't seen. Great thanks to the research staff at both libraries for their help!

Buying Fruit at Wrights: San Tomas Drying Company

It's still true: all we often know about the San Jose dried fruit packing houses is how their baseball team scored, and why they got sued.

Wagons line up at Wrights Station to load and unload from boxcars.

Today's lesson on that subject comes from the San Tomas Drying Company, another dried fruit packer who appeared in city directories between 1900 and 1910, but left few other traces. Heck, they didn't even have a baseball team, so we don't get to see how they stacked up against J.K. Armsby or the Guggenhime crew.

But, luckily, they got sued, and that suit hints a little at life at the San Tomas Drying Company, as well as the life of the plaintiff - an orchardist up in the Santa Cruz Mountains at the turn of the century. When you see that photo of the boxcars loaded at Wrights with the names of the buyers emblazoned across them, the suit explains how those prunes got to those boxcars.

The specific case is Morrell vs San Tomas Drying Company. J.B. Morrell ran a large ranch up along Summit Road at the crest of the Santa Cruz Mountains - an awfully long way out in the hills, but luckily convenient to the former South Pacific Coast railway line at Wrights Station. Early in the 1907 season, Morrell succumbed to the sweet pleading of the San Tomas fruit buyer, who offered to buy his whole crop for $70 a ton (around 3 cents/pound). That price assumed that the prunes would come in at 75 per pound; if they were larger or smaller, the price would be adjusted up or down.

For San Tomas Packing Company, Henry Booksin Jr., son of a famous San Jose orchardist, signed the contract. Booksin also noted that the crop was going to be sold to Balfour Guthrie, a large British food importer (who, twenty years later, was trying to buy the Virden Packing canneries when Charles Virden's empire collapsed, so Morrell's prunes were probably going for export to feed the children of Europe.

The contract's a little scattered about exactly where the prunes needed to be delivered. First, it says Wrights, then it says San Jose:

"[buying] the entire crop of dried Fr. [french] prunes, season 1907, and estimated at 100 tons, and grown and dried in the orchard known as Morrell Ranch - Wrights, f.o.b. [freight on board - Morrell was responsible for loading] cars Wrights, tested at Wrights… All fruit to be sound and merchantable and well dried, free from slab, of choice quality, and delivered f.o.b. packing house, situated on the Infirmatory Road, Santa Clara Co., California, packed in sacks furnished by the buyer, original condition as taken from the drying yard…
"San Tomas Drying and Packing Company agrees to pay balance of purchase money as soon as delivery is completed and sizes determined. Delivery to be made as directed, final delivery before November 30, 1907."

One obvious question is the location of Booksin's packing plant, for the city directories only say it was on "Infirmatory Road", now Bascom Ave. Booksin addressed the contract as "Moulton's Switch, Santa Clara County", and indicated that the fruit would need to be delivered there. Now, Moulton's Switch helps us place San Tomas Packing, for Stillman Moulton ran a dried fruit packing house on Infirmatory Road in the late 1890's on some land he had next to the South Pacific Coast narrow gauge tracks. (A September 1, 1890 San Jose Evening News gives us details of the operation.) Period USGS maps show the likely location as the triangular lot at 1400 South Bascom in San Jose; it's now the home of a dated 1950's strip mall, but the USGS maps show signs of buildings and industries around the turn of the century.

So when the buyer gave Morrell the contract, he also handed over $1 to seal the deal, and then everyone waited for the harvest. And it wasn't too bad a year; after the drying was done, Morrell grabbed a bunch of teamsters and hauled 134,000 pounds of dried prunes down to the Wrights train station, then loaded them on the equivalent of five or six railroad cars.

But Morrell had actually harvested and dried 172,000 pounds. San Tomas Drying Company, with its bins already packed, asked Mr. Morrell to hang on to the rest of the prunes for a while… They went up to the Morrell Ranch in December, inspected the prunes, and said all but a ton were in fine shape, but again asked to hold off on taking the prunes until May because their bins were still full. Finally, in April 1908, San Tomas dances around for a bit, and says they're not willing to take the last ton of prunes. Morrell, fed up, sells the remaining prunes at auction, then sues San Tomas for the difference in the promised price and what they got at auction.

San Tomas Drying Company lost the suit - they'd promised to buy the crop and they didn't. Considering the times, it's possible to guess why they were being so ornery. 1906 had been a bad year for dried fruit as the Great San Francisco Earthquake destroyed packing houses and disrupted travel. Even with that, the crop came in larger than expected, and prices dropped from an expected 3.5 cents/pound to 2 cents a pound.

1907 was better, with some of the highest prices in memory for fruit. But a sulfur scare caused France and Pennsylvania to ban sulfured fruits, and even though the prohibitions were loosened within a year, prices for the 1908 crop were unbearably low. For Booksin, with his packing house full of fruit that might have been selling slowly, picking up additional fruit must have been an awful risk, especially as the 1908 crop approached.

I like this story best for the details about what it took to ship hundreds of tons of prunes out of the mountains. The packing house had to send up sacks, which would have to be hauled to the orchard. Fruit would have needed to be harvested, dried, sacked, and stored. Multiple wagon loads would have needed to haul all the fruit down from the ranch and over to the station to fill a freight car. The fruit would have been hauled down to the packing house and placed in bins for storage until sale, then it would have been pulled out, cleaned, boxed, and shipped out again. All this work would have been manual, with the sacks handled multiple times. In these pre-automobile days, just hauling all that fruit around must have been costly and tiring.

And those teamsters at Wrights were only the first ones to get tired.

This story also states an important lesson: if the packing house asks you to hold onto the fruit for a while because their bins are full, start looking around for other buyers.

No matter how good their baseball team might be.

[Photo of wagons at Wrights Station from History Los Gatos.]

Danger Stalks the Railroad Tracks

Going through old newspapers definitely gives you an idea about what the dangers of the time were. The 1930's Campbell newspapers were filled with harrowing stories of car crashes and cars getting hit by trains. When I was searching the 1903 Evening News articles for any mention of a fire at A. & C. Ham Packing, there were lots of stories of injuries, deaths, and near-deaths from spooked horses and trains. Needless to say, I was a bit more interested in the train stories, and was surprised how many stories were about injuries or near-injuries to the workers in the railroad yards.

The breathless "locomotive kills railroad worker" stories, apart from hinting at the danger of railroading at the turn of the century, are also interesting for hints about how trains operated back then.

Narrow Gauge and Standard Gauge Train Nearly Collide in Los Gatos For example, the Monday, June 22, 1903 San Jose Evening News mentions a near-collision between a broad-gauge and narrow-gauge train. In this case, a standard-gauge train coming from the picnic grounds at Sunset Park (high up in Los Gatos Canyon beyond the summit tunnel at Wrights) left Los Gatos headed downhill at the same time that the narrow-gauge train to Santa Cruz left Campbell. Luckily, the two trains saw each other and were able to stop before colliding.

Part of the problem might have been the recent completion of the standard gauge track to Wrights - that is, taking the existing narrow gauge tracks with rails three feet apart, and adding an additional rail 56.5 inches away so both narrow and standard gauge trains could use the tracks. The April 14, 1903 Evening News had reported two months before that the conversion was almost complete to Wrights. It had been a substantial job - widening cuts, strengthening bridges, and daylighting a tunnel in Los Gatos Canyon two miles above Los Gatos. The crews were probably still getting used to the idea of checking both the standard and narrow gauge timetables for conflicting trains.

Standard-gauging the whole railroad from San Jose to Santa Cruz would take a few more years; the cutover was planned for April 18, 1906, but the Great San Francisco Earthquake destroyed the summit tunnel and delayed standard gauging for another three years.

Track Worker Falls Under Train, Killed Later that same evening, a track worker fell underneath railroad cars at Campbell when the car he was sitting on was recoupled to the train. Nicola Caravello was a new immigrant from Italy who'd only been in the United States for two years. Caravello's death made it to the front page, and because of the local interest was featured high on the front page, well above an update on Saturday's wreck in Marin County at Point Reyes Station on the North Shore / North Pacific Coast railroad. That wreck, which one of the books on the North Pacific Coast, labels the worst accident on the road, injured 29 and killed two when a funeral train going too fast left the tracks on a sharp curve.

One possible reason for the gravel train might have been for work on the San Francisco-San Jose main line. A May 22, 1903 Evening News article notes that progress on double-tracking the San Francisco to San Jose main line is going well:

Five gravel trains now play between here [San Jose] and Palo Alto with ballast for the double track which is fast approaching San Jose. Men are being constantly added to the gangs and the work of completion is being rushed.

The gravel pits along Los Gatos Creek south of San Jose would have been a good source of gravel for the new line, and Caravello's death would fit with lots of new employees and rushed work.

Commute Train Engine Falls Over at Narrow Gauge Depot The May 22, 1903 Evening News reported on the Friday afternoon San Francisco to Los Gatos passenger train's locomotive derailing and falling over on its side. The rather embarrassing accident occurred just as the train reached the old narrow gauge station where Diridon station now sits. It was also a very public and visible wreck, entertaining hundreds of witnesses at the station and on nearby streets. A rider on the Santa Clara St. streetcar reported:

Our car had just stopped at the crossing [on the Alameda] to allow the Los Gatos train to pass. It was nearly half past one when the train pulled into view around the bend from San Francisco. Just as the engine pulled past the ice plant [at Julian St., one block up] within plain sight of where we were standing it jumped the track and commenced bumping along the ties in a cloud of dust and debris. After running a short distance the engine toppled slowly over on its side burrowing its nose into the loose dirt and snorting and hissing a last gasp.

Obviously folks were a lot more jaded then, for this article was buried on page 5. If a Caltrain engine flopped over on its side within sight of Diridon station today, we'd have news helicopters circling endlessly and declaring the immense danger of commuting by rail. The San Jose Evening News of the time thought the following stories more important than a locomotive falling over:

• Balloon (oops, "airship") exhibition at Longchamps, France.
• Child in Illinois may lose his tongue after licking ammonia pipe at new ice plant.
• Local horse and buggy thief captured in Monterey.
• San Francisco Chronicle declares that prune crop looks good.
• Washington D.C.: Experimental subjects testing preserved and adulterated meat go on strike because of too much borax'ed meat.
• Girl in Indiana shot by jealous lover.
• Boy burglars captured after several robberies in San Jose, and caught at the broad gauge depot.
• Hogs in Dixon, California eat suicide. 

• ...and several other stories that obviously were more interesting than a railroad locomotive flipping over on its side right there in the middle of town.

I was surprised by the idea of a mid-afternoon Los Gatos train - most of the timetables I saw showed only a single Los Gatos commute train from San Francisco, but the SP's handy timetable in the day's paper showed five trains to Los Gatos at 9:48 am, 10:20 am, 1:35 pm, 4:21 pm, and 6:20pm, with a train to Campbell and New Almaden at 4:45 pm only. Switching Campbell on my layout would be a lot more interesting if the crews had to get out of the way of passenger trains that often.

Trouble at the Market Street Station Some of the stories hint at how the railroad was was operated. For example, the old Market Street station north of downtown had tracks which crossed several busy downtown streets. There was also a sharp curve where the tracks joined Fourth Street so the mainline to Los Angeles could run down the middle of the street past San Jose State. Some of the switching movements - such as assembling the commute trains for San Francisco - would have requires a switch engine to pull cars along that Fourth Street curve. But that sharp curve and the street running would have made all the crews especially vigilant, right?

Uh, no.

Engines in a Collision: Smashup at Second Street Crossing This Morning The Evening News on July 9, 1903 leads with the breathless "Engineer and Firemen Jump for their Lives" article:

A fast manifest freight from Gilroy crashed into a switch engine at the Second Street crossing of the Southern Pacific at 5:40 this morning and a serious wreck resulted. The freight was pulling into the station at a high rate of speed concealed from view by the sharp curve at Second Street. The switch engine was upon the same track and proceeding slowly in the opposite direction.
Suddenly the freight pulled into view and bore down upon the switch engine with a speed which made the avoidance of a collision an impossibility. The trainmen realized their danger and after reversing their engines jumped to the ground.
The locomotives came together with a resounding crash which nearly demolished the light engine and severely damaged the other… the crippled engines were towed to the roundhouse and the broken wood and other evidences of the accident were removed.

So why was the switch engine pulling cars so far east? I haven't seen any good maps of the San Jose yards as of 1905, but the 1915 Sanborn map shows that most of the freight yards were west of San Pedro St., while a small passenger yard existed right behind the depot between San Pedro and First Street. Now, a 5:40 am train crew might have been switching boxcars from the east end of the yard or from the packing houses along the tracks, or they could have been putting together the first commute trains of the day. My first guess would be they were a crew with passenger cars, but another story from a year later suggests both are possible.

Trains Crash Together At The Broad Gauge Depot The November 3, 1904 Evening News again buries a story on page three when a switch engine crew blocked the main line in front of the station just as a freight train arrives from Salinas in the late afternoon. We know the switch engine was pulling from the east end because both engines touched in the crash.

Owing to the carelessness of an engineer in charge of a switch engine which was making up a train of freight cars at the broad cage depot last evening a collision took place with the way freight from Salinas. The freight train had the right of way and the engineer of the switch engine whose name was Tescheran had orders to run his cars on another track. Owing to his slowness the freight bore down and the engines crashed together… The wreck was cleared away in about an hour and a half and caused no interruption of regular traffic. The accident took place at about 4:30 p.m. None of the trainmen was hurt.

New Buildings at Market Street The awkwardness which might have caused the first near-miss at Los Gatos might have encouraged some of the problems at the Market Street Depot. A October 11, 1902 article describes more work needed for the double-tracking as workers moved telegraph poles away from the depot and built an additional track at the station. There's also rumors of a new building for Wells Fargo and a dining room for tourists which as far as I know was never built.

There were other stories - railroad men pinned between trains or hit by a moving freight car in the yard, but all the stories hinted that the railroads were a lot faster and looser with operations at the turn of the century than in the 1930's. With each of those accidents and news reports, we learn a bit more about how the trains were operating in the last century.

1939 Aerial Photos!

If you're either not interested in San Jose history, or you have things you need to get done tonight, you can stop reading now.

For the rest of you fearless readers, however, here's another great example of the sort of material that's available out on the Internet if you just keep looking. The University of California, Santa Cruz's library has a collection of aerial photos from the 1930's through the 1970's, and cover Santa Cruz, Monterey, Santa Clara, San Mateo, and Alameda counties.

These are magical for me, for they show San Jose in wonderful detail around the same time as the setting for my model railroad. The West San Jose shot shows the canneries well; a later shot shows the San Jose Brick Works in all its glory. The north side of San Jose shows the old Market Street Station completely gone four years after the station was closed. The surrounding packing houses and Anderson Barngover plant still look busy. Los Gatos Canyon allows me to see the site of Alma station, as well as the routing of the railroad along the creek. There's even an image of Wrights, with the main line heading towards the summit tunnel.

The photos are a bit painful to navigate; they're generally in sequences heading north or south, but occasional skips and duplicate sequences can make it hard to track down sections to the west or east of the photos. I haven't looked much beyond the 1939-F flight, but I suspect there's some great details elsewhere. UCSC appears to be trying to use crowdsourcing to fill in some of the details, so add notes as you identify locations to help the next viewer.

As you find cool photos from the collection, please add a comment so others can check them out too!

[Aerial photo from UCSC's aerial photograph collection, flight 1939-F. Captions are mine.]

More Reading: Santa Cruz Trains

If you're more interested in the trains running from San Jose to Santa Cruz than in cannery finances, you might also want to check out Santa Cruz Trains. Derek Whaley from Felton has been writing about the old SP line (among other things), and his latest article follows the old roadbed from Zayante to the Mountain Charlie tunnel.

He's also got more photos of banana slugs in his blog than I do, but I'm probably noticing just because I'm jealous. Go read it.

Map of Wrights

It's still amazing to me how much cool data can be found out on the internet. This weekend, someone on the South Pacific Coast mailing list on Yahoo (spcrr@yahoogroups.com) noted that the September 1895 issue of the Journal of the Association of Engineering Societies had a long article on the repair of the summit tunnel portal at Wrights. It seems that during the winter of 1892-1893, the hillside slid down across the tunnel.

(Wow, sliding hillsides in the Santa Cruz Mountains, who would have thought!)

The article describes not only the civil engineering necessary to keep the hill from sliding again, but a very nice map of the area around Wrights, along with the locations of the Sunset Park spur and the existence of a rooming house on the east side of the creek at the future site of the station (post-earthquake). It also mentions that the sand and gravel for the new tunnel came from the gravel pit in Campbell.

Amusingly, academic papers in those days included not only the actual article, but also the question and answer session from what I assume was the conference where the paper was initially presented.

The map also seems to show that the road over to the future station site went under the trestle, so it looks like I modeled that correctly!

Movie Night V: Trains in the Canyon

Following last year's exciting Vasona Branch time-lapse video, here's another video... and this time at regular speed!

After last month's tree-making, the hills between Alma and Wrights look much more realistic. This video shows off two trains in the scene as well as the Wrights trestle and station scene, Alma station and siding, and a bit at the end of the Wrights General Store, summit tunnel, and fruit packing shed. Apologies for the shaky video; camera phones aren't great for steady video.

Enjoy!

The soundtrack is Paul Whiteman and his orchestra playing "California Here I Come". Folks who've operated on the Vasona Branch know I have 1920's era pre-show music playing in the background. Some of the music is vintage (copied off one of the sites providing out-of-copyright 78's, though the Library of Congress also has a copy online), while other music on the playlist just sounds old, but might be played by a bunch of college kids from San Luis Obispo.

The Best Day to Make Trees Is Two Years Ago, Or Today

Yep, even in dry California, I never have enough trees on the layout. This weekend's hot weather encouraged me to go on a tree-building kick, pulling out the Supertrees, the matte medium, and the tarps for an afternoon of sunburn and ground foam stuck to my hands.

It took me years til I figured out how to make trees that I found at all realistic. As a teenager, I found Woodland Scenics' metal armature trees a pain to make and unrealistic, both in color, shape, and size. I never understood why their trees were so small til we drove through Texas one year and I saw what counted as trees out in North Texas. Heck, we've got chaparral bigger than that. I didn't have any better luck stretching the foilage over the plastic armature trees, and the results never looked like my favorite places in California (whether up in the drier hills, as seen in the first photo in this set, or down in the canyons near the redwoods).

In the last few years, I've finally found the styles I'll stick with - Woodland Scenics' plastic armature pine trees for the redwood forests around Wrights, their small plastic armature trees for my orchards, and a combination of Supertrees and Woodland Scenics fine-leaf foilage for small trees and bushes. The Supertrees work well for the larger deciduous trees - the buckeye, laurel, and sycamore - start with the cone-shaped tops of the Supertree weed armatures, and get pale green ground foams. The round coast live oaks are shaped from the lower portions of the armatures, and get the dark green Noch leaf flakes.

I got about 40-50 trees done over the afternoon, and would have done more except I ran out of clothespins to hold them while drying. More clothespins are on my shopping list before next time.

All the trees went along the tracks between Alma and Wrights. This stretch had been completely empty and distracted from two nice scenes on either side, but now it's a continuous stretch of trees. Here's some photos of the completed scene.

[Real California scenery photos both from Almaden Quicksilver County Park.]

Gems in Documents

The San Jose Library's digital collection has more documents than I thought; they've also scanned several city directories, including this
1910 San Jose directory.

A quick glance through the section on fruit packers listed all the different companies I've already seen when checking out the Market Street warehouses: J. B. Inderrieden at 200 Ryland, H.E. Loss on San Pedro, Earl Fruit on the other side of the tracks on Bassett at the northeast corner of Terraine. There's also some names I don't recognize down by what will become Del Monte Plant #3 and elsewhere on the west side of downtown.

They also list some of the packers outside town, including an Earl Fruit Co. branch in Wrights. That's unexpected to me; Wrights was a small hamlet and I wouldn't have imagined the farmers in the hills would have produced enough fruit to support a packing operation... even if I've modeled one of the warehouse buildings in Wrights that probably held them. However, Earl Fruit's presence in Wrights does connect some dots, for this photo from the Los Gatos Museum shows several narrow gauge cars on the short spur at Wrights loading fruit, with the Earl Fruit Co. placards displayed prominently on each car. Coincidentally, this photo convinced me to model that siding as well as Wrights on my layout.

And if anyone ever challenges me on whether Wrights deserves a refrigerator car or two for fruit occasionally, I'll show them the city directory.

"Take a Setting Card"

Every now and then when talking with a new acquaintance, I'll mention my model railroad hobby. If they don't immediately give me the "you play with trains?" look, I'll also mention model railroad operation, and describe it as "kind of like Dungeons and Dragons, except where you're trying to role-play life as a railroad employee rather than a freelance destroyer of monstruous pests in the local ruins."
And, to be honest, that's what operations feels like to me: can I do the switching jobs in the same way a real crew would, and get an idea for what life on the railroad was like? That's great for the work tasks, but there's not a lot of ways to appreciate the setting when model railroading. We focus on the track and trains because... well, that's our job. We've got nice scenery to explain where we are in the world and hint at the setting, but what's it really like to be riding in the caboose up Los Gatos Canyon, or what subtleties of the town are we not getting from the scenery?

I'd thought a couple years ago about having a bunch of "location setting" cards at each town to add some color. As you passed through each town, you could pull out one card and it would give you some color to whatever role you were playing. For example:

Wrights
Climbing up Los Gatos Canyon feels like a different world. The canyon walls close in, the towns disappear, and the closest sign of civilization are the orchards and farmhouses further up the ridge. At times, the tracks are carved into the cliff, and you can look down out of a window and see the creek below.
You can smell the sage, and the bay laurel trees, and the dust getting kicked up from the train.
The brakeman shot a rabbit during a station stop at Alma, and the smell from the caboose makes it seem like they’re working on lunch.

Or:

Wrights
As your train pulls past the empty station at Wrights, you almost feel like the town’s fading away before your eyes. Sure, the general store’s still open on the other side of the tracks, but the Water Company’s trying hard to buy that bit of land and chase out the few families in the area. Alice Mattey, the operator, waves from the station, but there’s no one else on the platform. A couple wagonloads of apricots sit on the opposite side of the river waiting for a refrigerator car to be spotted.
The forest is slowly overwhelming the town. The trees droop and shade the track, and you occasionally see deer running through the brush.

Similar cards for Campbell or San Jose could give details about life in the canneries - reminders of what season it is, reminders of how the traffic compares to last year, which plants cut production completely because of the depression, or how the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU) strike affected the train crews.

So, what's your opinion - too geeky, or a nice way to help set a mood for operations?

Another Cool Photo!

I've been spending evenings adding online library and history photos to Lookback Maps; it's been a good way for me to organize photos I've seen at the Bancroft Library or Los Gatos History Museum's websites without downloading and saving them all. I've also been finding all sorts of cool photos available online, ranging from some of Dorothea Lange's photos of the last days of the Berryessa Valley before Monticello Dam flooded the region to photos of William Wurster's modern office building for the Schuckl Cannery in Sunnyvale.

I've also found a few wonderful photos for planning the Vasona Branch. Here's a neat photo from History Los Gatos's collections of photos from the Jesuit Novitiate above town; it shows some of the Novitiate students on a hike up Los Gatos Canyon to Wrights Station in December, 1938. I like this picture because it's a really clear shot of the station location, though it's obvious that the station was torn down sometime before 1938. The water tank is still available for any trains that come by, but it'll be useless as soon as the line is abandoned in a year and a half.

The surprising detail for me in this photo is the huge size of that cut behind the water tank - the hillside's been cut away up to fifty feet above the tracks. Wrights had a short passing siding here, but I don't know why the railroad cut such a huge bench out along here. The sign is located where the post-1906 station had been; before that, the station had been behind us, across the river and just before the tunnel. I wonder if the railroad needed to carve out more of the hillside to give the tracks room to curve across the creek and to the mouth of the tunnel? Or was the canyon just so narrow and steep that digging space for the tracks required so much earthmoving?

Time to start combing through those online history web sites to find more photos like this one!