One of the bigger changes in model railroading since the 1970’s is whether we’re modeling a completely imaginary railroad, a plausible but invented railroad, or if we’re trying to model the real world as it was at a particular time. The “imagine everything” folks might build something that’s a caricature - think John Allen’s mountain-crossing Gorre and Daphetid — or that borrows some historic reality (“bridge route in Colorado”) Owners get all the freedom to choose what they’re building out of whole cloth, create cities along the railroad from any inspiration, and avoid all the pesky research and visits to actual sites. Folks building to a plausible reality might need to understand something about the economics, architecture, and industries of a specific place and time - modeling an agricultural short line in California, or a fictitious logging railroad in Washington state. However, they’ve also got the freedom to imagine new places using whatever constraints they choose. I’m on the other side - I choose to model actual locations, and try to accurately model what’s there. I enjoy the research, I think I get a more realistic whole, and I suspect that the research helps me fill in details I couldn’t imagine on my own.
Or, more bluntly, the real world is stranger than I might imagine, so modeling a real place from photos helps me fill in those details I couldn’t possibly invent.
How strange is the real world? How about “freight trains in the sky” strange?Report on Steam Railroads of San Jose
I was poking around in San Jose Library’s California Room, the library’s local history collection. One item caught my attention: “Report on Steam Railroads of San Jose”. This report from 1925 described the current state of the different railroads in San Jose at the time, and suggested ways to improve both the profits of the railroads while improving quality of life for San Jose residents and businesses. Considering the author was a well-known urban planner from St. Louis (Harold Bartholomew, who apparently had an entire urban planning firm specializing in railroad rethinks), I think we can imagine we’re about to hear a bunch of crazy ideas from those Back East crazy consultants. And it doesn’t disappoint, with a crazy proposal that I couldn’t have imagined.
[ Partial version of Report on Steam Railroads of San Jose here. I didn’t bother to scan the fold-out profiles for railroad elevation for the three plans. Sorry! ]
The problems of San Jose in regard to its steam railroads are similar in every respect to those in other Cities of normal and rapid growth, where the expansion of industries, commercial enterprises, and residential sections has taken place with little or no regulation. Instead of well defined and segregated industrial districts, we find in San Jose clusters of factories, warehouses, coal and lumber yards and a great number of packing establishments located close up to the railroad tracks, often main lines, as they have always existed. The industries have closed in on the railroads, so to speak, thus hindering greatly both their own expansion and that of the railroads.”
As a reminder, San Jose in 1925 was different from the railroads we know today. In the 1920’s, the College Park yard straddling the Guadalupe river was the main SP yard. The “big old barn” of an Eastlake-style wooden station on Bassett Street was San Jose’s primary railroad station. The line to Los Angeles ran down the center of Fourth Street, past office buildings and San Jose State University. The old South Pacific Coast line broke off the SP mainline at the old Lentzen Street roundhouse, past the current Shark Tank and future site of Diridon Station, and then off towards Campbell and Los Gatos. Santa Clara’s Newhall Yard hadn’t yet been built. The old freight yards were congested, lots of downtown streets got blocked by trains around the clock, and the residents complained about the 19th century feel of the railroad facilities in town. Main roads crossed the railroad at ground level, so busy streets such as First Street, Polhemus (Taylor), San Pedro Street, and the Alameda were constantly blocked by trains coming and going.
What’s Wrong with the San Jose Railroads?
It was a very different San Jose than we know. The report highlighted many of the challenges: the passenger station and yards were overwhelmed, the freight station wasn’t modern, and the city wanted the SP off Fourth Street.
There were 100 passenger trains running through San Jose each day. 70 of the trains were the commute operations - nearly as busy as today. Most of those passenger operations went to the San Jose Market Street station - a two track station that was too tiny for the service, stuck in the middle of the city, and ill-equipped to turn commute trains and send steam engines to and from the roundhouse. There were also five trains to and from Oakland and Niles, six trains to and from Los Angeles and points east, and six trains to and from Monterey and the Salinas Valley. None of these were trains to Santa Cruz - the Santa Cruz trains all stopped at the former SPC station off the Alameda.
The yards and services were still based on 1870’s San Jose. Freight switching of College Park blocked Polhemus (Taylor) Street; San Pedro Street had six to twelve tracks to cross. The consultants were particularly dismissive of the old Southern Pacific freight depot on San Pedro Street. The freight station was a fine building, 600 feet long with two tracks holding 44 freight cars each (assuming temporary bridges could be placed between adjacent cars.) However, the freight station predated automobiles. There were no loading docks for trucks on the property, the station was reached by a narrow driveway, and the only exit along San Pedro Street required crossing eight active yard tracks.
“THE FOURTH STREET PROBLEM That a problem exists as to the proper disposition of the Southern Pacific track in Fourth Street, is granted by all, including the railroad itself which some twenty years ago anticipated the situation and purchased the necessary right of way for relocating its track to by-pass the city to the South. The detour was never built, however, and in the interim the city developed a rapid suburban growth to the South and west so that the proposed route is now fairly well surrounded by residential and potential residential areas and is intersected by some 20 improved streets. Naturally, a well established community such as this resents the intrusion of the railroad into its midst. On the other hand that part of the public along and in the vicinity of Fourth Street, and those utilizing its own streets have endured the presence of the railroad for about 50 years and now feel the need of relief. It is also the sentiment that the natural expansion of the business district eastward is hampered boy the operation of trains on Fourth Street.
The railroad without a doubt would prefer to remain in Fourth Street, operating at grade for the rest of its life, as the sight loss in time due to speed reduction through the city is inconsequential and any change it may make to materially better the situation will probably cost from one to five million dollars.”
The great thing about the report is that the consultants went into detail about how the Southern Pacific and Western Pacific ran their railroads. They noted a ton of operating details about the SP.
The consultants were also detailed, explaining exactly how cars for the Santa Cruz branch were handled. They stated that Santa Cruz branch trains were assembled in “a small yard in Senter Street prolonged” (aka the current main line between Lenten Ave and Diridon Station). Train crews didn’t have to do any additional re-blocking or organizing there; instead, trains could sort cars at “several tracks on the Santa Cruz division in the vicinity of San Carlos Street (called the South Yard)” This is some great detail that I’m not sure how I’d get any other way. From the point of view of my Vasona Branch model railroad, it would be quite accurate for crews to sort and shuffle cars near Plant 51 either for local work or in preparation for later work further down the line. Best of all, I now know to refer to this stretch of tracks as “South Yard” - a little detail that otherwise might never have been recorded.
So What Should We Do About It?
The Eastern Consultants made four proposals, two that made sense and one that was batshit crazy to my modern eyes.
The consultants thought the bypass around the west side of San Jose was a non-starter. Although the SP had owned the land for twenty years, suburbia now surrounded the right of way, and the neighbors were unlikely to want trains coming through their nice neighborhood. (Two years later, the Willow Glen neighborhood incorporated as a city, primarily to block the Southern Pacific from coming through. They merged back into San Jose once the SP bypass was built to their east, avoiding the neighborhood.) The consultants also noted it was going to be pricey to raise the tracks around the Alameda and through Willow Glen, build bridges at the Alameda and San Carlos, and fight the neighbors. “It is therefore recommended that this plan be definitively abandoned.”
Plan B was their favorite - they assumed that the then-current mainline north of downtown and down Fourth Street could be raised 15 feet in the air, and the city streets in the vicinity could be dropped four feet. More importantly, they only suggest raising the through tracks to Los Angeles - the station would remain at ground level (though it would be “replaced by an efficient and modern station”), and San Francisco commute trains would continue to stop at ground level. This plan seems to assume the College Park yard must be decommissioned, for there would be no way for a train leaving the yard to reach the ramp to the elevated structure. They still note that “freight and passenger terminal reconstruction will be quite expensive as will also the elevated line of open type design” - an interesting admission when they discounted the bypass around Willow Glen because of the cost of routing and elevating the tracks there.
To my eye, they’re being awfully optimistic about the plan:
“The principal advantages of plan B are as follows: (1) Property values along Fourth Street will not be depressed but should be favorably affected.” Honestly, I can’t imagine freight trains rolling by at second floor level would be pleasant, either for noise, shaking, or strange stuff dropping from the train. They also admit that “certain industries particularly in the vicinity of North First Street including in the Wye… will be unfavorably affected.” I think they’re primarily talking about the Golden Gate Packing Co on Fourth Street here - apparently, its sidings couldn’t be connected after all the work to raise the line.
The third option, Plan C, was to bypass San Jose to the west like Plan A, but avoid the challenges of forcing a new route through the Willow Glen suburbs. Bartholomew proposed having the SP move the main line to the former South Pacific line, build a new station at today’s Diridon Station, and build the necessary overpasses and underpasses along the way. When the tracks passed by the Western Pacific crossing, though, the mainline would follow the WP line through the Willow Glen neighborhood and onto open country. The consultants suggested that a jointly operated double track line could be created, or the SP could just parallel the WP immediately to the south. They claimed this approach would remove all the tracks on Fourth Street, “no important industries would be affected”, “no additional interlocking plants would be required with the WP.”, and a joint line would allow for a more convenient place for the railroads to exchange cars. They also admit that moving the SP’s passenger depot away from downtown is a drawback, “passengers will be carried through an industrial area largely and will not get a satisfactory impression of the city as a whole”, and requires acquiring a different set of land through Willow Glen.
Paralleling the WP might not be as easy. From modern eyes, the WP’s line through Willow Glen seems to weave its own way through suburbia on a narrow right of way. I’d imagine the neighbors would have complained just as loudly as they had to the SP’s bypass proposal. The consultants proposed a joint line with the WP, or at least a parallel line, and do note that these would be much more unsafe than the existing situation if the line continued to have street level grade crossings - drivers and pedestrians were too likely to start moving when one train passed, not realizing another was coming on the parallel track.
Plan D appeared to be a bonus proposal, provided mostly as an afterthought. Although they noted the SP could go around the east side of San Jose, they noted that the railroad would need to push a right-of-way through many blocks of existing neighborhoods, increasing the cost and the outcry.
How’d the Consultants Do?
All joking aside, I really love this document. Not only does it propose an alternate San Jose that I would never have imagined myself, but it also provides so many details that are helpful for my model railroad based on the real railroads they examined. I appreciate their fact gathering about the activity in San Jose: the number of trains and cars switched, the work done at the freight house and passenger depot, the switching practices, and the informal names for pieces of track. I can’t imagine anywhere else I might have learned that the tracks near the Del Monte cannery were referred to as the “South Yard”.
I love the document, but that doesn’t mean I love that alternate San Jose they propose. I don’t know how serious this plan was, but the elevated tracks through flat San Jose doesn’t match my image of California - elevated structures like this definitely sound like something we’d find “back east”, not here. However, the fact that someone proposed this definitely highlights that this could have happened, and I could imagine someone building an interesting “what-if” layout with freight trains flying by downtown San Jose at treetop level. If I were into modeling plausible railroads, it might be interesting to build a major mainline through downtown San Jose on an elevated structure. However, I suspect it would look awkward and out-of-place. If we’re building a plausible layout, that also means we want to avoid the stuff that might be accurate but that doesn’t match our viewers’ expectations much. Just because some fancy east coast consultants thought it’s possible doesn’t mean my next guest to see the model would think so.
I’m also not sure it would be a fun model railroad. The operational challenges - the long climb paralleling existing tracks, the new two level station at Market Street, the curve onto Fourth Street - make me wonder whether it would be good or bad as a model railroad - the elevated and ground level tracks seem like they’d remove some of the complexity and action we’d like in a model railroad.
The whole plan, though, highlights how strange the real world is, and how folks might have suggested plans for our hometown that might seem surprising or improbable to our eyes. Apparently, someone in City Hall or the Chamber of Commerce didn’t think it was so strange, and was willing to cut Mr. Bartholomew a large check to “think outside the box” and consider freight trains in the sky.
Bartholomew didn’t just try to rebuild San Jose’s railroads - urban planning was his business, and he did similar reports for many big cities from the 1920’s through the 1950’s. The archives of his company, Harland Bartholomew and Associates, are in Washington University’s library in St. Louis, and a listing of just some of their records show how broadly he consulted - the list shows Alameda, Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley, and San Jose all having reports done, as well as many more cities across the U.S. If I had a couple days free in St. Louis, I’d likely stop by and check out Bartholomew’s other plans. I suspect I’ll find a bunch of “just put the freight trains on an elevated structure” ideas.
We’ve got a lot of choice when we’re building a model railroad - whether we’re building something imaginary, plausible, or historically accurate. I’ve always aimed to model real locations and times because I think I’ll create a more believable scene than I would have if I either had to imagine a place from whole cloth, or where I wasn’t doing research on what a real place was like. The Bartholomew report on San Jose shows highlights both how strange and unpredictable the real world might be, as well as the outlandish ideas that might have been seriously considered in the real world and might be reasonable choices for a plausible layout. Either way, searching through archives and building up knowledge can be a great boon for real or plausible layouts… even if it’ll tell us we ought to put freight trains in the sky.