Freight Trains in the Sky

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.

San Jose yard assembled trains going to San Francisco, Oakland, Niles, Tracy, Watsonville Junction, Redwood City, and Santa Cruz.

30 switch engines and crews were needed for yard and industrial switching during the fall season.

30-40 freight trains a day, and 1600-1800 cars per day came through San Jose. “This is not an extraordinary great volume for the facilities at hand but the great diversity of classifications necessitates quick handling.”

SP had four team tracks just west of North First Street and north of passenger depot, and two additional tracks west of San Pedro Street that had a loading platform and Gantry crane.

For Market Street station, the two tracks under the train shed and one track north of the train shed were used for loading and unloading passengers. Five tracks north of the station were used for storing passenger equipment.

WP cars were only interchanged on the south side of town near Fourth Street and Alma. This was also a point of contention in the report, and the authors stressed that better and faster ways of interchange were needed.

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.

A: Bypass around San Jose to the west.

B: Elevated tracks along Fourth Street

C: Reuse the Western Pacific right of way around San Jose.

D: Pass around the city to the east/north, and parallel the WP on the east side of town.

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.

Image generated by gemini.google.com, which refused to put a Daylight locomotive on the elevated structure regardless of how easy that would be.

Comparing 3d Printed Models Against Kits of the Past

When I talk about those Hart gondolas I made a while back, I like to highlight how the models represent freight cars that haven’t been done accurately in the past. There’s no resin kits or brass kits for Hart gondolas, let alone for SP's own version. However, combing through old Walthers catalogs will show two Hart gondola kits: the craftsman kits from Silver Streak in the 1960’s, and Train Miniature’s plastic shake-the-box kit from the 1970’s. Both are good for their time, but we can do a lot better in the 2010’s. How much better? I picked up examples of both the Silver Streak and Train Miniature cars at a train show a couple weeks back. Let's compare them against the 3d printed model and see how forty years of technology has helped model building. (Click on any of the photos for a higher resolution version.)

Let’s first look at the Silver Streak kit. For the time, this is a neat kit. It has the underframe trusses from the real car, brake cylinder mounted on the side of the car, and matches the SP cars with 8 spaces between posts on either side. Just like the modernized SP cars, the Silver Streak Car has grab irons on each end supported by a short vertical piece of wood.

However, the kit lacks the car sill and floor you'd see on the real cars. Instead, it has the car side boards going all the way down to the bottom edge of the car. It’s also missing all the door hardware; the real cars had castings at the bottom of each post, but that’s a pretty tiny detail to include. The modeler who built this kit didn’t quite get the bulkheads at the correct location - they should line up with the outer post.

The model’s a little coarse with 6x6 strip wood serving for the top rail and for the posts, but it’s a fair tradeoff for intermediate modelers building their first car. It’s nice to see the board detail on the inside faces of each side. Overall, the car is a bit oversize, with the sides measuring almost five feet high compared to three on the real car.

Here’s the Train Miniature car. Again, it looks like it got inspired by the Southern Pacific cars that would have been seen in the 1930’s and 1940’s… or they just copied the Silver Streak car. The car has the correct eight spaces between posts. The grab irons arrangement doesn't match any of the real cars, though. More importantly, the trusses are pushed out to be even with the sides - definitely not how the real car was built, and a detail that hides one of the neat details of the Hart design. Like the Silver Streak car, Train-Miniature left out the car floor visible on the sides. Again, the car sides are taller than they should be - partially out of scale, and partially fallout from removing the side sill.

And finally, here’s one of my models. I pulled out one of my “original” cars just to highlight the detail. 3d printing gives us a lot of advantages, including the ability to throw in all that detail for the door hinges , the door latch mechanisms on the posts, and the various bolts all over the model. The truss is lighter than the Silver Streak car, we can see the car side frame and floor sticking out beyond the car sides.

Here’s all three from the top: Silver Streak on the left, the Train Miniature, then the 3d printed model. The Silver Streak car did correctly model the sloping hopper. It’s not perfect; this kit shows the hopper as incorrectly extending up along the bulkheads on each end. But I’m pleased to see they included the supports that ran through the hopper, even if they’re not quite at the right location. There’s no detail on the hopper doors, but then that’s a pretty tiny detail.

The Train Miniature kit’s hopper is hidden by the load, but that brake cylinder and brake gear in each end is completely wrong for the car, and misses the fact that those partitions were meant to be removable so the car could be used as a typical gondola.

And finally, for the 3d printed version. We see the braces running through the hopper (with the notch to hold the 4x10 that supports the doors when closed. We see the end bulkheads definitely look removable. On the far end of the car, you also might see the hinged apron that allowed running a plow through all the cars - a detail that wouldn’t be needed on either of the other modernized cars, but does highlight how 3d printing lets us throw all that sort of detail on the car.

Finally, here’s the underside of each car - Silver Streak on the left, mine in the middle, Train-Miniature on the right. This photo highlights how the other two cars are a bit oversized compared with the actual cars. Both Silver Streak and Train Miniature made some parts oversized (like the trusses) and also placed the trusses differently to make the car easier to manufacture. Both also had to lose some of the interesting detail: braces for the trusses, side sills, etc. in order to make an economical and easy to build kit.

All in all, the Silver Streak and Train Miniature kits are fine for both their time and for what they’re intended for. They had to design parts to be manufacturable. Train-Miniature moved the trusses out to the car edges so they could be injection molded in one piece. Silver Streak made the trusses thicker to survive manufacturing and clumsy fingers, and left off detail on the hopper so the fiddly shape could be made in cardstock. Both kits needed oversized parts for easier assembly, dropped details to keep part counts low or permit injection molding, and did the best they could from the photos and plans they could find.

The 3d printed model gets to benefit from being 30 years in the future. I had access to the SP blueprints which the earlier manufacturers may not have had. 3d printing meant I could make parts closer to scale, and could easily add details and embossing that would have fouled up molds and part ejection. 3d printing also allowed me to refine the models, and quickly make variants: doors up vs. doors down, or the modernized cars without the side dump doors. If I found some railroad back east had a similar car but with a minor tweak, I could make that too. That's a luxury that anyone doing injection molding doesn't have. Cutting a new mold is an expensive, start-from-square-one sort of action. Anyone trying to run a business would want to cut those molds once, and getting a detail wrong isn't enough of a reason. Doing a different model requires a different set of molds; again it isn't worth doing unless you're going to sell a ton of the new design.

All three models also show how model building's changed. Silver Streak's kit dates from the craftsman kit era, and a time when you could run a reasonable model railroad manufacturer out of your garage. As long as you could cast white metal and cut strip wood, you could sell a model railroad kit. Because of the lack of good models, if you had an even partially realistic model, you'd have a hit. Train Miniature dates from the heyday of small-scale plastic kit manufacturers. You need a lot more skill and equipment to make injection molded parts, and even more to print the car sides. Worse, the effort needed to cut those molds meant you had to sell thousands of cars - great for a forty foot boxcar, but not so good for an odd misfit maintenance-of-way car.

3d printing gets us back to those garage days. My Hart gondolas were, after all, made in a garage. (Or at least I wash the extra resin off the printed models in the garage; the printer stays inside to stay away from dust and cold.) And yet the models still have some pretty impressive detail - approaching resin kits, but certainly better than the kits we saw in the 60's and 70's. We'll see more 3d printed models like these in the coming years, and it'll be great to see the prototypes that folks find interesting enough to manufacture in their garages.

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In case you'd like a Hart gondola for your Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, or Pacific Electric layout, I've still got 3d printed kits available. Check out photos, prices, and ordering details over at Dry Creek Models site.

Just Scan It.

The biggest challenge for recreating a prototype railroad in miniature is finding enough information about the real thing. I've been lucky with the Vasona Branch. Maps of the railroad are common. Newspapers and city directory help me spot the location of businesses. The local historical associations have lots of photos. Folks who worked on the modern SP tell stories that suggest that operations in the 1930's sometimes matched operations decades later.

That doesn't mean there's enough information; sometimes I've had to search official archives (such as finding out about the rebuilt Hart gondolas from the University of Texas, El Paso's collection of SP files), or poke around California State Railroad Museum's collection for maps of Wrights.

Still, I'm always hoping there's more documentation out there, so I occasionally go searching on Google for new documents, or even check eBay for interesting railroad paper.

Last year, for example, I found an eBay auction for a document from the Ogden Union Railway and Depot, which I assume controlled the tracks around Ogden Union Station. I was hoping the document might give some hints about local switching in the 1930's. Instead, it turned out to be primarily an accounting document, setting the rules for how traffic from each of the owning railroads - the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific - counted towards upkeep of the depot area.

Now, although it's not too interesting for me, it might be interesting for others. There’s also a bit of detail about operations. There’s hints about the routes that trains take (discussing UP routes), lists of major industries on the industrial track and branches operated by the Ogden Union, and details about when the Ogden Union gets a switching allowance for handling a car.

So, just in case there's someone out there modeling Ogden, I've scanned the document and put it up on Flickr. You won't get to enjoy the crackling of cheap paper and mimeographed text, but it's one more bit of research available to someone interested in modeling Ogden, or understanding how a jointly-owned belt line might think about the railroads that own it. (The San Francisco Belt Line folks might check for any similarities with how the Belt Line operated.)

The document is “Rules Governing the Counting of Freight and Passenger Cars at Ogden Utah between the Southern Pacific Company, the Ogden Union Railway and Depot Company, and the Union Pacific Railroad Company. It’s dated June 27, 1938. It also includes sample register check forms for the railway.

Go check it out, and if you see anything interesting, let me know! And if you've found some odd document in your research for your own prototype, how about sharing it online so that a future researcher can discover new tidbits from it?

Bureaucratic Railroaders, Paperwork, and Car Locations

Most of us are interested in railroads because of the glamour - gleaming passenger trains running crossing the continent, crews performing dangerous work in good weather and bad, and heroic engineers keeping their train right on the schedule’s times.

Talk to real railroaders, and you’re likely to hear a different message. You’ll hear about all the jobs we don’t model on the railroad. Car clerks typing out waybills. Station agents keeping precise records of the petty cash box. Salesmen taking shippers out for a two martini lunch. Most of all, you'll hear about the bureaucracy needed for a large, distributed company in the days before e-mail. The real railroad was all paperwork, processes to be followed to the letter, and multi-day delays for the simplest of questions.

My glamorous illusions of the railroad got dashed a couple months ago. I’m still looking for information on those Hart gondolas, you see, and a couple Google searches pointed out that the University of Texas, El Paso had a bunch of records from the Southern Pacific’s El Paso shops. Now, I’m unlikely to make it out to El Paso to look at the files in person any time soon, but I’m willing to spend a little bit of cash just in case the records are interesting. I sent the Special Collections librarian a note asking about getting copies of a couple files, and gave them a maximum amount I was willing to spend on photocopies. It took a little while; the SP records don’t appear to be referenced very often, so the library keeps the boxes of material in off-site storage in a warehouse somewhere. But within a month, I got a thick envelope from U.T. El Paso.

That stack of papers in the envelope had a few interesting finds. One file on reinforcing the Hart gondolas in 1927 gave some details about where the Hart gondolas were used on the SP. More amusingly, that particular file told a lot about SP bureaucracy in the 1920’s.

Guess We Better Ask the Big Boss

Excerpt from SP's Campbell, Calif valuation map showing the station and Sunsweet plant

The first bit of bureaucracy involves big expenses. Railroads, like most capital intensive businesses, are very careful about how they spend money. If you’ve ever seen an official Southern Pacific railroad valuation map indicating the location of tracks, signals, and railroad buildings, you’d see that some of the sidings had “G.M.O. 73914” written next to them on the map. These were “General Manager Orders” (probably - I’ve never found an official definition for the acronym). G.M.Os gave official permission to do the big work of laying track, and the original G.M.O. would probably explain exactly why the track must be built. It turns out the G.M.O.s were for more than track; the U.T. El Paso file contained the order allowing the modification of the cars:

Office of General Superintendent, Motive Power, San Francisco, December 26, 1926
Authority for Expenditure of $9,820.00 is requested for the purpose of Improvements to the property as follows:
Reinforce underframe Hart Con-vertible cars, class W-50-3 Series C.P. 10880 to 10959 incl & 12220 to 12239 incl…
These cars were constructed with trussed intermediate sills without proper bracing, thus permitting the bottom of sill to deflect inwards, also drooping of sides.
It is proposed to reinforce cars by applying two additional cross ties, change present location of two cross ties so that intermediate sills will be properly braces laterally at each pair of side stakes between bolsters, also to apply reinforcing plates to intermediate sills.
Authority: General Manager’s letter file 414-0013-2 of August 27, 1924.
… Cost of reinforcing one car:
Material (including percentages): $95.29
Labor (including percentages $80.51
Dr. A&B Acct #55: $173.80
…


Image of G.M.O. order

The records give us an idea of the process of repairing these cars. We now know that these cars were starting to fail in the 1920’s, and we also know how they’re failing - that the sides would droop and sills would deflect. We know the cost - it was worth spending $10,000 to fix a few hundred cars. We know that George McCormick, the superintendent for motive power, was responsible for deciding when to repair freight cars. We know the decision wasn’t a minor one; the railroad's general manager, J. H. Dyer, had to sign off on the purchase because the repairs would cost more than $100 per car. We know the problem had been lingering for a long time - the work had been going on for at least two years, and only only 25 out of 200 cars in this subset had been fixed already. I don’t even want to think of how many meetings McCormick had to sit in arguing whether to do this work or not.

Inter-Office Memo

The second bit of bureaucracy was just the effort of communications, both in the 1920’s and in a physically distributed railroad. In our era of e-mail and iPhones, it’s easy for decisions to be made easily. However the packet of papers had 50 or 60 memos from the El Paso division archives. Some letters asked for updates on progress; the work apparently went slow. On May 4, 1927, the El Paso superintendent sent a response to one of the queries stating that no work had been done on any cars, but they had one car (SP 12281) in the shops for the work. (El Paso was doing better than the Tucson division - A. J. Burke admitted no work had been done on repairing the cars. Like e-mail, memos and letters were often cc'd to relevant people in other divisions, giving the file a view of the Hart repair beyond just El Paso.) Another Hart gondola was loaded with slag and somewhere out on the New Mexico division; Superintendent Irwin ask for the car to be returned ASAP for repair.

By August, budgets must have been getting reworked, for George McCormick in San Francisco asked the divisions to hold off on repairing any more cars on one of the G.M.Os . By September, 46 cars were reported repaired - 16 in Los Angeles, 7 at Bayshore, 14 in Sacramento, 8 at Brooklyn Yard in Portland, 3 in Gerber, and the two in El Paso. I can’t imagine trying to carry on this conversation via a months-long chain of letters, memos, and telegrams. By October 1927, all hundred cars had been repaired, and the GMO was declared complete.

We need to talk about your TPS report covers.

Letter from George McCormick asking about a $15 difference per car in costs billed.

And finally, there was just all the odd little exchanges. A bunch of letters in early 1928 from San Francisco asked R. U. Lipscomb why El Paso spent over expectations on the car repairs.

Auditor of Disbursements advises GMO 71402 now overrun $524 and GMO 71403 overrun $113.00.
The original cost per unit for this work was estimated at $173.80. Los Angeles Shops have verified this figure ample for the 1928 program.
Below is a tabulated list of units in excess of the estimated cost as shown in our records. Please give reason for the increase in cost and state whether this represents cash or second-hand value or if credit adjustment will be arranged. Please give this matter preferred attention.

Ah, nothing more fun than getting e-mails from a manager questioning charges. The El Paso division files includes Lipscomb’s page of math as he figured out the costs to answer his boss, responding ten days later with:

While we have been able to perform work on labor authorized, you will note from the above that the material cost is in excess of amount estimated on Form 30. Set of reinforcements for one car amounted to $100.30. In handling this with the Store Department, they advise this was the cost of one set of reinforcements carried over from 1926 and that the remainder received are invoiced at $85.00”

Even with that bit of information, the questions weren’t ended; two weeks later, McCormick writes back wondering if the Stores cost already includes labor. El Paso responds that the Sacramento Stores apparently double-charged them by including labor costs; L.A. had lower costs because the L.A. accountants were wise to the Sacramento Stores budget tricks. It still took a couple months of mailgrams between A. J. Burke and R. U. Lipscomb in El Paso, Edward Blumenstiel in the El Paso office, and McCormick in the head office before the whole double-charged for $15.00 a car battle ended.

So What Did Those Memos Actually Fix?

Even with all these accounting and responsibility and cover-your-ass memos, there were some nice tidbits for modelers. One of the letters was kind enough to include the L.A. Shops list of parts needed for car repair. (A separate accounting by the El Paso shop superintendent tells us exactly how many bolts and rivets were used on each car. I'm not interested in those because I'm not one of those "rivet counter" model railroaders.)

1.101.33

Description	Weight	Cost
8 Intersill Stiffeners	752 lbs @ 2.59 Cwt.	$19.48
2 Cross Tie Channels	322 lbs. @ 2.60 Cwt. $8.37	...
4 Cross Tie Top Plates	120 lbs…	3.13
8 Intersill Stiffener Fillers	42 lbs
4 Stake “U” Bolt Brackets	12 lbs	0.32
2 Cross Tie Gussets	51 lbs
4 Intersill & Cross Tie Connections	48 lbs	1.25
4 Stake U Bolt Brackets	12 lbs	0.66
4 Outside Inter Cross Tie Gussets	105 lbs	0.32
2 Inside Inter-Cross Tie Gussets	50 lbs	2.74
2 Do	50 lbs	1.31
4 Hopper Sill Brackets	8 lbs	0.21
4 “” “”	5 lbs	0.14
4 Hopper Top Plate Supports	25 lbs	0.65
4 Intersill Reinforcing Places	20-130 lbs,	3.38
Labor, laying out, shearing, forming and punching…		22.65
Labor, apply to car		42.16
Shop expense		16.10
Use of machinery & tools		4.02
Total Labor		84.53
Total Cost		$141.70

Parts needed for the Hart gondola repairs

And We Also Know Where the Cars Were

So far, all the information I've shared has been pretty dry. The correspondence should be familiar to anyone who's worked at a large company, and it doesn't tell us too much about the models of the W-50-3. The list of parts for strengthening the car might hint at how the W-50-3 class cars changed between construction and later years, although it'll still take a bit of work to understand exactly what changed.

But the file does contain some tidbits that could be very interesting for a model railroader. The letters discussing cars fixed not only documents which shops around the Southern Pacific system performed repairs, but also suggests where the Hart Convertible Gondolas were being used in the 1920's.

41 cars were specifically identified as converted in 1927:

• 14 at Los Angeles,
• 6 at Bayshore,
• 5 in “Southern District” (Los Angeles?)
• 5 at El Paso,
• 3 in “Northern District” (Portland? Dunsmuir?)
• 2 at Tucson,
• 2 at Sacramento,
• 2 at Brooklyn (portland),
• 1 in New Mexico,
• 1 at Gerber.

These details hint at where those W-50-3s might have been found in the Southern Pacific system. If you model Northern or Southern California, or El Paso, W-50-3 cars should have been visible. If you were in the southwest or Portland, you might see them. If you're in Nevada or Utah, you're out of luck - they're nowhere to be seen. This information doesn't replace photos as evidence for where particular cars or locomotives might have run, but if we're looking for a rough answer about whether the Hart gondolas would have been seen in the Bay Area in the 1920's, this is a good bit of confirmation.

But There's Still More

All this information came only from the first chunk of letters in the files I got from U. T. El Paso. Another 50 pages came from the work to remove home-built snowplows from 7 former El Paso and Southwestern gondolas. The third packet covered GMO 79727, another year's attempt to fix the Hart gondolas.

The last packet had twenty pages documenting the saga of two CS-35A flat cars, SP 79075 and SP 79026. The correspondence was triggered by the cars being used for maintenance-of-way service without officially being charged to the MOW service. By doing so, the SP probably was missing a bit of a tax break by writing off the remaining value of the cars. Every time you letter a car "SPMW", you're actually missing the months of back-and-forth memos needed to throw those cars off the roster of revenue cars.

From George McCormick, back at the head office in San Francisco:

Mr. E. A. Gilbert inspected these cars Jan. 18 at El Paso and found they were assigned to a concrete outfit on the New Mexico Division for sometime past and are permanently fitted suitable for such service, where they should remain. Also it will cost but $5.00 per car to restencil, while cost to return them to revenue service would be approximately $300. each.
Please submit form 30 in the name of Southern Pacific Railroad to convert…”

If you ever dreamed of working on a railroad, I imagine answering telegrams from San Francisco about $10.00 overruns and restenciling cars wasn’t why you wanted to join the railroad. You probably would have had more fun dreaming about being an insurance actuary.

So How Do I Find Records Like These?

Although rare, a few research libraries and archives do have former SP files and drawings in their collections. The files that exist are a tiny fraction of what the railroad kept, but occasionally you can get lucky (like I did here) and find documents relevant for a subject you're either interested in for history research or model building. Generally, find the libraries that might have the correct documents, then look for finding aids which will tell you the actual documents that were saved.

For the SP, common sources are Stanford Library (various records, including freight cars and some land records), California State Railroad Museum, U.C. Berkeley's Bancroft Library, University of Texas El Paso (Rio Grande division), San Francisco Maritime Museum (Southern Pacific ferry records) and California State Railroad Museum. The Online Archive of California website provides a single place to look for relevant collections in many different California libraries.

In each library, you'll be searching for collections - related boxes of records, usually donated together - related to the Southern Pacific. Each collection usually has a "finding aid" - a document that summarizes what records are in a specific collection. In Stanford's finding aid for its Southern Pacific records, you can find exactly which corporate records survived, a list of folders for specific land or track improvement projects, or photos for specific freight cars. With the name of the collection and the identifier for a folder inside that collection, you now can ask the owning library about viewing the material at the library, or, like I did, ask whether they can make a copy of particular materials.

---

Records from GMO 71402 and GMO 71403 from the Southern Pacific Company (Rio Grande Division) records, MS 077, University of Texas El Paso Special Collections department. Thanks to the librarians who pulled these files out of dusty boxes and photocopied a couple hundred pages of telegrams, mail, and assorted scribblings. Excerpt of Southern Pacific valuation map for Campbell, California excerpted from an original drawing at the California State Railroad Museum Library.

Morgan Hill, As Seen From Shipping Receipts: Prunes, Wine, and Stove Pipes

Receipt for prunes shipped by E&J Bender from Morgan Hill to San Jose, 1896

I've had a couple articles here about how the dried apricots and prunes made it to the packing house; we learned about the San Tomas Drying Company and the trains coming down from Wrights, and we've heard about the packers having agents ready with train cars at Niles in the season. But were there other ways?

Through another EBay find, I've got some more details. Someone was selling a bundle of old shipping receipts from Morgan Hill in the 1890's; I've, of course, scanned them all and put them on Flickr. And in those receipts, we get a few answers about how orchardists got their prunes to the packers and eventually to the East Coast and Europe.

For example, E. and John Bender, local orchardists, had a pretty good season in 1896, with four loads of prunes being shipped from Morgan Hill in October. First,they shipped 456 sacks - 48,000 pounds of prunes on October 2, 1896, shipped on Central Pacific boxcar 19678 as inferred from a quick scribble. Then, 40,000 pounds of prunes on the 3rd in 600 boxes. On the fifth, 540 boxes of boxed and dried prunes for another 34,000 pounds on SP 1750. And finally, on October 7, they shipped 560 sacks of prunes - 53,500 pounds of prunes - out on SP 38626.

I didn't have an Official Railway Equipment Register to track down all these cars, but SP 38626 was a 33 foot ventilated boxcar with a 50,000 pound load limit. That car managed to survive until 1913 according to the 1913 ORER, but the rest of the cars didn't survive the additional fifteen years for us to identify.

So over four days, the Benders shipped around 200,000 pounds of prunes. That may seem like a lot, but if you poke around on the internet, you'll find that modern prune orchards can produce around 4 tons per acre. California currently averages around 2 tons of dried prunes per acre of prune orchard. With such numbers, the Benders would only have needed 50 acres worth of prunes to produce four freight cars worth of fruit.

For my grandfather's ten acres in Hayward, that means that every harvest season would produce around 40,000 pounds of apricots, and that's not including fruit dried at his yard but produced by neighbors. That would have been a lot of fruit to haul to the station in a horse-drawn wagon... and he was doing so in the 1920's.

All Bender's Morgan Hill prunes were going straight to Porter Brothers on Julian at Bassett Street, just west of the San Jose Depot. Porter Brothers was a Chicago-based wholesaler. The Binders must have been pretty happy clients of Porter Brothers, but hopefully they weren't selling fruit in 1903 when the company surprised Valley fruit men with a surprise bankruptcy.

There's occasional other details in those old receipts. The Binders also sold wine to Paul Masson in San Jose in 1896, though the receipts list them as puns. I'll leave it as a puzzle to you, the reader, to figure out what a pun is. There's also a bunch of household goods being shipped around, some to a George V. Herbert who doesn't appear to be the same as San Jose's own George N. Herbert. I'm also surprised at the number of tents and camping gear that appear in the shipping receipts; I suspect mid-September was a good time for vacationers returning from resorts like Sveadal, the Swedish society's campground in the hills.

Another cute detail are a few receipts from the Bisceglia Brothers for boxes of tomatoes - usually less than a thousand pounds - going to San Francisco and the California Canneries plant at Fourth and Townsend. The four Bisceglia brothers - Joseph, Alphonse, Bruno, and Pasquale - came to the U.S. in 1885 and, at least from the receipts, must have been farming by 1898. Like many immigrants, though, they worked their way up, starting their own cannery in Morgan Hill in 1903, and then moving the business to San Jose by 1913. The receipts not only catch them on their rise, but also highlight that the San Francisco (and probably San Jose canneries) were attracting fruit from many miles away. Importing fruit by railcar isn't that crazy an idea on my model railroad.

For my modeling, the receipts highlight just how much freight even a small depot like Morgan Hill would handle. If I ever wondered why railroad stations had such big freight depots, the idea of Bender's sacks of prunes and barrels of wine certainly explain the purpose. On my model railroad, I disregard the freight depot at Campbell, partially to avoid blocking a passing siding and partially because I didn't think there would be enough freight traffic to deserve blocking the siding with a boxcar. If I want to be able to load Bender's prunes, spotting the occasional boxcar against the depot might be worthwhile.

Check out the full set of receipts and see what you can learn about Morgan Hill at the turn of the century, and add your comments to the scans there. And if you figure out what a 'pun' is, throw your guess in the comments here.

More SP Engineering Drawings... From the Dome of Foam!

Last year, I told you about going on eBay and buying a 170 SP engineering drawings from the 1940's, then scanning them all and putting them up on Flickr. I don't think I mentioned that I'd also bid on a couple other sets, but managed to get outbid.

Well, luckily, one of those high bidders was E.O. Gibson, Caltrain engineer, train order instructor, and owner of the Dome of Foam, one of my favorite railroad (and San Jose-related) web sites. (Haven't read the Dome of Foam yet? Go do it now! Shoo!) E.O. just scanned his set of drawings, and put them up on the web.

Dome of Foam Southern Pacific Engineering Drawings

There's some cool details for both San Jose modelers and SP fans whose interests run a bit further from the main office. For us San Jose fans, there's a great plan of the tracks around the United States Products and Contadina cannery off of Race St. The plan shows way more spurs branching off the Los Gatos branch than either the SPINS books or Sanborn maps show. There's also some nice plans of tracks near Bassett St. and Ryland St. up by the Market Street station. Another drawing hints at the location of the Drew Canning Company, formerly in the Ainsley cannery, now off of Lafayette Street in Santa Clara.

Going further afield shows additional cool drawings, such as a great sketch of the buildings at the Surf depot near Lompoc, and another showing all the packing houses along the tracks in Winters.

Go check both sets out and see what bits of history you discover. If you check out my Flickr set of drawings, add comments right on the pictures; if you see something interesting on the Dome of Foam drawings, drop a note to E.O. with your discovery!

Question TimeAnd here's a question for all you smart folks out there: why would SP build a switchman's shanty and bathroom off at Race Street and Moorpark in San Jose, when they're so close to Cahill St. Station?

[Drawing of Race Street switchman's shanty and toilet from the Southern Pacific Coast / Western Divisions Engineering Drawings on wx4.org / the Dome of Foam. Great thanks to E.O. for sharing them!]

Go In Looking for Model Details, Come Out With Corporate Accounting Experience

So let's recap, shall we?

• Robert wants to build a model railroad with scenes that match places he likes in California, and wants realistic and busy levels of traffic so he can run lots of trains switching boxcars around the layout.
• Robert chooses the San Jose - Los Gatos branch because it has lots of busy canneries and dried fruit packing houses, so there will be lots of boxcars to move back and forth.
• Robert researches the individual canneries, like the Hyde Cannery in Campbell, to understand what to build, and because he's hoping he'll learn interesting historical tidbits that make for good stories about the models and the layout.
• Robert finds the Hyde Cannery was closed after 1928 or so - the era he models. Robert is annoyed.
• Robert, being curious, goes to the County Recorder's office to understand why the cannery was closed in what ought to have been a prosperous year.
• Robert finds documents describing strange mortgages and leases starting several years before the closure, making him wonder about financial difficulties.
• Robert becomes very fearful that his next step is to take some college coursework in forensic accounting… all to figure out how to build an HO model of a cannery.

Which leads straight to the question of the day. When I'd researched the Hyde Cannery's financial state a few weeks ago at the County Recorder's office, I'd turned up one interesting lease that I didn't understand:

At the same time, Hyde leased all the cannery's warehouse space to the Lawrence Warehouse Company for $1.00 on a month-by-month basis. (7/16/23, book 37 pg 368, as well as renewals in 1924) I don't know if this was a way to raise funds, or if there were legal reasons to have an official warehouse company handling those buildings, but overall feeling I get is that Hyde needed capital.

We also know that Higgins-Hyde did a similar leasing of their warehouse space to Lawrence Warehouse. So… leasing your warehouse, lock, stock, and barrel to another company: sign of desperation, or sign of having very clever accountants?

An interesting story in "The Sunsweet Story" by Robert Couchman actually explains why Hyde's lease of their warehouse might have actually been very smart. When the California Prune and Apricot Growers (Sunsweet) got started in 1917 as a grower co-operative, Sunsweet contracted with sixty-five dried fruit packing houses to receive the dried fruit from the Sunsweet-associated growers, and pack the incoming crop.

When Sunsweet got the 1917 crop packed, they found out working with someone else's packing companies wasn't good. First, they noticed that different packers had wildly different costs, often out of line with what packing the fruit should have cost. Worse, one packer (George N. Herbert Packing Company) refused to turn over $100,000 they'd collected for the crop. Sunsweet responded by putting liens against

"22 carloads of packed fruit, 200 tons of fruit in the firm's warehouse, and a large orchard owned by Herbert. By its prompt and energetic action, the association got its money back and avoided further trouble of this kind."

And Sunsweet learned their lesson: working with the individual packers sucked, sometimes in small ways, and sometimes in very big, not good, very bad ways. And they learned that slapping liens on property that someone cares about often gets their attention quickly.

But what to do instead? Now, they could have just opened their own Sunsweet-owned packing houses. But California law at the time put a nasty little restriction on companies: they couldn't borrow money against product in their own warehouses… but they could borrow money against unsold product if it was stored in someone else's public warehouse. (I suspect this was a way to make sure you weren't slipping the product out without paying off the lender.)

So Sunsweet issued another $750,000 in stock, and started buying packing houses. But they called their lawyer and accountant first, and made sure (and here's the trick) all the packing houses were bought in the name of the Growers' Packing and Warehousing Association (GP&WA), which was a company fully owned by Sunsweet. Sunsweet could now take dried fruit from the orchardists, box it in preparation for sale, and put it in the GP&WA warehouse. GP&WA would give them a receipt for whatever they'd stored in the warehouse, and Sunsweet would take the receipt to the bank and, if necessary, borrow money against the fruit now in the safe and protected hands of Growers' Packing.

This little accounting trick explains why Sunsweet Plant #8 in Mountain View had Growers' Packing and Warehousing Association painted across the building, but everyone really knew it was Sunsweet Plant #8 - it was there just so the folks in the warehouse remembered their paychecks were signed by Growers Packing, and not by Sunsweet.

Oh, and guess which packing house they bought first? Yep, George N. Herbert's plant on Lincoln Ave. in San Jose. I wouldn't have trusted him with the 1918 crop either.

And for George Hyde, it's now easy to understand that if he ever wanted to borrow money against the unsold canned fruit or dried fruit in his warehouse, he needed to get it out of his hands. For whatever reason, he decided against making his own company, and so instead called up the very-large Lawrence Warehouse Corporation up in San Francisco, and invited them over to run his warehouse. Hyde would roll his prunes and fruit cocktail into the warehouse, hand it to the Lawrence Warehouse folks, and give them some money for storage fees. He'd get back a warehouse receipt from the very upstanding and very detail-oriented Lawrence Warehouse staff. If he ever needed to borrow some money for the short term, he'd then take those warehouse receipts down to the bank, and walk out with some hard cash borrowed on reasonable terms that he could use to buy more prunes, more apricots, more cans, or more crates.

And if you want to build a model of the Sunsweet plant, or the Hyde Cannery, you don't really need to know about the rules about borrowing money against finished goods in warehouses, or whether the staff in the Hyde Cannery are wearing "Hyde Cannery" t-shirts or "Lawrence Warehouse" t-shirts. At all. It's completely irrelevant, and if you care, it means you've crossed over from a nice model railroad hobby into some strange history/accounting obsession that can't be healthy.

Which means I'm either really strange, or I've started on a path to a lucrative career in corporate forensic accounting. But if I ever had to build models of buildings in downtown San Jose, I know that the building holding George Hyde's accountants ought to be pretty swanky, for it sounds like they knew how to earn their fee.

[Additional information: The official term for opening a public warehouse at a business is called "field warehousing", and it can be done to borrow against both raw materials and finished product. The September 1922 Western Canner and Packer gives a bit of history on the company, and notes that Lawrence Warehouse was one of the early companies doing this business.

The President of the Lawrence Warehouse Company also wrote an article for the February 1923 Western Canner and Packer about the advantages of field warehousing. He raises the point that the system is helpful when railroad cars are scarce (as happened during the rail strikes during the summer of 1922), for it means that the canner isn't forced to immediately sell and ship the whole crop after canning to pay expenses. Instead, the canner can keep product in their warehouse and ship it as bought, borrowing against the warehouse's contents to pay the growers and other suppliers.

This justification also highlights the big change in the dried and canned fruit industry after 1918. Before the US entered World War I, canners and packers would often sell the crop ASAP to speculators who would hold the product and sell it over the year when prices were favorable. The canners didn't have to worry about warehousing space or shipping during the off-season, and also didn't care about price fluctuations.

Anti-profiteering rules during World War I discouraged the speculative wholesalers from holding product during the war. After the war ended, the wholesalers realized they liked not taking on the speculative risk, and instead bought from the canners and packers only as they needed product. The canners then started holding more stuff in warehouses during the off-season, had to staff the warehouse for shipments, and also had to pay more attention to prices. Now that the canners weren't immediately selling the crop, having ways to borrow against the slowly-selling pack became more important. Field warehousing appears to be one way the canners made sure they had access to cash as they slowly sold each year's crop.

There are specific rules about how a field warehouse is run; the Yale Law Journal in September 1960 cites that the items to be "warehoused" are segregated from the rest of the borrower's stock in an area leased for a nominal sum to the warehouse company, and demarcated with signs and physical barriers to warn folks that the contents have a lien against them. The warehouse company takes possession of the items when they enter the warehouse and issues a receipt that can be given to the bank in a loan, and is only supposed to release the products when the receipt is returned. Warehouse companies got a fee - usually a percentage of the value of the products stored - for being responsible for the stored items, and were on the hook for the value if the items weren't there when a creditor came calling. One of the larger court cases in field warehousing came when a public warehouse company controlling storage for a food oils company turned out never to have received the oil that they'd issued receipts for.

Although field warehouses were run as separate companies, they were often run by employees associated with the original business because of knowledge of how the business worked. Some considered this risky for the warehouse company because the employees might have a conflict of interest, but that's how just how things were run.]

Exciting Times at the Recorder's Office with Chattel Mortgages

For various reasons, I've been down by the County offices at lunchtime lately, and decided this would be a great time to poke around in the Santa Clara County Clerk/Recorder records. In California, the county recorder stores critical legal records: births, deaths, deeds, mortgages, subdivision maps, and the like, going all the way back to the 1850's. I'd always been a bit curious about land ownership, so I thought it might be fun to poke around on properties, both our current house as well as some of the canneries and packing houses I've been following.

I'll give the results of some of that research another day, but for now I'll highlight one tidbit of information I found, and I'll tell a little about what's good and bad about searching legal records.

Higgins-Hyde Lends Some Money

Now, land records alone aren't very interesting for the model railroader. They're not necessarily good for tracking down industries in a particular area, for land is often leased to businesses. The personal records - births, marriages, and deaths - can be found easier through ancestry.com or other genealogy sites without the trip downtown, and the legal records usually have much less color than, say, census records.

But that doesn't mean there aren't gems to discover. While tracking down the ownership of the "Abinante and Nola" packing house at 740 West San Carlos St., I got stuck trying to find the owner of the property before around 1950. After some failed searches, I decided to check in the 1930's records for mention of the occupant at the time, the infamous Higgins-Hyde Packing Co. I didn't find any deeds on my search, but I did turn up a couple agreements between Higgins-Hyde and local orchardists called "chattel mortgages".

A chattel mortgage is an agreement to borrow money on "movable personal property". In these cases, Higgins-Hyde lent money at the start of the year to orchardists to help them with the year's crop and also provided a minimum price for the crop. The orchardists mortgaged the crops of prunes on some or all of their land and perhaps some of their equipment, and in return got the cash immediately. The orchardists promised to properly care for, harvest, and prepare the crop for market, and use the proceeds of the sale to pay back Higgins-Hyde. If the sale price of the fruit was greater than the borrowed amount, the orchardists kept it. Higgins-Hyde kept the right to go and grab the fruit if the orchardists failed to maintain the orchard or protect the crop, and would also grab any additional collateral if the orchardists didn't cough up the prunes.

Here's one of Higgins-Hyde's agreements with Fred and June Lester, well-known Willow Glen residents, from mid-August 1932. (Just to be precise, this mortgage was filed 8/17/1932, recorder's book 620, pg 294). This agreement, adding another $400 to an existing $4100 debt due in November of 2012, was signed just before Higgins-Hyde was savaged in the press for trying to undercut the Prune Pool.

And the agreement gives us a few hints about some of the Lester's orchard lands. The Lesters were best known for farmland south of downtown San Jose. Like a lot of orchardists, it appears they also owned and leased land in other parts of the Valley to expand their business or diversify their crop. This agreement covers two of these orchards not on the family ranch: a quarter quarter section of land (40 acres) at Bascom and Hamilton Avenues (now the site of a Whole Foods and large strip mall), and another 60 acres on White Road near Penitencia Creek in the Berryessa District of San Jose.

The Lesters also pledged a car (Studebaker) and tractor (50 h.p. Best Tractor. That Best tractor would be a nice detail for one of my orchards, for Best was a Bay Area company that produced continuous tread tractors that wouldn't compress the Santa Clara Valley's soft orchard soil. Best later meddled with Holt to form Caterpillar.

Note to self: buy more Studebaker models. Campbell sounds like it was more a Studebaker town than a Ford town.

The Lesters must've been a bit desperate for money after the low prices of the previous seasons; the agreement shows they borrowed $1500 in December 1931, then $2000 in March 1932, then $635 in April, and the final $400 in July, all payable in November.

There were at least three other similar mortgages filed the same year - the Leos on Latimer Ave. in Campbell, the Avilas off Monterey Road, and Gwins in San Martin. There also might have been separate contracts to sell the fruit at a fixed price to the company, but those wouldn't have gotten officially filed because they were simple contracts and not pledging ownership of specific assets.

One last note on the chattel mortgage: note that the Vice President of Higgins-Hyde at the time was Jack Roberts, probably the J.S. Roberts that occupied the site after Higgins-Hyde. Looks like Higgins-Hyde didn't skulk off into the night, but instead changed their name and kept packing after the Infamous Prune Pool Caper.

Searching at the Recorder's Office

I've only done a few searches at the Recorder's office, but here's some advice based on that experience.

• Searching legal records is painful; they're not available online, so you need to be in the Recorder's office to see any of the actual deeds and mortgages. Indexes are awkward. Do as much research as you can about potential landowners and sale dates (to a likely year or month) before going to the Recorders office. Census records, city directories, and personal interviews can help you narrow searches before you start.
• Deed searches require using an index book to find the "book" and "page" of a recorded instrument, then going to that "book" to see the actual record. For post-1980 records, the index is a computerized database, so it's easy to search for a particular owner. For the 1970's, you leaf through microfilmed computer-printed indices (luckily sorted alphabetically).

  Before that, the indexes are no longer alphabetical. Instead, you find the index book for a year or set of years. Each book is grouped by the first couple letters of last name and sorted by date. For Higgins-Hyde, you'd find the "H-J index book" as a set of images to browse. You'd then look through that book to find the section containing records involving people with the last name starting with "Hi-Hu" prefixes, then you'd read through that section in date order looking for any index entries referring to Higgins-Hyde. You'd then have a book and page for the actual document, and so you'd go to a separate database to actually see the deed. Finding the Higgins-Hyde documents in the 1932-1939 index required some back-and-forth to find the Hi-Hu section, then required scanning all fifty or hundred pages in the "Hi-Hu" section looking for mention of Higgins-Hyde.

  At least in the 1960's, the date-sorted by name prefix indexes are typed. Before then, you're getting into handwritten indices. The 1930's indexes can be clear or hard-to-read depending on the handwriting of the recorder. Luckily, the actual documents are typewritten so the legalese is easy to read. As you go earlier, you'll start finding cases where the legal documents are handwritten, and you'll find reading legal descriptions of properties to be a chore. Let's hope the folks who have been computerizing the census records might turn their handwriting skills to mortgages.

• Viewing documents can be very, very awkward. In some counties (such as Alameda County), all the non-modern records and indexes are on microfilm, requiring some work each time you need to change media. In Santa Clara county, the indexes and actual records are all on computer, but the user interfaces for viewing the documents can be clunky and often only allow a single window at a time.
• Common names or similar corporation names can make searching ten times worse. Trying to search for records involving a prolific real estate investor, a title company, or subdivision builder could result in a couple entries a day or hundreds over a year. The indexes often contain the "grantor" and "grantee", so you might get hints about which records might be interesting, but you'd then need to dash to the actual records to decide if the one you're looking for.

  I learned to do my searches on the least-common name in a grantor-grantee pair. To find more on the Lester's interactions with Higgins-Hyde, it might be easier to look through the "Le" section of the grantee index for Lester rather than the "Hi" section for Higgins-Hyde.

• Legal records are a big business, so prices are set for the legal and real estate folks searching records. Unofficial copies can be $10/document (plus a per-page charge) in Santa Clara County. Using a smart phone to capture screen images might be an easier way to save a bunch of interesting records.
• Tracing ownership can be tedious. Generally, tracing the ownership of a particular piece of land means finding when the current owner bought the land, then searching backwards through the years to find when the previous owner bought, and repeating. If you know that Joe bought the land in 1980 from Jim, you'd have to then search backwards from 1980 looking for all records on Jim to find his purchase. Knowing that Jim bought some time around 1960 avoids a lot of tedious searching. You might even be able to search from two directions, going forward from a first owner rather than back from a last owner.

It's worth mentioning I also used the visits to the Recorder's office for non-model-railroad purposes. I managed to track down all the owners of our otherwise commonplace house all the way back to its construction. It turns out every owner has had some connection to high-tech: first a former Hughes engineer at IBM, then a Lockheed aeronautical engineer, a GE nuclear engineer, Sun/IBM family, and our Apple/IBM/Google family. That almost explains the unsafe electrical splices we found buried in the roof when we re-roofed in 2000.

There's other interesting facts in the Recorder's dusty files - a strangely cheap purchase of a warehouse from the SP by Abinante and Nola, notice of the sale of the George Hyde cannery on the courthouse steps in 1932, and a full accounting of the assets of the Ainsley Cannery during a corporate reorganization. Those can all wait till another day.

[Photo: Recorder's Office, San Diego County, 1962. From San Diego History.

That's Why I Scanned Those Plans

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

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

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

Historical Research in this Modern Age (or Scanning By The Dozen)

As I've been researching the San Jose - Los Gatos branch over the last few years, there's two key facts I've learned: there's a lot of great research material out on the Internet, and I'm much more likely to do research when I can do it sitting at home at midnight than when I have to go into a special library instead.

That doesn't mean I don't like libraries; I really love special collections. I had a great time last week, for example, spending a couple hours in the San Jose State special collections library looking at the John C. Gordon Photographic Collection originals, and found a few new photos of the U.S. Products cannery and a beautiful panorama of Del Monte's plant #3 in 1935, taken from the same vantage point as that only photo of the Abinante and Nola / J.S. Roberts / Higgins-Hyde Packing Company packing shed I'd found last year.

But those trips are rare; this was the first time I'd made it into the Special Collections library, and I'd only had the afternoon free because of some family business that required a day off from work. I've visited the same library's California Room and viewed their original Sanborn map books a few times, but it's still a rarity. I had a great afternoon at the California State Railroad Museum's library in Sacramento last year, but I don't know when I'll next be able to visit and look at their collection of valuation maps and Southern Pacific plans.

Instead, I do a ton of Google searches, poke through the photo collections for the different libraries that have put their images online, and read through the different books I've gotten over the years to do most of my research. Google's News Archive scans of old newspapers has been a particular favorite of mine (as has the California Digital Newspaper Collection. I also read through the different blogs and websites other railfans have posted, and reference or simply crib photos from other sites that are particularly interesting or highlight the stories I'm trying to tell. I also have a list of fruit-related businesses in San Jose in a Google Doc, and when I've got a few moments, I'll do a Google search on one and see what new links turn up. Google Docs - online spreadsheets and word processing documents - are a neat way to share railroad research with others, by the way.

So it's time to repay the favor and help share some documents so others can do these sorts of searches.

I saw an Ebay auction last week for Southern Pacific civil engineering drawings - plans of proposed sidings, track plans for small areas, plans for pipeline reroutings by third parties, etc. All the drawings were from the 1940's, and some were of San Jose, and I was hoping that some of the drawings might be for the Los Gatos branch. I suspected they all might be interesting for my Bay Area history bug, so I put in a bid, won, and on Friday had a pile of seventy-year-old vellum drawings in my eager hands.

But what to do with them? I could have just looked over them, shared the San Jose bits, and hid the rest off in a closet. But a friend, John Plocher, had just taken a box of Southern Pacific Bay Area slides he'd bought at an estate sale, scanned them all, and posted them all on Flickr for others to examine and enjoy. They're nice photos, except that every time the photographer had a great shot of a cannery lined up, a train came along and blocked the shot. Awfully bad luck, that photographer.

I followed John's example, and with about six hours of scanning and six hours of post-processing, all the drawings were online. Check the full set of images on Flickr, or look at the index of images and places.

I've got a lot of reasons for posting these on-line: keep the original drawings safe but accessible, return the favor for others who've published historic photos on-line, and curiosity about whether I could upload them all easily. However, my strongest reason for uploading all these was so that I could see what other people learned from these drawings. Check them out, and add comments on Flickr about the interesting details you see!

Some of the interesting details I've found already include:

• Centerville had a milk platform at least til 1940.  I didn't know that carrying milk by train was common in California. (Centerville: Abandon Milk Platform)
• One drawing shows a proposed underpass at Orange Ave. in South San Francisco for the Baden branch.  I'm pretty sure this never actually was built - there certainly were no signs of such an underpass in the 1970's. (Proposed Grade Raise of Portion Baden Branch)
• I'm surprised at the number of corrals turning up along the tracks - 10th Street in San Jose, 5th and Kirkham in Oakland, Harrison Street in Berkeley.  I hadn't seen any along the Los Gatos branch and Mayfield Cutoff as I've researched it. (San Jose: Proposed Spur to Serve Gagliardi Bros, Oakland: Widen Freight Platform, Berkeley: Proposed Pie Crossing)
• For that matter, Oakland's 5th and Kirkham freight station looks like it might make a nice model scene…(Oakland: Widen Freight Platform)
• I was surprised to see mention of the South Pacific Coast and Ocean Shore on these drawings, decades after the railroads disappeared:(San Francisco: Proposed Repairs Ocean Shore Railway; I'll leave finding the South Pacific Coast as an exercise for the reader. Perhaps I added it as a keyword for easier searching?!)

Details on scanning: Luckily, all the drawings fit on my ten-year-old Epson flatbed scanner. At 300 DPI, it took a minute or two per scan, and the work was pretty mechanical; the worst part was trying to do other work while being interrupted every couple minutes to put on the next scan. Next time, I hire a local kid to help.

For each scan, I also renamed the file to match the engineering drawing number, and typed up an index listing the number of the drawing, the railroad station related to the drawing, the title of the drawing, date, and a set of keywords for related streets or interesting details. Flickr also allows longer descriptions, but I didn't realize that at the time. The index file was just a single word processing document set up for easy parsing by a computer program; just making a single file relating the filename, title, and keywords makes it easy for a computer program to manipulate the list or generate a web page straight from the index. The keywords and good descriptions are absolutely essential; there's a ton of great content out there on the web, but if there aren't good references to what's in the picture, no one will ever find it.

There's automatic ways to post photos up to Flickr; I've used iPhoto's export feature to send collections of photos up, but I've found setting keywords and descriptions can be time consuming and hard to mass-edit. I also wanted to be able to put up the scans now, but mprove keywords or add map locations later, so I wanted a way I could redo things later without re-exporting all the photos. Flickr, like a lot of web sites, document how you can modify your collections on the web site: write programs to automatically do uploads, or change details on the photo. I used a separate Python Flickr library to actually do the work, and wrote a little Python program to take all the scans and index material, and create or update the Flickr photo collection.

If you're interested in sharing your own collection of photos or drawings on Flickr, let me know and I can share the scripts I wrote with you.

Once again, I scanned these drawings because I'm curious what historic facts others will find, and so others can share details about the places they model. If you find the drawings interesting, send me a note, or, better yet, use the drawings in a blog post about your favorite Bay Area railfan spot and send me a link!

[Image of San Jose:Proposed Track to Serve Floor Service Co. from my collection, viewable on Flickr.]