Warehouses at the Market Street Station

Today, I'll go through some of my thoughts when trying to research and scratchbuild a particular building.

One of the lingering projects has been the warehouses at the back of my Market Street Station scene. The far side of the San Jose yards, near Ryland St., had a row of warehouses up until at least the fifties.

This aerial photo from 1940 (from Silicon Valley History Online) shows the rough area; this photo is looking northwest to southeast; downtown San Jose is to the right, the San Jose yards (now the shopping center on Coleman Ave.) are in the foreground, and East San Jose is in the background. The large white building on the right side of the tracks is just after North First Street. The old Southern Pacific freight house is in the center of the tracks in the middle distance, and the old Southern Pacific Market Street Station would have been in the open space on the right side of the tracks just before the last warehouse on the right. All this track is sparsely used in the 1940's; the line to Los Angeles got rerouted through Diridon station five years before, so the track you see is just going to loop through Japantown and past the Del Monte and Mariani plants before heading back to Oakland.

The specific warehouses I want to model are those on the left side of the tracks just before North First Street. Checking out these warehouses on Sanborn maps shows the occupants of the warehouses changing with each year, but some of the names are quite familiar. Here's a list from east to west from First Street, past the Ryland Park swimming pool, and past N. San Pedro St. along Ryland St. That's roughly from opposite the old passenger station to opposite the SP freight station:

In 1915, the warehouses held:

• J . W. Chilton and Company dried fruit packing. (383 North First Street) Mentioned in 1922 history of Santa Clara County industry. Chilton was local; San Jose's Preservation Action Council's newsletter mentions that his house was at 1050 Bird Ave. in Willow Glen, and was designed by Andrew Hill.
  
• Mark-Lally & Co Plumbing supplies. (San Pedro St.) Plumbing and heating supply company out of San Francisco.
  
• Farmers Union General Warehouse. (152 Ryland St.)
  
• Warren Dried Fruit Co. (200 Ryland St.) My grandmother supposedly worked for them in Hayward in the 1930's.
  
• J. B. Inderrieden & Co Dried Fruit Packing (236 Ryland St.) They're not locals-they're from Chicago.
  

In 1950:

• C.I. Dick Dried Fruit Packing. (405 N. First St., but same as the Chilton warehouse)
  
• "Shelling Plant and Warehouse". On the site of former yard tracks, closer to the SP station.
  
• "Fruit Packing" (386 N. San Pedro St.)
  
• "Fruit Packing and Warehouse" (392 N. San Pedro St.)
  
• Beer warehouse. (395-399 San Pedro St.) Shares Warren's warehouse.
  
• Warren Dried Fruit Co. (100-200 Ryland St.) They're doing pretty good to be in the same place 35 years.
  
• Abinante and Nola Packing Co. (236 Ryland St.) They occupied the Inderrieden warehouse. It's interesting to find them on this side of town, as their former plant on San Carlos St. is on my Vasona branch layout.
  
• Western Metal and Export. (280 Ryland St.) Tin salvage plant.
  

1970-era SPINS maps marking locations of industries on the SP shows all these warehouses were vacant by 1972, assuming the buildings were even still there.

There were more businesses on the other side of the street close to downtown, but that's still an awful lot of industry for a small area, and quite enough for any self-respecting model railroad.

There's not a lot of close-up's of that neighborhood, but I found some photos when diving through books. As usual, I took maps of the area (this time photocopies of the Sanborn maps of the neighborhood rather than hand-drawn) and went searching through my books for potential photos showing the warehouses. As I found photos, I'd mark the location of the photo source on the map for later reference. The aerial photo leading this blog entry gives dates from 1940 and shows the row of warehouses on the left (north) side of the tracks. They're the long warehouses standing alone with the little clerestory peaks to get light into the buildings.

Detail shots are sparse, though. "Prune County Railroading" has a couple photos. One shows the roof lines of the warehouses peeking out over the tops of passenger cars at the old SP Market Street station. This nice photo from 1935 of SP 3105 crossing San Pedro Street showing the board and batten warehouses with covered loading docks and signs running the length of the roof peak advertising "A. Levy & Co." and "… Fruit Company". From the Sanborn maps and my guesses at the location of the photos, that would be either be the C. I. Dick warehouse and one of the generic warehouse which were up against the neighborhood in the aerial photos, or a new line of warehouses built on former yard tracks just behind the old station. The new warehouses appear as that row of three brighter warehouses in the aerial photo. The old Market St. station had been torn down by the time this photo was taken, but it appeared on the right side of the tracks opposite the newer warehouses. Just for trivia, the larger building on the right side of the tracks in the distance is a cold storage warehouse just on the other side of First Street. That space had been a house/estate up until the twenties, and the warehouse appeared sometime in the 1930's.

So with these photos and a bit of guessing, here's my assumptions about what these warehouses look like, and what my model should look like.

Generally, what I've seen in the photo are tall (16-20' high) one story warehouses with sloping roofs, covered loading docks, and occasional large freight doors; the Sanborn maps confirm this, with exact wall heights, notes about boilers and motors for power, and addresses. One exception was the Inderrieden / Abinate and Nola warehouse which had 24 foot high walls and was marked as having two floors. None of the Sanborn maps show locations of doors, but all show how the buildings were divided up, and where the non-railroad loading and unloading docks must have been.

From comparing building sizes to the widths of the roadways, the warehouses appeared to be on the order of 150 feet long and 50 feet wide. The photo of locomotive 3105 shows that the loading dock to the right was sheathed below the dock, and the one to the left was not. The Sanborn maps don't give much more detail - 18' high walls, truss roofs with wood posts, covered platforms, occasional motors for running machinery, fuel oil.

I'm guessing they're mostly board-and-batten structures from textures on some of the photos, and that they should appear a bit worn both from age and from lack of maintenance due to intermittent use. They'll be simple to build except for those clerestory roofs. Because my warehouses will be up against the backdrop and at an angle, getting all the rooflines correct will be a chore.

Anyway, that's all I've learned. I've done my research using photos from books, photos (like the aerial photo) from library collections on the Internet, explored Sanborn maps thanks to San Jose Library's Sanborn subscription. (Yes, a great use of my tax dollars!) I've made a good guess at the appearance of the warehouses, and started on construction. I'm not sure my guess at the building is perfect, but it's a starting point, and I'll have an interesting model as a placeholder til I learn more.

And if you're looking for a historic project to get started, how about doing some searching on those fruit packing company names and addresses on the Internet, and see what you turn up?

Next time, I'll show some construction photos.

SwitchList: Feedback Wanted

If you tried out my SwitchList program for the Mac when I mentioned it a couple weeks back, I'd appreciate any feedback you've got.

I made the app public in hopes of figuring out what next to do with it. I knew it worked well for my layout and was a great improvement for me over car cards and other routing systems, but wasn't sure whether it would be useful to all of you out there. I wasn't sure which features to add or bugs to fix to make it particularly useful. Should I stay with the small layout focus or aim for more complex layouts? Should I finish the feature for spotting cars at particular doors of an industry? Are there better ways of printing the switchlists? I'm also trying to decide whether to keep working on it on my own, or whether there are others out there who might have features they think are worth adding.

If you tried it and had comments (and especially if you tried it and found it wouldn't work for you), I'd appreciate hearing your comments, either on this post or via e-mail.

Modelling Diridon Station

Anyone interested in railroading in San Jose ought to check out the latest edition of Model Railroad Hobbyist for a great set of model photos of Diridon Station in the 1950's. Vic Roseman, famous for his realistic east-coast dioramas and photos in Model Railroader magazine in the 1970's, appears to have switched coasts, and he's done some beautiful models and captured the scenes nicely.

Welcome to the Left Coast, Vic! We'll try to make sure you'll never have to model snow again!

Personally, I'm holding off for my chance to build a large and operable version of San Jose's old Market Street Station circa 1930, and try to run the tons of daily commute trains that left that victorian-era three track station on five minute intervals.

Busman's Holiday

I spent a good part of the weekend on a busman's holiday - cleaning up the computer program I use for deciding which boxcars get switched during an operating session. It's cleaned up enough so that I'm willing to let others try it out.

Go check out a very early version of SwitchList if you've got a Mac, and could use a computerized switchlist generator for your layout.

Now, if you don't know why you'd need that, let's talk about model railroad operations.

If model railroad operation is a game, then figuring out what has to be done during the game is a key detail. For the operations game, the question is "where do the trains run" and "what freight cars do the trains need to switch?" There have been all sorts of ideas proposed over the life of the hobby. Some use car cards that can be picked randomly to figure out where a car should move. John Allen, a famous modeler from the 1960's, drilled holes in his freight car roofs and stuck colored tacks in to indicate the destination of each car. (Rumor has it a real railroad tried this once, but stopped after accidentally drilling holes in the roofs of new cars held in a car carrier.) Others have placed scraps of paper with placement instructions on the top of freight cars. Others go with the simplest approach and roll dice at each town to figure out the number of cars to pick up and drop off in each town.

When I first started operating the Vasona Branch, I tried the car cards approach. I photocopied a couple hundred of the cardboard slips to represent the cars and the cargo they carried, and spent a couple nights on the repetitive task of writing down potential actions. "Take a boxcar from Plant 51 back to staging." "Take another boxcar from Plant 51 back to staging." "Take a stockcar up to the passing siding at Alma." "Take another boxcar from Plant 51 to staging, but this time pretend you're sending it to Cleveland." It was slow, painful work.

At the operating session, I dealt out a card for each freight car, and paper-clipped the cargo card to the card representing the freight car, gave a stack to my operators, and let them start. The cards worked decently - the print was a bit small, but they weren't too hard to handle, and they were easy to find if someone dropped his cards on the garage floor. I needed a place to put all those cards, so I glued together some small plastic pockets out of styrene sheet to hold the cards for the freight cars at each industry.

It worked ok, but after a few sessions, I wasn't as happy. The cargo cards just specified a kind of car - "this car is for a tank car, that for a refrigerator car.' But the process of picking an appropriate car for appropriate lading in the real world is much more complex. There are elaborate rules about what to do to return a boxcar after it's carried a load to another railroad. Generally, the rule is that the car can be reused for a load heading back towards the owning railroad, but if no loads are going in the right direction, the freight car needs to be sent back to its owner as fast as possible. (Read a bit about demurrage here or here too if you'd like a future in transportation law.) One bit of fallout of that is that cars on my layout from a non-Southern Pacific railroad -- such as those East Coast boxcars -- should only appear on industry sidings that might either send or receive lading from the east coast.

And so, one day I look at the concrete warehouse spur in front of Plant 51, and I see a Florida East Coast ventilated boxcar sitting there, and I know that there's absolutely no reason why that car should be there. No one would have *any* reason to ship cement from Florida to California in the 1930's. Nothing in that warehouse would be heading the other way from California to Florida. It's just wrong for that car to be there, and I'm annoyed. Obviously it doesn't take much to annoy me.

Now, there's ways of tuning car cards to avoid that sort of problem. Maybe mark certain cards according to which railroad's cars can hold them. Similarly, when I got annoyed that the dirtiest boxcars were ending up hauling canned fruit for Del Monte, I could have started marking which cargo cards required "clean" boxcars, and which cargos could go in the dirtiest, most weathered boxcars. But that requires writing a lot of car cards, and I'd had my fill of that.

There are some commercial Windows-only programs for generating switchlists or waybills, but they were all for Windows only. I found some free switchlist software, but found them cryptic and hard to use. Yes, I'm proud I can tweak some strange configuration file for a twenty-year-old command line program to add a couple new freight cars to the system, but I don't really want to do that regularly.

So the solution was to write my own program for the Mac, and it's been sitting on my computer for a few years now. It's usually worked ok, but I've never spent enough time to actually polish it or get it in a state where others might be able to use it. One of my biggest problems was that that car assignment algorithm was messy, and I didn't have any easy ways to test that any change I made wasn't going to break the software completely. Fortunately, I tried using the automatic unit testing code for the Mac (specifically the OCUnit Objective-C unit testing framework), and spent the weekend adding hundreds of tests to make sure that cars moved reasonably correctly. Between that and some cleanup of how stuff is stored on the computer disk, SwitchList was finally at a state to let others check it out.

So try it out, see if it's useful for you, and let me know how it works!

Santa Clara Valley Mill and Lumber and Cheim Lumber

One of my industries on the Vasona Branch is the Santa Clara Valley Mill and Lumber yard on San Carlos St. near Sunol St. I'd done a bit of research on it - enough to know that the company was run by William Doughtery, who did significant logging in the Felton area. Although the old Sanborn Maps showed this name on the property, it became Cheim Lumber some time in the 1930's, a business that ran at that location until 1997. Leo Cheim's obituary also mentions the business.

I don't know much about what the business looked like in the 1930's, but Rick Sprain shows some photos of what their retail store on the Alameda looked like in the 1950's. Sadly, they were photos taken as the store burned down, supposedly because of children playing with matches in the yard behind the store. Searching the Internet also turns up the lawsuit by Pacific Hardware complaining that Cheim Lumber should have kept those kids out of the yard. Rick's photos are nice views of San Jose in the 1950's, with the landmark (and recently gone) Andy's Pet Shop in the background.

History San Jose also has a picture from the fire showing employees saving the business records as the fire rages behind them. There's also a water tank visible in the smoke; my guess is it's for Del Monte Plant 51.


Here's what the site looks like today.

Freight trains on Fourth Street?

Along with the Vasona Branch layout in the garage, I've also got a shelf layout focusing on the old San Jose Market Street station inside the house.

Originally, the Southern Pacific line from San Francisco curved east near present day Coleman Ave., crossed north of downtown San Jose, then turned onto Fourth Street and proceeded through downtown San Jose on its way to Los Angeles. The Espee had a fifty year franchise to run trains on Fourth Street starting in the 1870's, and by the 1920's, San Jose was sick of mainline trains snarling traffic and dirtying laundry hung outside. After a good deal of fighting with the locals, the Southern Pacific finally re-routed their mainline around the west side of town, and built the current station on Cahill Street near the Alameda. Any traffic jams after that point could only be blamed on the automobiles.

This photo from the Willow Glen Resident newspaper shows why the town wanted the Southern Pacific off Fourth Street. Apologies for the bad reproduction, but the newspaper hasn't gotten around to put the photo online.

One obvious detail I can see I need to add to my shelf layout: lots of cars stopped at the railroad crossing, cursing the railroad. I could even play a tape loop of drivers cursing to make the scene realistic, but then my layout would be rated NC-17.

Work like that doesn't happen instantaneously...

Articles about model building always seem to happen quickly and flawlessly, but my models never come together that well. Luckily, Bill Hambly actually kept a diary as he built a railroad station, and mentioned the mistakes (wall built backwards. Oh, I've never done that!) as well as the parts that went well. He also names the nine work sessions required to build the kit, with one (assembling the sides) dragging out over a week.