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.

"Take a Setting Card"

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

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

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

Or:

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

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

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

It's on the Internet, so it's got to be correct!

We all hopefully know that not everything is true on the Internet. For the Vasona Branch, I've always been a little suspicious of the guess on one of the SP railfan websites that a board and batten building on Railway Ave. in Campbell was actually an old freight house for the South Pacific Coast. I didn't bother actively debunking the details til I saw folks mentioning the building on the Espee mailing list.

Here's a photo, if you're interested, or all the photos of railroad details along the Vasona Branch.

So what's got me debunking this building as ex-SPC?

• It doesn't look very SPC or like a freight depot - no siding repairs to mark the position of freight doors, lots of windows, doors at inappropriate places, no SPC style roof supports or overhangs, etc.
  
• The 1928 Campbell Sanborn map shows no such building south of the later (now gone) Southern Pacific depot.
  
• I can't find any historic photos showing that building around. I've seen photos of the original (tiny) SPC depot in South Pacific Coast: A Centennial (p. 143), and that building is (1) much tinier, and (2) had horizontal siding, not the board and batten of the suspect building.
  
• I've seen photos of the later depot, and it's not the same building.
  
• The suspect building doesn't match the Los Gatos (SPC?) freight depot, a much larger building that I assume was SPC built - see the roof supports in this picture.
  
• I saw an article in the local paper describing that building as a former cannery cafeteria, (objection: hearsay!) and the Hyde cannery cafeteria in the foreground of this photo would be the right shape. The Sanborn maps also show the cafeteria building was vacant by 1928; any chance the old cafeteria building was just moved across the tracks when the bypass roads around downtown were built?
  

I don't know if I'm right, but I'm looking forward to hearing if anyone on the mailing list has got a strong idea that this really was an SPC building.

Making Mountains

Deep breath. How bad could it be to put scenery over the staging tracks?

Ok, it's done. I finally started building the scenery along the Alma siding, turning the corner curve at Alma from a place to see benchwork and the back wall into the beginnings of a hillside. In the process, I started covering up the hidden tracks below; they haven't been very accessible with the benchwork in place, but the scenery really cuts access further. Still, it's a necessary step. I've got hidden trackage, and that means it's got to be hidden at some point. The track below sometimes needs cleaning (and I think I've got enough access), but it's been running reasonably well so I don't think I'll need to do trackwork there any time soon. And even if I did, at worst I'll have to tear up some scenery to get some space to work, and that's not so bad, right?

On the other hand, I still remember that really cool cliff face I had on my teenage model railroad that came out so beautifully... but the 50' and longer cars I was trying to run kept bumping into the cliff face because of insufficient clearance. I rebuilt that cliff face, but it never looked as good as the first one...

For the Alma hillside, I used the same techniques as before. My backdrop is 1/16" styrene sheet, bought at the local plastic supply store (Tap Plastics) for less than $2/square foot. It cuts easily, bends nice, and takes paint fine. The scenery is white beadboard foam, cut with a hot wire tool and various knives, and glued in place (carefully and quickly!) with hot glue. The actual scenery surface is Sculptamold, a plaster/paper mache mix.

The space underneath is cramped; here's a picture directly below that scenery showing the Alma tracks, then the Vasona Junction wye, (in the shadows) the tracks heading towards the San Jose staging, and finally in the foreground the exposed San Jose staging tracks. Getting the backdrop in place behind Vasona Junction will be a bit of a challenge; it'll be attached with Velcro so I can still get to the tracks behind if necessary. The lower backdrop will lead under the Alma deck ; there's probably only a 5" wide area underneath the other level, but I think I can model Winchester Road and orchards as both arms of the wye dive through the backdrop.

I had two hitches with this project. First, my can of blue sky paint was old, and while it looked good in the can, it didn't have enough acrylic binder to stay on the backdrop. Instead, it just dripped big blue drops on all the scenery. Mixing the bad paint in with the white base fixed the problem before everything dried. Also, as I finished putting in foam scenery downhill and to the left of the new hill, I realized I still had a C clamp holding the Alma shelf to a support. My cordless drill and some contortions got that permanently attached, and now I've got another C clamp available for projects. Glad I saw that while I still had space for the drill!

Next steps: Start putting in ground at the Alma hill, then start building the scenery downhill from this scene to the far end of the Alma siding. It'll be fun to see what happens with that scenery. There's going to be a crossing of Los Gatos Creek, and there's also a (currently unused) switch for a long spur/branch that could lead to a space above the helix about six feet away. I've occasionally thought of industries there - perhaps a mine site and small town modeled after the mercury mines one ridge over at New Almaden, or (more prototypically) some minor oil drilling sites. Oil's actually been found in Los Gatos Canyon, and there was a spur at Alma in the SPC days to serve the production from Moody Gulch. Check out the USGS report for more details about the oil well in Los Gatos and the potential for measurable oil underneath Cupertino and Saratoga. Make sure you get mineral rights when you buy land in those towns!

Interesting finds in the newspaper

I spent the weekend on machining projects instead of on the railroad or (more importantly) yardwork, so there's nothing new to report. I did see a couple interesting articles in the paper, though.

First, the local weekly paper, the Willow Glen Resident, had this photo in their "Looking Back" feature. If I needed some ideas for my abandoned farm near Alma, this ought to give me some ideas. Looks like the owners brought out all their livestock to show how well they were doing.

Second, the Mercury News has a nice article on the city
buying up land for the proposed A's ballpark next to Diridon Station. Usually, I've got to go poring through old archives to find histories of old industrial buildings, but here they put a nice map on the front page. I'm glad I actually looked at the physical paper this morning.

The map's interesting because the area south of Diridon station holds areas I model. The "PG&E substation" used to be a PG&E generating plant. I've got a model of that plant as a building just south of the Plant 51 area; I modeled the building off a photo just after Diridon station was built. HP Pavilion was the site of a coal gas plant (I think) and had a gas holder for many years; I've got that too.

The extension of Autumn Street just south of the old main line (cutting across the top of the map) plows right over the former site of the Greco Canning Company, next to the Guadalupe River. History San Jose has a nice picture of that plant; it's where the large parking lot now sits at "B" on the map. There's also this history of Anthony Greco; I don't know if it's the same Greco's, but it gives some color for the history of the local canning business. [Oops, it's not the same. Anthony Greco formed a Greco Canning in 1909 which lasted four years until reorganization, then started Alba Canning, selling out in 1920 to buy land in the hills. The Greco Canning on Autumn St. was founded by Victor Greco in 1915. (Wonder if it was the remainder of what got reorganized?) The canning business is starting to sound a lot like high-tech...]

I also love the Greco Canning building because it looks like so many of the Campbell model buildings from my teenage years. They always looked odd to my eye, but now I know they were prototypical!