What Caused the Demise of Bayshore Yard
Author: Gen X'er
Date: 05-20-2015 - 21:11
A lot of people say the SP wanted to desert carload business and get out of it altogether. So they began abandoning the local service and started focusing on bigger customers and what not.
But if that's so, how come there are even any carload customers at all in SF--Dean's Trucking and PAc Agri?
Is that reefers are more valuable business, but spotting a tanker here or there, maybe twnety times a year is considered not valuable and worth keeping an industry on the line for?
What does the trend of industries abandoning rail tell us about the demise of Bayshore? South City lumber's spur was deemed too rotten to be used, and UP wanted a cool million to repair it, which of course south city refused to pay. They still have that customer via team track but that comes at a price.
Did the SP want to get rid of customers/industries in order to not have to maintain it's trackage in San Francisco? Was there a conspiracy to make life difficult for customers, or was the railroad doing the best it could with a diminsihing amount of business, reducing profits?
Who were the customers in San FRancisco circa 1995? I know that Cicosta got gondolas as late as ten years ago, but apparently that traffic has stopped. And that there was an industry on the ocean side of the tracks on NEwhall St. or something--a trucking company.
But by 1995 was that the only difference from 2015? It says a lot about the fact that the railroad must've wanted to get rid of business for some reason, because surely it's industries wouldn't have simply quit en masse. You'd expect to have a fair number of legacy industries in 1995, only 15 years after Bayshore's untimely demise.
Your thoughts?