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Re: Alice St. Yard
Author: Bill Root
Date: 12-19-2020 - 09:17
After 50+ years my memory is a bit fuzzy on details - I only worked the Oakland Locals a few times off the extra and my job consisted of pulling pins and passing signals. OPRRMS - are you referring to the "puzzle switch" at Wood Street. I never did figure it out. I think you needed an advance degree in physics to do so. The Oakland Terminal did come in to Wood Street, although I never saw them there. I got yelled at for "putting us on somebody else's railroad" one time, which was the OT. Emeryville and environs was very complicated and if you didn't have a a regular conductor or brakeman things could get dicey. One trip the engineer directed the whole operation with hand signals and much consultation from the cab of the loco. Nobody else knew what we were doing. You only had to make one student trip on the Oakland District, which you might as well not have bothered with.
Most of what we took down there was interchange, I guess mostly to the Espee. We had a few regular customers, but nothing big. Trains were very long, though and required a shove up and over the Espee main line coming out of Richmond Yard. Power was always one Alco S2 or S4 switcher. When the Viet Nam war heated up, we had more interchange to the OT for Oakland Army Base. I remember one trip where we had a mechanical reefer full of frozen hot dogs for the Army Terminal. The diesel had failed at some point and they sent a machinist from Richmond to fix it. I thought "this isn't going to end well" and it didn't. I don't know who cleaned up the mess.
TMer, thanks for the overhead of Alice Street. It does appear there is a connection to the SP. You can see there's not much going on there. I loaded (not by myself) many barges at Richmond and the Alameda run was a daily event. If there were Alice street cars (rarely), they went on last and after being unloaded the tug (Hayden and Hastings by that time) would cross the estuary to the Alameda Belt on the same trip. We were still running two tug crews a day around the clock into the late 60's, when I quit to go on the Berkeley Police Dept. Mondays and Thursdays were Tiburon days after the tunnel collapse on the NWP. Sorry for the digression from Emeryville.....
Most of what we took down there was interchange, I guess mostly to the Espee. We had a few regular customers, but nothing big. Trains were very long, though and required a shove up and over the Espee main line coming out of Richmond Yard. Power was always one Alco S2 or S4 switcher. When the Viet Nam war heated up, we had more interchange to the OT for Oakland Army Base. I remember one trip where we had a mechanical reefer full of frozen hot dogs for the Army Terminal. The diesel had failed at some point and they sent a machinist from Richmond to fix it. I thought "this isn't going to end well" and it didn't. I don't know who cleaned up the mess.
TMer, thanks for the overhead of Alice Street. It does appear there is a connection to the SP. You can see there's not much going on there. I loaded (not by myself) many barges at Richmond and the Alameda run was a daily event. If there were Alice street cars (rarely), they went on last and after being unloaded the tug (Hayden and Hastings by that time) would cross the estuary to the Alameda Belt on the same trip. We were still running two tug crews a day around the clock into the late 60's, when I quit to go on the Berkeley Police Dept. Mondays and Thursdays were Tiburon days after the tunnel collapse on the NWP. Sorry for the digression from Emeryville.....
