The Times have changed, indeed.

And all of the Street jobs, on LA's first railroad line Banning's original Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad, were grea. You learned about places like to old auto dock, violet ally, the rathole, the banana dock, the old coach yard, eighth street team and the LA Times dock. Beer to Cours, to onions to the old Mayor of Arcadia Charlie Gilb, cantaloupes, and corn syrup, the 20-bulk car loads of rolled newsprint spotted and pulled twice a day on two massive loading docks for that old Times Sunday Edition, and of course 10 or 20 boxcars of Christmas trees to the wholesale Christmas tree sale at 8th Street team track. You got to go on obscure rail "alley" leads in between the buildings crawling around the heart of "old downtown" in the dead of night. A trip back in history and time to when SP 0-6-0's prowled those spurs hissing and blowing steam.

Stopping for pork noodles at the Atomic Cafe at half past two in the morning with cops, bail bondsmen, punk rockers, prostitutes, pimps, truck drivers, LA times printers in "old downtown" LA was one great perk of working the "Street" jobs (that is if a drunk didn't run into your engine tied down in the middle of Alameda Street).

"Street" jobs were only allowed on the "Street" after 6 pm and before 7 am the next morning on all jobs going "down" Alameda from the Links/Bull Ring. Trips north from the J Yard mostly came, including day jobs, via the old UP Passenger main to the old Grand Central Station via 8th Street now known as the Times Spur in some of these on-line videos with one or two customers south of Olympic.

Ironically one of the little side jobs I picked up consulting back around as a sub to a friend who knew I knew all about the "Street", in my second career, way back in the early 2010's, was to document all of the rail usages and photograph the state of the rail lines active and abandoned on the "Street". This was basically the section from 2nd Street down to Olympic. I documented the status of connections, and still connecting trackage, and took hundreds of digital photos of track, crossings, rail in alleys, and switches in the streets. All of this was to put together an application for the City of LA to get a grant to remove much of the abandoned trackage and repair the "Street".

Little Tokyo's Atomic Cafe (with the famous "atomic bomb exploding" neon sign, IIRC preserved at the Museum of Neon Art down in what is today's "Arts District"), lives now only in fading memories, replaced today by the Metro Little Tokyo LRT subway station entrance.

What a long, strange trip it's been...