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Re: OLD WP LINE BEYOND 98TH AVE OAKLAND
Author: OPRRMS
Date: 07-01-2009 - 21:25
john Wrote:
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> You're right because I got my bart stations mixed
> up. It was at coliseum. sorry for the mix up.
Alrighty then! It was the "Long Street" which is a yard job (YOA82) that runs out of West Oakland (down behind the Main Post Office on West 7th Street) and serves the remaining customers on what's called the Melrose Drill that runs next to the Oakland Sub (old WP) in the area of 81st and 85th Avenues. The main customers are R&A Trucking and Longview Fibre. The majority of R&A's business involves receiving, unloading and warehousing covered coil steel cars (most are cradle flats) for NUMMI Motors, then driving the coils down to the assembly plant in Warm Springs as requested. Longview has a corrugating plant at 85th Ave and receives boxcars of rolled paper and occasionally ships out scrap paper. There are a couple of other customers that occasionally receive cars, too.
The job works Sunday-Thursday and is on duty at the former-SP yard in West Oakland at 3 PM. The name "Long Street Job" is a holdover from WP days. It takes a drag from West Oak to the East Oakland Yard at 5th Avenue, does some switching, then heads for the Drill Track. When it's done there, it heads back to West Oak. The job rates one 4-axle unit, most commonly a GP38-2. The majority of its cars are handled between West Oak and East Oak, as there is very little industry remaining in far East Oakland anymore. For comparison, in 1970 there were so many customers on the Drill Track that it was switched by both Western Pacific and Southern Pacific, 24/7. Back then, SP had two jobs working the Drill Track on each shift, WP one per shift. That makes nine daily jobs switching customers in an area of about two miles. Nowadays, there's just the one remaining job, working one shift, five days per week, and if NUMMI closes or changes the way they receive steel, it'll bite the dust, too.
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> You're right because I got my bart stations mixed
> up. It was at coliseum. sorry for the mix up.
Alrighty then! It was the "Long Street" which is a yard job (YOA82) that runs out of West Oakland (down behind the Main Post Office on West 7th Street) and serves the remaining customers on what's called the Melrose Drill that runs next to the Oakland Sub (old WP) in the area of 81st and 85th Avenues. The main customers are R&A Trucking and Longview Fibre. The majority of R&A's business involves receiving, unloading and warehousing covered coil steel cars (most are cradle flats) for NUMMI Motors, then driving the coils down to the assembly plant in Warm Springs as requested. Longview has a corrugating plant at 85th Ave and receives boxcars of rolled paper and occasionally ships out scrap paper. There are a couple of other customers that occasionally receive cars, too.
The job works Sunday-Thursday and is on duty at the former-SP yard in West Oakland at 3 PM. The name "Long Street Job" is a holdover from WP days. It takes a drag from West Oak to the East Oakland Yard at 5th Avenue, does some switching, then heads for the Drill Track. When it's done there, it heads back to West Oak. The job rates one 4-axle unit, most commonly a GP38-2. The majority of its cars are handled between West Oak and East Oak, as there is very little industry remaining in far East Oakland anymore. For comparison, in 1970 there were so many customers on the Drill Track that it was switched by both Western Pacific and Southern Pacific, 24/7. Back then, SP had two jobs working the Drill Track on each shift, WP one per shift. That makes nine daily jobs switching customers in an area of about two miles. Nowadays, there's just the one remaining job, working one shift, five days per week, and if NUMMI closes or changes the way they receive steel, it'll bite the dust, too.
