Question for any oldtimers familiar with the Stockton Ca. area:

In an old WP track chart handed down to me by my Grandfather, is a reference to a "North Channel Spur", about 1.2 miles timetable east from El Pinal(SP Xing) at @MP 96.2. No other data on this spur is included on the charts, but they show it branching away from the main.

The AAA San Joaquin County Map shows the WP crossing the Calaveras River at about that point, but no spur line. I had therefore always assumed that this river was the North Channel referred to, and that the spur served an industrial park nearby.

However, while googling the old WP line recently, I discovered something unexpected. Google maps also shows no spur, but their sattelite view also shows no industrial park! But instead, an old neighborhood. Not a sign of any industry - ever!

Drilling down closer on the sattelite view, an old abandoned r.o.w. seems to appear, tightly squeezed in a neighborhood just south of the Calaveras river (in the back yards paralleling E. Essex St). The r.o.w. is visable until it reaches the river and then the University Of the Pacific, where it disappears. It then seems to reappear south of Pershing Ave in another residential neighborhood until about Michigan Ave - Still no sign of any industry big enough to justify such a line (now a few miles long).

From there, things are pretty murchy - lots of what appears to a narrow band of "Infill" housing, on both sides of a small navagable canal (no evidence of a bridge), and then the seeming in the dirt remnants of a lot a trackage all along the north side of the Port of Stockton Channel. No evidence of any other connection to the north side of the port is visable in the sattelite views.

Questions:

Can anyone confirm that the WP served the Port of Stockton via this line?

If so, why the circuitous routing to the north side of the port, tight against back fences in residential areas, instead of a more direct route up a street in the business district?

History of the line - When built, dismantled, etc? Why?

How was it operated?

Any info would be much appreciated, as I am attempting to produce an historically accurate (as much as practical anyway) "Dispatcher" computer game covering the Western Division (Oakland to Oroville) during what I believe to be the Western Pacific's heyday as an independent railway - the fifties.

Thanx

OPB