Alameda by Rail
By Grant Ute and Bruce Singer
5/5
()
About this ebook
Grant Ute
Authors Grant Ute and Bruce Singer compiled this evocative collection of vintage images to celebrate Alameda�s railway heritage using the archives of the Bay Area Electric Railroad Association�s Western Railway Museum. Singer rode the Pacific Electric �Red Cars� in his youth and, after he retired, realized his dream of becoming a motorman. Ute, the grandson of a San Francisco motorman, is a founder of the San Francisco Railway Archive.
Related to Alameda by Rail
Related ebooks
New York, Susquehanna & Western Railroad in New Jersey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBuilding the Caldecott Tunnel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPortland's Streetcars Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe New York, Ontario and Western Railway Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLost Trolleys of Queens and Long Island Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRevisiting the Long Island Rail Road: 1925-1975 Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The B & O Railroad: A Brief History in Time Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsReading Trains and Trolleys Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in Maryland Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPortland's Streetcar Lines Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStrasburg Rail Road Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAlong the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad: From Cumberland to Uniontown Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Columbia River Gorge Railroads Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Western Maryland Railway Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Southern Railway: Further Recollections Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Lehigh Valley Railroad across New Jersey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAkron Railroads Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPennsylvania Main Line Railroad Stations: Philadelphia to Harrisburg Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Great Cooper River Bridge Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Suburban Philadelphia Trolleys Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCopper Country Streetcars Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCanton Area Railroads Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Ontario and Western Railway Northern Division Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWillamette Valley Railways Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Railroads of New Jersey: Fragments of the Past in the Garden State Landscape Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Laramie Railroads Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNorthwestern Pennsylvania Railroads Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBrooklyn Streetcars Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Los Angeles Railway Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Summit County's Narrow-Gauge Railroads Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
United States History For You
Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Killing the Guys Who Killed the Guy Who Killed Lincoln: A Nutty Story About Edwin Booth and Boston Corbett Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A People's History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Reset: And the War for the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5U.S. History 101: Historic Events, Key People, Important Locations, and More! Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/51776 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer: An Edgar Award Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Killing the Mob: The Fight Against Organized Crime in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fifties Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Alameda by Rail
1 rating0 reviews
Book preview
Alameda by Rail - Grant Ute
Wurm
INTRODUCTION
The railroads are gone from Alameda. The present Fruitvale railroad bridge carried its final freight train in 1998. A passenger train in revenue service took its last riders over an earlier version of that bridge in 1941. Ferries have not departed the Alameda Mole since 1939, although the 1991 Loma Prieta earthquake induced a modest restoration of ferry service to the East Bay.
For nearly 75 years, however, Alameda was laced with a tight mesh of railroad track, carrying passengers to ferry boats bound for San Francisco and over bridges to Oakland. The obvious signs, such as tracks in the streets, are largely gone, and the few that remain, like the rail still left in Blanding and Clement Avenues, were part of the freight-carrying Alameda Belt Line. The less obvious but more durable traces are seen in the streets that once carried the passenger rails: the width of Lincoln Avenue, the long curve of Tilden Way, the gore corner where Encinal and Central Avenues intersect, Marshall Avenue’s reverse Z
connection of Lincoln and Pacific Avenues, and the diagonal segments of Eighth Street and Constitution Way.
Alameda first became part of the railroad age in 1864. It was then a land of oak and marsh with three distinct settlements—Woodstock in the west, Encinal on the estuary, a tidal creek whose proper name is San Antonio Creek, and old
Alameda, centered on Encinal Avenue and High Street. In its natural state, the estuary was one-quarter mile wide at its mouth and three miles in length, terminating in a shallow basin. About midway, it had a northerly reaching arm that drained the Oakland Hills and was dammed in 1869 to form Lake Merritt. Depths varied between 10 and 20 feet, depending on the tides. The loss of velocity as the creek flowed into the bay produced a sandbar within a mile of the mouth that, during low tides, came within two feet of the surface. In 1874, with the urging of Oakland, by Act of Congress and the hand of the Army Corps of Engineers, construction of a tidal canal was begun. Twenty-eight years in the making, it connected the basin to San Leandro Bay and turned Alameda from a peninsula into an island.
By the end of 1864, the trains of its first railroad, the San Francisco and Alameda, ran easterly from Woodstock and reached a station built in the area of what is now Pearl Street and Fernside Avenue. Westbound passengers could transfer in Woodstock at the railroad’s ferry pier, just to the west of today’s Pacific Avenue and Main Street, for a boat to San Francisco. Within five years after that beginning, Alameda became the first tidewater terminal of the first transcontinental railroad.
Alameda was not the intended end of track for the Central Pacific, which initially built eastward from Sacramento in a race with the oncoming Union Pacific for land and money that finally ended at Promontory, Utah. Oakland was where the grand plan took the railroad. Alameda, however, was in the right place at the right time when, after the rails met on May 10, 1869, the Central Pacific began its rush from Sacramento to a saltwater port.
The route from Sacramento coveted by the Central Pacific, which ran to Vallejo in a line that generally parallels today’s Interstate 80, had already been taken by the California Pacific and was not for sale at the time. The prize finally fell to the Central Pacific in 1871, when, ignoring Vallejo, they built south from Fairfield-Suisun to Benicia, crossing the Carquinez Straits by ferry until 1930, and then continued by way of Martinez and Berkeley to Oakland. In 1869, however, they were forced to follow a more circuitous route, buying and building their way down the Sacramento Valley to a point near Lathrop, then westerly toward Tracy and Pleasanton, and through Niles Canyon to what is now the town of Niles.
In sight of San Francisco Bay, the railroad turned to the northwest, and as it passed Hayward, it began to run parallel with and about a quarter of a mile westerly of the San Francisco and Alameda Railroad, which in 1865 had made that community its final rail head. Still Oakland-bound, the Central Pacific ran headlong into the rails of the San Francisco and Alameda as they emerged from the marsh at a place called Simpson’s (by some) and Melrose (by others), near San Leandro. Straight ahead lay Oakland, with more miles to go and more construction to do, including a pier when the rails reached tidewater. To the left was Alameda, with track in place, although in need of some upgrading, and a pier that already sent ferries across the bay.
The Central Pacific, by now the owner of the San Francisco and Alameda Railroad, made the left turn, and the rest is the story that is told in the words and photographs that follow.
No railroad helped make a more indelible mark on Alameda than that of the San Francisco Bridge Company. This double-headed train, being loaded with spoils by a steam shovel, is assisting in the geo-surgery that created the 400-foot-wide, mile-long tidal canal that linked the estuary with San Leandro Bay and turned Alameda from a peninsula into an island.