Robert's Vasona Branch Blog

New Photos

2012-02-01T22:48:00.000-08:00

BTW, for your amusement,

Del Monte's Plant 51

East end of Glenwood siding, with some fine-looking static grass.

Op Session for the South Bay's Annual LD/OPSIG Meet!

2012-02-01T01:03:00.000-08:00

The Bay Area's annual Layout Design and Operations Weekend is now over. As usual, I had a great time - fun presentations on Saturday, invitations to operating sessions on Sunday, and layout tours throughout the weekend. Byron Henderson also arranged his layout design advice sessions for all comers, and the folks looking for advice all enjoyed getting hints about their layout designs from the experts. (If you arrange meets and conventions in your own area, consider offering the same consulting. You don't really need *experts* at layout design, just some knowledgeable folks who can listen and give good suggestions. The help seekers will be very, very grateful.)

If you didn't make it out to Mountain View this year, make sure to mark the weekend before the Super Bowl next year on your calendar, and come out and attend. It's a great event!

I'm particularly proud of the LDSIG Meet's tradition of inviting participants who may never have done serious operations to op sessions at the local layouts; my visits to Don Marenzi and Dave Adams's layouts back in 2000 and 2001 got me interested in switching, timetable and train order operations, as well as operations in general. I remember coming home from each of those operating sessions with a different view of model railroads, fired up to improve and run my own model railroad.

This year, I helped repay the favor by hosting operating sessions at the Vasona Branch for a few of the attendees. I was behind on preparing; between work, a nasty cold, and family issues, I didn't start my usual preparation til Saturday night. While I got the layout presentable and operating with around six hours of cleanup and prep, it wasn't the smoothest operating session (though it wasn't the worst either.) One of the serious problems was that I didn't check for problems detected in the last operating session in... um... October. The last thing I wanted to do the night before an operating session was try to fix balky switch machines and frogs that were intermittently losing power for fear of breaking things worse. Next time, I block out a full day for the little repairs.

But the guests seemed to all have fun; the photo shows Don and Nolan handling the Campbell Cannery Turn, with Jeff checking his timetable to figure out when the Los Gatos commute train leaves town. Brett, another guest who's a professional railroader, was impressed that my small layout could give him a realistic and busy day of switching. Note the tall shell of the Sunsweet building on the right hand side of the scene, and the new Hyde Cannery spur at the far end of town. Also note the bright blue erasers I leave around as handy brakes to keep free-rolling cars from moving.

Brett also noted that my switchlists with door assignments listed are a bit unprototypical. In the real world, the crew arrives at the industry, finds the plant's foreman, and asks where the different cars need to be spotted. They then do the necessary shuffling. The computerized switchlists with the doors chosen do add more complexity (sometimes too much), but loses that sense of "we've gotten somewhere, let's figure out what we need to do or find someone who'll tell us what to do." I'm tempted in the future to require the crew switching a big industry to stop, send a switchman over to me, wait til I stop b.s.'ing with the guests, then ask for door assignments. I can give him some specific assignments ("the Pennsy boxcar needs to go at door 5"), some random ones ("the SP cars can go in any order at doors 1, 2, or 3") and some don't cares ("why are you bothering me about those cars? You're the railroaders; just put 'em where you think they go!") I don't know if the interruption would be annoying or fun, but I'm tempted to try it next time. Model railroaders interested in auditioning for the operating session role of "cranky plant foreman" can drop a resume and head shot in the comments.

Model railroad operations and layout design are both fun, but they're more fun when shared with others. Don't forget to have some operating sessions for the new folks in the hobby. Someday, they'll be building the cool layouts you'll want to operate on!

Life in Del Monte's Complaint Department

2012-01-31T22:18:00.000-08:00

It's outside my era, but let's move away from the canning and dried fruit departments and see what life was like in Del Monte's complaints department in the 1980's.

Even if you don't like the article, at least there's a nice photo of China Basin Building east of the San Francisco train station. I hadn't realized that building had originally been built by Del Monte for importing bananas!

"Campbell is Just a Tank Town Now"

2012-01-26T21:02:00.000-08:00

When I started designing the Vasona Branch layout, I didn't realize that my preferred era - early 1930's - was also the time that The Peninsular Railway had interurban (long-distance electric trolley service) running from San Jose to Los Gatos by way of Campbell.

The Peninsular Railway covered the west end of the Santa Clara Valley, going from Mayfield (Palo Alto) through Los Altos to Cupertino, Cupertino to San Jose along Stevens Creek Road, Cupertino to Los Gatos along Highway 9, and Los Gatos via Willow Glen and Campbell. Although the line was abandoned by the late 1930's, rails were still visible in the middle of Meridian Ave. in San Jose well into the 1960's. For some photos of the Peninsular Railway, check out the Saratoga Historical Foundation's capsule history of the Peninsular Railway in Saratoga, or History Los Gatos's collection of photos.

Within Campbell, the Peninsular line came down Bascom, turned at what's now the Pruneyard, and went down Campbell Ave. to Railway Ave., turning south just before downtown. There's one photo of the Peninsular making the turn at Railway Ave. in Campbell: The Orchard City. A 1930's era photo postcard of the Campbell Depot (available from the Pomona Library and U.C.'s California Digital Library shows the trolley power line and rails passage in front of the depot.

But as cars became popular, ridership dwindled. The streetcars ran at a loss until the Great Depression forced some hard choices. The March 8, 1932 Campbell Press leads with the headline "Street Car Service to Campbell to be Discontinued Soon", remarking that the California Railroad Commission was allowing the Peninsular to abandon the San Jose-Campbell-Los Gatos line.

The CRC's decision reasons for allowing the closure: the need to expand the State Highway (Bascom Ave.), risks of having the train line next to the roadway, and the company's loss ($1,000 a month loss on cost to operate of $3,000 a month) all encouraged the choice. The CRC also noted that several chick hatcheries and egg suppliers in the Campbell area declared they needed the interurban to run their businesses, but the CRC thought the Campbell post office would be convenient enough. The Interurban had been willing to stop and pick up freight anywhere along the line, but that wasn't enough of a reason to keep it running.

By April 1, it was over. "LAST ELECTRIC CAR SERVED CAMPBELL THURSDAY NIGHT: The last car over the Peninsular railway between San Jose and Campbell ran Thursday evening, and new buses between the two towns started Friday Morning, April 1. Peerless Stages started running buses on the same route, if not at the same frequency.

But Campbell folks didn't like *that* sort of progress. The Chamber of Commerce went on the record against the buses in August, but Peerless wasn't willing to increase service. J. B. Held, the company manager, got quoted in September wit the colorful language "We can't play Santa Claus forever… we can't run buses at hours and places when there's no traffic to warrant it." Even the bus was losing $600 a month right after taking over the service, and conflicts with Greyhound's charter for routes through Los Gatos kept Peerless from adjusting the route so it would be more profitable.

And folks moved on to cars. The car problem was so obviously bad that the January, 19, 1933 issue of the Campbell Press highlighted that a stop sign had just been placed on Campbell Ave. on Winchester Road. One wonders how they dealt with the traffic jams that must have caused.

From a model railroad point of view, I'm planning to put in the tracks and wires for the trolley in front of my Campbell depot model. Although the area around the depot had a bit of work last year when I cleared space for the Sunsweet plant and added the team track, I've been delaying detailing the scene till after the Sunsweet plant and Hyde Cannery work is done.

As long as I'm modeling before April 1, 1933, I can even put the interurban car on the tracks. The Western Railroader's special issue on the Peninsular Railway notes that the 70 series cars were used on the line up until the twenties, then moved over to the San Jose Railroad local trolleys. The CTRC's San Jose Trolley #124 resembles the 70 series well, and can be seen in San Jose's Kelley Park. The 50 series cars were often used on this run in the late 1920's and early 1930's, so putting one in front of the depot would be a nice touch. At least one car - car 52 - survived and is now at the Western Railway Museum near Rio Vista.

Of course, any interurban details I add to Campbell also need to appear in Los Gatos, for the Peninsular survived there even longer. If I model downtown Los Gatos, then I'll also need to include the Peninsular Railway tracks crossing the SP at Main Street.

The disappearance of the Peninsular Railway wasn't the last of the affronts to Campbell. By March 8, 1935, the SP was also threatening to pull back on passenger service through Campbell and cancel the two San Francisco - Santa Cruz trains that went through Campbell. The paper lists that the trains would be cancelled by March 15, but the April 7, 1935 timetable still shows the trains as passing through Campbell and ready to make a flag stop if anyone wanted. The trains were still on the schedule in 1940, so either SP didn't cancel the trains, or did bring back service. Throughout, Campbell constantly worried whether the absence of rail service would force the decline of their fair city.

[Picture postcard of the Peninsular Railway on a trestle near Saratoga is from Hooked on Los Gatos / Los Gatos Public Library.]

Dateline: San Jose

2012-01-13T22:21:00.000-08:00

And for a final post tonight, I'll throw in references to some breathless news articles I'd run across in the last couple weeks.

February 24, 1928: SP TO ASK FRANCHISE MONDAY, IS RUMOR. See also the article on the brazen Berkeley women who found San Jose a much less pleasant place to shoplift, and the conclusion of the Great Willow Glen Dog Hospital crisis (which started a few weeks earlier with the WILLOWS ACTS TO BAR DOG HOSPITAL, SICK PETS ARE HELD MENACE headline.

May 25, 1934: Conference to Speed Up R.R. Work Planned. San Jose tries to force SP to finish the bypass around San Jose so they can start building the Bayshore Highway.

February 15, 1928: The West San Jose area near the Del Monte plant had its own nickname: Pinard's Island. Although unincorporated, it was finally getting door-to-door mail service.

Also February 15, 1928: the prunes finally sold. "Time and good, careful management have brought about a great change. In a very short time the entire 1926 crop was disposed of, being exported to Germany, where it will not interfere with the sale of the 1927 crop."

Bad Years in the Valley

2012-01-13T22:03:00.000-08:00

I've heard it said that all the worst mistakes on an engineering project happen on the first day when our assumptions and premature decisions appear on the whiteboard. We start building, then six months, a year, or five years later realize that reversing that mistake on day one will be near impossible.

That certainly happens with model railroads. We'll decide on the towns we absolutely must have, or we'll choose a prototype and setting that won't carry the traffic we want, or we'll overestimate (or underestimate) the number of operators we can easily fit.

My worst mistake, it appears, is right there at the top of my blurb about my Vasona Branch layout:

It's summer 1932, and the Great Depression has taken hold in the U.S. Even with the depression, Santa Clara's crops still head for Eastern markets. Apricots fresh and dried, prunes, and cherries from the Valley of Heart's Delight all are grown here, and all get exported to the rest of the country.

If I've learned anything over the last couple years, Santa Clara's crops were not heading for Eastern markets. Hunt's Cannery closed for 1931 and 1932. Crop prices were insanely low, and crop sizes were huge. Packers and farmers tried to sell their crops ahead of the rest of the market, causing prices to plummet further. California Packing Corporation (aka Del Monte) had earnings collapse from $6 per share in 1930 to 9 cents a share in 1931, and produced its worst year ever in 1932.

My visit to the Campbell library and quick glances at the Campbell Interurban Press highlighted how much worse it was. It turns out that the Hyde Cannery, one of the two canneries I model in Campbell, shut down in 1928; although there are hints in "The Orchard City" that it opened for a couple seasons, I doubt it. The March 30, 1930 issue quotes Mr Squibb, secretary for the cannery, declaring that the cannery will be open for the 1930 canning season. Not so; the advisory board for the company overruled him, and the July 1 issue included the front page banner "Hyde's Cannery Will Not Operate This Year, Is Decree of Directors."

Having the cannery news on the front page must have been a pretty big deal in town, as the Campbell Interurban Press rarely had business articles on the front page. I suspected it would cut into the column-inches that could be devoted to the local Sea Scouts chapter. (For the record, I have nothing against the Sea Scouts, but it was just a bit tedious to read through four years of meetings, and mysterious fires in their boat-house, etc. I'd also like to know why they even had Sea Scouts when the bay was miles away!)

Hyde must not have been open in 1931 either; the October 20, 1931 issue includes an article "Local C. of C. Asks Growers to use Hyde Plant" with explicit hopes of stealing 12-15 jobs from the association's San Jose packing plant:

The Directors of the Campbell Chamber of Commerce met Monday in a special meeting to ask the California Prune and Apricot association to consider the Hyde packing plant for processing and packing prunes. Thousands of tons of prunes are temporarily stored here by the association."

Hyde stayed dark till 1937 when Sunsweet bought the plant and turned it into the "Campbell Cooperative Dryer". Hyde's days as a cannery were, as far as I can tell, over way back in '28.

[Update: I spoke too soon. The "Campbell Packing Corporation" used the facility in 1933.]

Luckily, it appears, the Ainsley Cannery (which became the Drew Cannery in 1932/1933) kept running. A June 30, 1932 article mentions that Ainsley was "running 'cots" starting the next day. Although it was "a fair crop with regard to size and better than usual quality", the cannery production was going to be considerably lighter than usual because of "depressed business conditions throughout the world." There would also be fewer jobs, with folks who'd worked for Ainsley in previous seasons having priority for the available jobs. This same season was the one that paid the Olsons fifteen dollars for their entire 1932 crop of apricots. And they were lucky; one of the advantages of growing apricots was that the farmer could sell to the canner or the dryer depending on demand. The prune farmers had no such choice, and were completely at the mercy of the dried fruit prices.

But that's not the worst of the Depression stories. The Hunt's Cannery might have been closed for the 1931 and 1932 seasons, but that didn't mean it opened again afterwards. Hunts sold the cannery in 1942 after using it only as warehouse space for the intervening years. The cannery changed hands again in 1943 to Seagram's which must have been buying it as warehouse space for the Paul Masson wine business they'd recently bought. The May, 1943 article describing the sale mentioned "the cannery has not been in operation for 10 years. Recently, 13,000 of the 70,000 square feet it comprises were leased by Louis Devich of San Jose. He stated he would can apricots there this year."

I hope Devich managed to do some canning for the 1943 season, if only to perfume Los Gatos one last time with the smell of cooking apricots.

The Hunts cannery survived, by the way. Drive by the intersection of Highway 9 and Santa Cruz Ave. just north of downtown, check out the shopping center on the northeast corner now inhabiting the buildings.

Some of the disappearance of the canning industry in Campbell and Los Gatos was obviously caused by the Great Depression. I could also imagine that some of the pressure on Hyde and Hunts was from more modern and efficient plants in San Jose. Either way, Campbell and Los Gatos would have been a lot quieter in 1932 than I'm modeling them.

So I'm at a crossroads. Do I keep my 1932 era and pretend that the canneries were running full-bore? Do I push my era back a few years into the late 1920's when the cannery traffic would have been more appropriate? Or do I rethink my choice of industries, and keep 1932, but downplay the unused canneries and instead focus on the businesses that were running?

"Experts Find Valuable Oils in 'Cot Pits"

2012-01-13T20:41:00.000-08:00

For those of you planning to model Sewall Brown's apricot pit plant, you've got another source of photos and background. Check out the July 23, 1928 issue of the San Jose News for more details about what those apricot pits were used for, and for more history of the plant. There's also a nice picture from the railroad side of the plant, and words from Mr. Brown himself.

Fun details: apricot pits turned out to contain bitter almond oil, used in Europe for cooking, perfume, and other products. The apricot kernels themselves were also useful for salads and baking. In the early days, the pits were shipped to Europe for processing. However, World War I stopped the sale of the pits, so Sunsweet started to do the processing themselves. The oils produced must have been valuable; the pits themselves would be bought for $55 per ton. Most of that pit-crushing business in the U.S. was right there on Winchester Blvd., where Sewall Brown and Co. processed a large chunk of California's 10,000 tons of apricot pits.

We'd already noted that the plant started off as Gem City Packing, then became a Sunsweet plant, but the article explains why it switched ownership. Sewall Brown got into the business when the Sunsweet co-op decided not to continue with the side business, so Sewall and his partner Harold Scott (the plant chemist) took over the business. Scott died within a few months, but Brown ran it until his death.

And if all these stories of Sewall Brown encourages you to break into the pit-cracking business, note that peach pits aren't at all profitable; the kernels are too small and it's too much work to get them out. Stick with apricots.

The News bills the article as one of a series of special articles on Valley businesses, so poke around on other Mondays in 1928 for more stories of Valley entrepreneurship back in the fruit salad days. The Faultless Bakery article was a bit dry, but the World's Largest Orchard Ladder Factory deserves its large billing. The Monday, August 20 paper doesn't appear to have a "local business of the day", but there is an article on the death of Wayne, California, a small station between San Jose and Milpitas which the SP no longer wishes to serve. "The crops shipped from there are... highly seasonal, and consist mostly of peppers, walnuts, and nursery products."

Campbell Depot News from the Campbell Interurban Press

2012-01-03T15:11:00.000-08:00

The Campbell station on my layout wasn't the first Campbell train station; that honor goes to the early South Pacific Coast station built around
1886. The South Pacific Coast - the narrow gauge line from Oakland to Santa Cruz that broke the SP's monopoly on freight in the Valley - was building a new branch line down to the mercury mines at New Almaden, and the station appeared the same time, perhaps as a handy place for a train order operator, though there must be a good reason why the station was at Campbell rather than down by where the branch peeled off around modern-day Camden Ave. [Oops, just checked the SP valuation map for Campbell, and it shows that the New Almaden branch peeled off at the far end of the Campbell siding. Timetables also show that Campbell was a train order station in the 1930's, so my guess is that the Campbell station got its location because (1) it was close enough to where the New Almaden right-of-way started that it could serve as a train order and register station for the branch, and the existence of the Campbell family ranch and upcoming subdivision made it a fine spot for the station itself.]

The tiny depot that the narrow gauge built shows up in at least one photo, but it must have been replaced within a few years by the larger stick-style depot that my model represents.

I learned a bit more about the depot last week. I hadn't yet explored the Campbell library, and found they had copies of the Campbell Interurban Press newspaper on microfilm. After the fun of searching old newspapers and back issues of Western Canner and Packer on Google News and Google Books, stepping through the rolls of microfilms had a much more twentieth-century vibe. Two hours took me through the entire 1928 to 1932 roll. In the Tuesday, July 23, 1929 issue, I found some history about the Campbell Depot and its long-time agent, Charles Berry:

Charles Berry, 43 Years as S.P. Agent, to Retire Aug. 1

Charles Berry, one of Campbell's pioneers and first and only agent for the Southern Pacific company at this point, will retire Aug. 1 after a most faithful and conscientious performance of duty for the past 45 years.

Charley came to Campbell in April, 1886 as the young S.P. agent when but 21 years of age and sold tickets from the small "6x18" depot when the Almaden line was being laid. That building is still doing duty at Campbell.

In December, 1890, he was married to Miss Gertrude A. Bell of Portsmouth, N. H., who has many times been his only assistant at the station. He purchased the first lot sold in the Campbell subdivision, that being the site of the present Kimmel house on South Central. At this time most of the valley was hay and grain fields with but little fruit. F.M. Righter shipped the first fruit from this station, some ten boxes of apricots.

As a bit of comparison, the first month's business was $5.10 for tickets sold as against an annual monthly shipment of 25,000,000 tons of gravel and fruit today.
Mr. Berry was elected to the school board at the time for and against the creation of a high school district and he, winning out, sided in the beginning of our high school. He served on the board for 13 years. He has always been a worker for…

An article the next year (August 19,1930) showed that the Campbell Chamber of Commerce found the depot I model not modern enough for Their Fair City, and managed to corner the division superintendent and lobby for a modern station:

Campbell Will Not Get a New Depot, Report

The Campbell Chamber of Commerce, in their efforts to secure a new depot for Campbell, met last week with E. R. Anthony, division superintendent of the Southern Pacific, who came to Campbell Friday evening.

Mr. Anthony was not at all in favor of spending any money for railroad improvements in Campbell, stating that the patronage of the railroad did not warrant the expenditure. He remarked on the competition of the bus and truck-freight lines.

Chamber of Commerce committeemen felt that Improved facilities would serve to increase railroad business here, but Mr. Anthony told them, bluntly, that there would have to be some guarantee of that before the company could see its way clear to spend the money necessary to make the required improvements free.

The railroad- or industry- related articles in the newspaper were few and far between, but the coverage of the local social scene and the Sea Scouts was pretty impressive. Fast-forwarding through four years of small-town newspapers is worth doing occasionally, but definitely choose a day when you can handle the tedium. Luckily, the Campbell Interurban Press was only weekly, and stepped down from eight to four pages as soon as the depression hit Campbell.

A final story from the Interurban Press highlights just what we can - and can't - trust about Sanborn maps. The Campbell map from 1930 shows that the area between the depot and Campbell Ave. was described as "Park", which immediately made me think of the tended gardens that the SP had around other depots in California. Unfortunately, it wasn't so; in March, 1930, the Interurban Press railed against the SP Park, that unkept piece of land that had become the dumping ground for old machinery and dead cars. So be careful with Sanborn maps; not only can they be occasionally inaccurate on track diagrams, but they can make a neighborhood seem much more pleasant than it was in real life!

Watch this space for more news from Campbell; I've got other tidbits worth sharing.

[Photo shamelessly stolen from www.campbellmuseums.org.]

Places I Won't Model II: San Jose Brick Company

2012-01-01T20:36:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned a while back, there were some photogenic or interesting industries along the San Jose - Santa Cruz branch that I just am unwilling to represent on the layout, either because of space constraints, lack of traffic, or just the difficulty of representing those places convincingly.

This week's pick: the San Jose Brick Company. The San Jose Brick Company was located out on Fruitdale Avenue just west of Willow Glen. On the railroad, the location was called Foyle, though there was nothing except the brick company's siding and a sea of orchards there. The 1931 track directory lists its location as "Foyle" even as it groups the spurs (holding 18 and 15 cars) with the San Jose canneries near Lincoln Ave. San Jose Brick's actual address was 1916 Fruitdale Ave, which pinpoints their access road / driveway well, but misses on the plant which was between Fruitdale and the railroad tracks. San Jose Brick Co. was a prolific brick maker; San Jose Brick shipped 23 million bricks just in 1887, and its bricks built the Spreckles sugar plant down by Salinas.

I'd never seen any pictures of the brick works themselves, though Historic Aerials shows the plant well. The 1948, 1956, and 1968 photos show the plant layout reasonably. But suburbia slowly encroaches, and by 1980, the site is all tract homes. I don't know what they had to do to get rid of the clay pit, but there's no depression there today as far as I can see, though I'll bet the local gardeners dig up an awful lot of brick fragments whenever they plant tomatoes in their backyard.

But there are other photos out there, and a California Bricks collector site includes two great photos of the plant as well as a history of the firm. San Jose Brick's wooden plant office underneath a mature blue gum eucalyptus just screams "California industry!" to me. The industry overall would be a nice one for a model railroad; the production buildings, kilns, and chimneys are photogenic, and the long spur would provide lots of cars.

There's also a bit on the business in a biography of Fred Dreischmeyer, one of the founders. Also, as keeps happening, when there's nothing else saved about the company, there's always a juicy lawsuit to keep the name visible.

Unfortunately, San Jose Brick, like Sewall Brown, has a couple fatal flaws. First, it really deserves to be out in the middle of nowhere, and doesn't deserve the space that could be used for another town. Also, like Sewall Brown, it's a big industry that really needs to spread out to be represented well. So San Jose Brick won't appear on this layout, but maybe some day I'll have more space for the San Jose branch.

Correction: Yard Limits aren't Job Limits

2011-12-19T21:36:00.000-08:00

A few days ago when looking at the instructions for tagging freight cars, I'd said:

Cars to Alameda got "61", Oakland "62", and Lawrence and Atherton "35". The tags hint at the likely ranges of the different switch jobs, and how work was partitioned; Campbell was treated differently from Auzerais St. because it would have been outside yard limits and thus served by road crews.

Er, no.

Jason Hill from the La Mesa Model Railroad Club at the San Diego Model Railroad Museum corrected me here. He says it well, so let me just quote him:

Do be aware that there's a difference between "Yard Limits" and "Switching Limits". They are sometimes the same physical locations, but not always and their root reasons for existing are TOTALLY different. "Yard Limits" are a operating rules issue (Rule 93). "Switching Limits" are a crew agreement & labor issue.
For example, Yard Limits at Bakersfield extend only to the crossovers at Magunden (3 miles of out of the 'main yard'), however the "Switching Limits" extended all the way out to the far end of Edison (about 8 miles). The result of this was that the packing sheds at Edison were worked by a yard crew, under yard labor agreements, not road crews.
As a modeler you might say 'who cares what labor agreement they were under'. The answer is that the road crews have to be provided with a "caboose" which complies with a Union-agreed on defined. A 'yard job' did not have to have a "caboose" as defined by the Unions. This is not to say that the yard crews didn't grab a caboose, or a 'crew riding car', but by the Union Agreements it didn't have to have things like a stove, ice box, bunks, etc.

So for the Vasona Branch, that means that while yard limits moved back and forth over the years, all that said was whether the crew needed permission from the dispatcher to be on those tracks (though it also hints at whether the traffic was dense enough to require more control over who was blocking the tracks.) As Jason points out, crews running to Campbell inside or outside of yard limits could have been road crews, or switcher crews from the San Jose yard. His comment about cabooses also highlights that my all-yard-limits job from San Jose Yard to Auzerais Street may or may not have needed a caboose; I'd probably have a plausible story for either choice in the absence of any photos suggesting how Things Got Done in San Jose in 1932.

However, that makes the list of car routing tags from track directory that much more meaningful, because if two cars were being tagged for the same destination, then it's pretty likely that they were being sorted together, and were going out on the same train for delivery. All cars for the Almaden Branch were tagged with one number; that's not surprising, as 1928-era timetables showed that the Almaden branch was served by a weekly scheduled train that went to Almaden via Campbell, and went back via Hillsdale and the main line. The car routing tags also group all the cars destined for Campbell to Santa Cruz together, suggesting that all those stations were served off the same train. (That was a Tuesday train in case you're planning a time-travelling road trip.) There's photos from later in the 1930's showing short, six car trains going towards Los Gatos, and the routing numbers suggest that train would also have been dropping off cars in Campbell.

None of this hints whether that train from Campbell to Santa Cruz handled only those towns; although the Lincoln Ave. canneries and fruit packing plants had their own routing tag, the answer's hazy about whether Lincoln Ave. was handled with a local switch crew from the yard, or whether the train from San Jose to Santa Cruz handled the work.

And I still don't know whether the routing tags were stapled pieces of paper like on the Santa Fe, or were just written in chalk. The photo of the Material Supply Warehouse at the station at West San Jose suggests chalk as one of the WP boxcars has a prominent "13" written in chalk across it - that's the routing tag for the WP Interchange, though it seems wrong that a car still at the industry would already be tagged. I don't see any signs of paper tags on any of the visible cars.

Anyway, that's the logic-puzzle fun of historical research when there's no crews around who can tell you how they worked. Maybe some conductor's books from the 1930's would help, or maybe there's some train orders hinting at how the freight trains on the branch operated. But til then, I'll need to do a combination of guessing at what the railroad really did, and also remember to break the historic rules when it might make operations on the layout less fun.

Note to Self: Lots More Orchards

2011-12-19T21:34:00.000-08:00

Although I've been pretty focused on the cannery and fruit packing buildings in the Santa Clara Valley for the layout, I do remember that they're just a very narrow strip of what the Valley looked like in the 1930's. Most of the Santa Clara Valley at the time was orchards and farms, with only the thinnest strips along the railroad looking so industrial.

This panorama, for instance, is a nice reminder. This is a drying yard somewhere near Campbell, stuck in a depression on the edge of the property with railroad tracks cutting across the back of the photo. There's nothing but orchards visible. At a first guess, I'd suspect those are the SP tracks in the background, and two signs might hint at that. The post to the right has an "X" - a whistle post - indicating there's a road crossing somewhere off the right of the photo. The left shows two white boards nailed to a telegraph pole with "50" written on each, probably a railroad milepost. Milepost 50 on the Los Gatos Branch was about where the tracks crossed Hamilton Ave. near the current Highway 17 in Campbell, and was about 0.7 miles northeast of the station in Campbell.

There's also the chance that the Interurban line to Los Gatos used SP mile numbers, but I'm guessing this is the SP line. A better SP historian would know if that odd shaped whistle post was an SP prototype or not.

It's nice to know what the mileposts and whistle boards looked like so I can duplicate those. It's also good to see the orchards and the shapes of the trees. Best of all are the details from the drying yard - the prune dipper at the far left for dipping the fruit in lye before laying it out for drying, the piles of fruit boxes, and all the drying flats scattered around. But I'll have to scratchbuild it; I don't think I've ever seen a prune dipper kit in HO.

Teasing Out Operating Details from Dusty Old Paper

2011-12-14T00:07:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned a while back, Ken Middlebrook was nice enough to share a 1931 track directory for the San Jose area with me. I've put a copy online along with some of the other SP paperwork I've scanned, so go check it out if you're interested in the businesses around San Jose in 1931. If you aren't familiar with the trackage and the street names, you might check out the Dome of Foam's 1947 clear standing room map as well as a 1970's era SP SPINS book to try to correlate track capacity, listing order, and physical location. Note that the back of the directory lists the street location for each numbered siding, and peeking there isn't considered cheating when trying to locate long-gone industries.

The document also has a list of SP phone numbers just in case you wanted to… er… go back in time and make crank calls to the Lamp Room. Assuming you knew what the Lamp Room was, of course. On second thought, the telephone list is probably better for just getting a sense of what offices and roles were needed by the railroad even in the then-small town of San Jose. They're all two digit with various letters and extra digits, so you'd probably have had to go through the switchboard operator anyway.

We've got Ken to thank for the 1931 track directory; he bought it and donated it to History San Jose. I've got more to say on what the track directory says about my 1932 era, but I'll leave those stories for another day. Check it out and add comments here about what interesting facts and details you find about the SP and San Jose in the directory.

I'll throw out one tidbit now, though. The fourth page includes a list of "tags" that clerks should apply to specify car routings - basically two digit numbers to indicate the destination. Cars going to the canneries near Auzerais St in Zone 8 got a tag of "8", while cars destined from Campbell to Santa Cruz got a tag of "72". Cars to Alameda got "61", Oakland "62", and Lawrence and Atherton "35". The tags hint at the likely ranges of the different switch jobs, and how work was partitioned; Campbell was treated differently from Auzerais St. because it would have been outside yard limits and thus served by road crews. (Wait a year, and Campbell would be in yard limits. Bet the zone would have extended, and the Campbell industries would have been switched by yard crews.) The separation between Alameda and Oakland probably hints at the volume of traffic as well as the potentially different routings.

Interestingly, I didn't know much about the tags till I read the 2012 edition of Great Model Railroads a couple weekends ago. Keith Jordan had an article on his Los Angeles switching layout, and he described the route cards idea Santa Fe used in later days for highlighting destinations for cars. On the Santa Fe, the tags were 3 inch square cardboard, intended to be stapled on the car side. I hadn't realized when reading that article that the SP would have used a similar scheme! Tony Thompson mentions route cards as well in one of his recent articles, but the two examples he had were from non-SP railroads. Time to keep an eye out for an SP-style numbered route card...

Again, check out the directory and share what odd or interesting facts you notice!

Ryland Street in 1976

2011-12-10T11:44:00.000-08:00

If you've got to say one thing for progress around here, it's pretty hard to find undeveloped dirt lots around San Jose these days. Case in point:
E. O. Gibson's 1976 photo of the Freedom Train in San Jose. It's billed as "sitting on display at the site of SP's former San Pedro St. [freight] station", though it might be better billed as "sitting on the site of several old packing houses on the north side of the old yard after they'd bulldozed everything interesting away." The street in the background is Ryland St., and Google Maps shows that the warehouses and little houses are still there. The dirt field is now condos, and Abinante and Nola's plant on Ryland St. was located about where that British bus is parked.

But those houses along the street have cleaned up nicely in the intervening years, at least as seen from Street View.

Just try finding that much undeveloped dirt around San Jose today. It's hard to believe that this pre-1930 photo would have been taken at the same location.

That 1976 photo, by the way, is from one of my favorite railroad sites, the Dome of Foam. Snarky humor, lots of San Jose content, and a serious dose of train order minutiae make it worth an afternoon of reading.

San Jose Wants a Union Station

2011-11-29T08:55:00.000-08:00

Like I said, the railroad- and fruit industry-related history on-line gets skewed heavily towards team bowling scores and lawsuits. Luckily, transportation law--whether Interstate Commerce Commission or California Railroad Commission--is filled with lots of fun details for the model railroader.

For example, City of San Jose vs. Southern Pacific in 1918 documents the fights going on around the time that the Western Pacific started building south. WP's proposed line looped down the east side of San Jose, across the south side well past where the canneries stopped and the open fields began, and then looped up through Willow Glen and the west side of town to a new freight depot just off the Alameda. San Jose, instead, fought for a union passenger and freight station to limit the trouble from the WP tracks.

The full article has a bunch of nice tidbits about railroad history in San Jose. Southern Pacific lost its franchise to run down the middle of Fourth Street in 1918. They'd started talking with the City in 1906 about getting the mainline tracks off of the downtown streets as early as 1906, and bought the land for the bypass through Willow Glen in 1913 for a bit less than a million dollars. It took the railroad (and the city, and the neighbors) until 1935 to actually agree on the details of the re-routing and build the tracks.

There's also all sorts of numbers and building costs, details of the routing, and hints at streets that changed names. Polhemus is what we now call Taylor Street, and Senter St. is a phantom street that's now fully occupied by the tracks approaching Diridon station. There's also reference to whether the WP's plan to build an independent and parallel track from Fremont to Milpitas was justified, or whether they could run on the SP's track to avoid the cost and duplication of effort. The California Railroad Commission is obviously worrying about whether the extra line is justified and worth building, but they're leaving that question to the "Director General of Railroads" because the case is taking place during the World War I government control of the U.S. railroads.

It's also interesting to see that the California Railroad Commission made sure to accent the e in San Jose in every use. I don't know if they did that because of the legal name of My Fair City, or if it's an affection because of the popularity of the Missions and Spanish/Mexican California in those days, but it's an amusing detail that must have made the typesetter curse.

What's With Those Crazy Railroad Historians?

2011-11-24T14:05:00.000-08:00

I suspect there's at least some readers out there who see the recent chain of articles on the history of the apricot and prune industry, and just don't get it. "Why bother to look at a bunch of dusty old books" (or, for that matter, dusty old PDFs.) "It's not helping you run trains."

Well, maybe... but where else am I going to find that perfect period Sunsweet logo for the side of Sunsweet Plant #1? The plant on Lincoln Ave. in San Jose had one painted prominently.

Luckily, a Sunsweet promotional book from the 1920's was kindly scanned in by the Library of Congress and made available to the public. With a few minutes of capturing the image from the PDF version of the book, I've got a logo, ready for trimming and photoshopping to turn it into a suitable decal.

The book also has a nice picture of the Hyde drying yard, looking north towards downtown Campbell. The original halftone image is rough, so it's hard to make out details. There's also some nice shots of prune grading machinery if you're looking to superdetail your dryer or packer scene. There's also a sample "Inspection Certificate" showing the documentation provided to a buyer. Note that the packer is the mythical A. & C. Ham I've seen mentioned, and the boxcar bound for Chicago had 1,500 twenty-five pounds boxes of prunes for a total of 37,500 pounds of prunes. We also see that the sale was in January of 1918, reminding us that the packers stored the fruit til the sales came in.

We also see that Iron Chef didn't originate in Japan, but in 1920's San Francisco. A "Prune and Apricot Battle" was waged by Victor Hirtzler, "maitre de cuisine of the Hotel St. Francis, San Francisco", who prepared a dinner using Sunsweet's apricots and prunes:

Prunes en Supreme
Chicken Soup
Salted Almonds
Filet of Sole with Sunsweet Prunes
Stuffed Squab Chicken with Sunsweet Apricots
Peas etudes, Potato Chateau
Prune and Apricot Salad
Pudding Glace Prune et Apricot
Assorted Cakes
Demi Tasse
Prune and Apricot Punch, Prune Bread, Apricot Rolls

One wonders how Iron Chef Morimoto would have responded to challenger Hirtzler.

Sunsweet declares that recipes will be furnished on request; I'm tempted to call them up and see if they're still honoring that offer.

I found the book "A Fact and Picture Story of the Prune and Apricot Industry" when doing a search on Amazon for Sunsweet-related books; the seller mentioned their $12 book was "a scan of a period document", and the lack of any photos of the book made me very suspicious that they, like some of the eBay photo sellers, were just doing cheap prints of material already available out on the Internet. If you see interesting historic documents out on eBay or Amazon, always do a quick search to see if they're available elsewhere for free.

Collecting Packing Houses

2011-11-21T22:57:00.000-08:00

And for those of you who wonder how I'm finding and remembering all these details about the different packing houses of San Jose, check out my list of all the fruit-related businesses in San Jose and nearby. I've been keeping up this document for the last several months. I've been most interested in keeping track of locations - which businesses were at which locations (and thus where they were on the railroad), but it's been interesting to see just how incestuous the various businesses were as salesmen jumped off to form their own packing houses, packers occupied the spaces of defunct businesses, and 1940's and 1950's mergers combined the packing houses like playing cards.

If I was more of a game player, I'd be so tempted to make a collectible card game based on the dried fruit industry. If you've got a salesman and contract card, you trump the grower, unless the grower has a "bad weather - small harvest" card. Packers generally win against the growers unless they all team up, or someone has a "form fruit pool" or "co-operative!" card. And woe be on everyone if someone plays the "speculators accidentally short the market" card and everyone from a broker card has to rush to buy as many prunes as possible.

Gem City Packing becomes Sunsweet Becomes Sewall Brown

2011-11-21T22:45:00.000-08:00

The research for the Sunsweet #1 plant hinted at a pair of packing houses in Los Gatos: Curtis Packing and Gem City Packing. I didn't know anything about either, but I've been trying to fill in the holes in my fruit business knowledge in hopes of finding railroad-related details. Some judicious Google searches turned up more on Gem City.

Gem City Packing (whose name refers to an old nickname of Los Gatos) existed from before through 1918. There's not much about it; in the usual fashion, the few tidbits we get are from the crime pages. The packing house was built in 1902, according to a newspaper report on the fire that destroyed it. The plant's location can be guessed based on California Railroad Commission case debating whether San Jose Water Company or the Los Gatos Municipal Water should be building a half-mile line down the County Road (Winchester Ave.) to serve the plant.

Nice location, that - it's next to the main road, it's got a seven car siding on the Vasona branch (according to a 1931 SP industry list), and there's plenty of orchards nearby.

But when Sunsweet starts building up the core set of packing houses to serve as their initial plants, Gem City joins up:

The Prune and Apricot Growers Association will convert one of its packing house plants into an institution for cracking apricot pits and nothing else. The pits from other packing plants will be collected and shipped to the Gem City packing house at Vasona.

General Manager Mr Willes has numbered the packing houses as follows, each plant being called a “Sunsweet Plant”:

Campbell Farmers’ Union, Campbell, 1; Morgan Hill Farmers Union, Morgan Hill, 2; Gilroy Farmers’ Union, Gilroy, 3; O. A. Harlan & Co., San Jose, 4; Hemet Apricot Growers Association, Hemet,5; G. N. Herbert, San Jose, 6; Gem City Packing Company, Vasona, Campbell, 7; O. A. HArlan & Co., Mountain View, 8; Hollister Packing Company, Hollister, 9; G. Frank Fruit Company, San Jose, 10; A & C Ham Company, San Jose, 11; F. H. Holmes, San Jose, 12.

So in 1918, Gem City gets swallowed up by Sunsweet, the old name plate gets taken off over the door, and the employees get to work breaking large apricot pits into small apricot pits. Sewall Brown rolls into town with his Stanford diploma around 1921, and takes over as superintendent of the plant, and they keep breaking large apricot pits into smaller ones. By 1934, Sewall Brown buys the plant off Sunsweet. He christens the business Sewall Brown & Co and runs it for another twenty years until all four million pounds of apricot kernels on-site catches fire and destroys the plant in 1955.

The Los Gatos Times - Saratoga Observer reporter knew how to turn a phrase when describing the fire:

The three-story, red-painted main plant literally burst at the seams as the wooden siding gave way under the flames and apricot pits stacked 50-feet high in burlap sacks steamed in huge mounds from cracks and corners of the walls.

The processing shed, a well-known landmark, dates back to 1902 when the original building was constructed by the late Sewall Brown, who died three years ago...

I'll trust the "Three story, red painted main building" quote, and the "bags of apricot pits fifty feet high" gives an idea of what sort of volume of apricot pits you need to get four million pounds. We do know Sewall Brown didn't build it, but I'll be generous and let the inaccuracy slide.

And (long) after the fire, Netflix put their offices on the site, and if you take a good whiff of your Netflix envelope, you might just smell the faint tang of burned apricot pits left over from the fire.

There's at least three packing houses listed there I'm clueless about: A & C Ham, G. Frank, and F & H Holmes. Those of you getting tired of packing house talk might check out cute pictures of cats for a little while...

Sunsweet Plant #1: Progress

2011-11-21T00:32:00.000-08:00

Back in August, I mentioned how the SP valuation maps had convinced me I needed to redo the tracks in Campbell. I finally decided to fix two major flaws: to add a team track and move the Hyde Cannery down a foot so I'd have room for Sunsweet (California Prune and Apricot Growers) Plant #1.

The track changes were done within a couple weeks, but the Sunsweet packing house has been lingering for a few weeks. Here's some photos to show my progress.

But first, let's check out the prototype building!

Sunsweet Plant #1 started out as the Campbell Farmers Union Packing company. Farmers Union was a co-operative - a packing house owned by the local growers. The growers would promise to send their crops to the co-op, and the co-op would use its larger volume to better deal with the East Coast brokers. Co-ops were popular because the growers never trusted many of the independent packers, and the packers played enough shady games to deserve their reputation. The previous co-operative in town, the Campbell Fruit Growers Union, had started in 1892 and had initially done well, but slowly started losing the support of growers and eventually sold out to George Hyde in 1913. Farmers Union must have done okay; they built their own modern packing house along the railroad tracks in 1912, just south of Campbell Ave, just north of the separate Hyde Cannery.

(If I was modeling a few years later than my chosen 1932, I wouldn't need separate buildings for Hyde and Sunsweet; Hyde sold out to Sunsweet in 1937, and the Hyde Cannery became the Campbell Cooperative Dryer. That site was famous for a forty-eight tunnel dehydrator that could process 480 tons of fruit a day.)

By 1917, after several co-operative collapses, speculator binges, and arguing, the rest of the prune and apricot growers were thinking that joining a single, large co-op might help them. Those growers, as well as forty five packing houses in California, signed up to join this single, new co-operative - the California Prune and Apricot Growers. The list of initial packers included all the big names I've been seeing in my research: A & C Ham, George Herbert, J.W. Chilton, O. A. Harlan, Warren Dried Fruit, Pacific Fruit Products, Inderrieden (all in San Jose), George Hyde and Farmers Union in Campbell, Gem City Packing Company and Curtis Fruit Company in Los Gatos, and a scattering of other packing houses from Red Bluff to Santa Paula. The co-op had the production and storage capacity, and had enough of the market to get decent prices for their crops. The Campbell plant, for some reason, got labeled Plant #1.

And Sunsweet did well - well enough that it still exists, and still controls two-thirds of the world's prune supply. It had its drama - Couchman's The Sunsweet Story is filled with the troubles facing the industry and the co-operative. Reading it's a bit like reading the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, with all sorts of names, ancient battles, grand monuments (like Plant #7 on the south side of San Jose) and cunning ploys, but in between, it's scattered with enough facts to help me with my modeling.

Plant #1, however, only did well as long as there was fruit in the area to dry and pack.As suburbs ate the remaining orchards, Sunsweet closed the Campbell plant in 1971. The building was converted to office space, and still sits next to the railroad tracks that processed just south of Campbell Ave.

Regular readers can guess at what the plant looked like. The fruit was driven in by truck from the drying yard, and a scale at the plant weighed the incoming fruit. It would have been hauled upstairs to the top floor for grading, and dumped into bins by size. When the fruit was ready for sale (perhaps months later), it would be taken out of the bins by wheelbarrow, washed and hydrated, inspected, and boxed for sale. The John C. Gordon photos shows what the inside of the Campbell facility probably looked like with modern equipment and hordes of men and women packing the Sunsweet prunes into attractive Sunsweet boxes. A 20,000 fuel oil tank in the ground ran the boiler for the steam and hot water.

It must not have been a fun place if you were a truck driver. The plant is squashed tight against the Campbell Ave. businesses on the north, and has a remarkably small lot on the south end which must have been a pain for maneuvering trucks. Some photos from the 1960's hint show forklifts and crates littering Central Ave.

Finally, here's my model as it currently exists. I've placed the windows on the front walls based on the 1915-era photos of the plant because I haven't found any good photos from later times. Construction is straightforward - 1/16" styrene sheet with 1/2" strip styrene to fight warping, and Campbell corrugated siding on all the walls. The loading docks are scratchbuilt from strip and sheet styrene. As usual, I'm scratchbuilding my own freight doors from scribed sheet and tiny (1x3) strip styrene for the various bracing.

Unfortunately, it's a cramped space, so I'm not planning on building any of the building extensions seen on the Campbell map, and I'll hold off on any of the accessory buildings until I've figured out what will fit in the allotted space.

Sunsweet Plant #1 has been a bit going slow; first, I had problems with warping because of the solvent in the contact cement, then held off on building the platforms until I restocked my double stick tape from the local art supply store. I'll need to work to get the freight doors and loading docks painted before I can start assembling the model. It's amazing how those little hiccups can slow down a model.

Next step: painting, assembling, and detailing.

"Sixty Millions of Prunes Still on the Floors of Warehouses"

2011-11-19T17:04:00.000-08:00

So it wasn't just the Great Depression that was making life difficult for prune growers; the problems mentioned last time in 1931-1932 were problems for the industry even back in 1927, as the San Jose News commented on at length on Thursday, July 21, 1927.

In a front page editorial on July 21, 1927, the San Jose News highlighted the awful figures: Four hundred million pounds of prunes on California trees for the upcoming season. Sixty million pounds of prunes still on the floors of the warehouses. Only two hundred and sixty million pounds of prunes sold the previous years.

"It can be seen by anyone that if 460,000,000 pounds of prunes are dumped on a market which is capable of absorbing only about half that amount, ruinous prices are going to be the result. There is no element of chance, of luck. It is dead certainty."

Their plan: get all the growers and packers together into a single organization that could control most of the acreage. The new California Prune Producers concept had the approval of ninety-five percent of the packers, and half of the growers (all already members of Sunsweet). But that still meant that half the growers weren't ready to sign a contract with the new organization.

So, in late July, meetings and personal pleadings took over. Standard Oil lent ten crack salesmen to the Prune Producers for the remainder of the drive for contracts on prune acreage. The president of the Lawrence Terminal Co. of Oakland was sending staff to help with the drive. Santa Rosa's business men were pleading with the local growers.

In San Jose, mass-meetings were planned that evening at the Union Grammar School, Los Gatos Town Hall, and Evergreen grammar school. Contracts were being offered at all the packing houses:

California Packing Corporation at San Fernando and Bush
Rosenberg Brothers on Railroad Ave. in Santa Clara
Richmond Chase at 64 West Santa Clara Street in San Jose
Guggenheim & Co at Julian and Pleasant St.
Interrieden Company at 200 Ryland St.
O. A. Harlan & Co. at Fourth and Margaret
Libby McNeil and Libby at Fourth and Lewis
Pacific Coast Canners at Third and Keyes

The San Jose News closed with a quote from the manager of Hart's Department Store: "There is a grave necessity that something be done to save the prune industry, and that is something before us in this co-operative campaign. It is the most important task before San Jose now."

And if they thought the situation in 1927 was bad, it'll be much worse in just four years.

Also in the news: $80,000 of opium seized from a steamship docking at San Francisco. Aimee Semple McPherson rushes home to Los Angeles because of an "odd shortage of funds" at Angelus Temple, and local blacksmith Russell P. Kenyon dies the day before he inherits a half million dollars. Meanwhile, Union Furniture Co at 353 South First Street offers an entire bedroom set for $49.75, or $1.00 a week, as well as "smart new lamps" and a "General Electric Midget Radio."

The Dark Story of Higgins-Hyde Packing

2011-11-14T23:06:00.000-08:00

Oh, that poor little packing house across the tracks from the Del Monte Cannery. When I first built my layout, I saw that the building had been Pacific Fruit Products in 1915, and Abinante and Nola in 1950, so I declared my model would be Abinante and Nola because I liked the name better.

Then I discovered an old city directory, and found that J.S. Roberts occupied that big, rambling barn, at least between 1936 and 1949.

Then I found that photo of the J.S. Roberts plant, and it didn't look anything like my building.

Good thing I didn't start rebuilding my packing house model… or lettering a new model.

Ken Middlebrook, another local railfan, just sent along a 1931-era Southern Pacific list of sidings in the San Jose area, both with the name of the industry at each siding, its length, and the capacity of the plant or warehouse. It gives me a whole bunch of new data points about the businesses around Santa Clara County. More importantly, it tells me about the local fruit industry just as the Great Depression's about to completely shake up the industry. Up on Ryland St., the Chicago grocer J.B. Inderridden is still around, and Winchester Dried Fruit hasn't yet occupied the space.

When I got Ken's e-mail, I downloaded his scan of the document on my phone and went straight for the area around the Del Monte Cannery. And J.S. Roberts isn't there - in 1931, it looks like the building was occupied by Higgins-Hyde Packing, owners of the Sun-Glo brand.

There's not a lot about them out on the Internet. A couple of their prune crates are for sale on Ebay. There's even one Higgins-Hyde crate being used as a ballot box in Vermont, and hopefully is encouraging regular and productive voting.

But there's one place you'll find lots of mention of Higgins-Hyde Packing, and that's on the front pages of the San Jose News between mid-July and mid-August of 1932. That's one of the oddities of the Internet; the bits of history we discover are biased towards the news sources that have survived. For a typical fruit business, all I ever find are how their bowling team did (Abinante and Nola: very well!), and the court cases they got caught in (Winchester Dried Fruit blending offgrade fruit into their boxes in 1936: bad!).

But Higgins-Hyde - well, that's a bit special, so let's go through the story.

The depression hits the Santa Clara Valley in 1930 and 1931. The American economy is in horrible shape. Crops are huge. Packers are trying to sell dried fruit as soon as it comes in so they can get cash for the crop before prices drop further… and that makes prices drop even faster. Attempts by Sunsweet (California Prune and Apricot Growers) to control tonnage going into the market and increase marketing to consumers languishes over the winter of 1931-1932 and prices plummet. Finally, the independent growers and Sunsweet come to an agreement: together, they'll work to control 85% of the prune production, and they'll form a "United Prune Growers of California" stabilization pool in order to (1) regulate the amount of prunes going into the market, stabilize values, establish standard grades for fruit, and increase consumer demand. Most are for this because of the horrible prices of the last couple years. The San Jose Chamber of Commerce jumps in to help with management support, all the major growers and packers volunteer to be involved. Only four packers decide not to join the Prune Pool.

And in mid-July, it turns out one packer - Higgins-Hyde - has been silently soliciting growers to sign its contract and sell outside the program. Worse, it appears Higgins-Hyde was misrepresenting their position:

"With Regard to the Higgins-Hyde Pool, Mr. Boland reported he found definite misrepresentations had been made to growers, among them that the pool would enter the United Prune Growers; that the growers joining the pool would be exempt from the industry prune advertising charge; that united prune pool members could not hope to get all their money prior to from ten months to two years after delivery, while Higgins-Hyde members would receive 90 per cent of their money before January 1 of the following year and the balance not later than the April or May following. (San Jose News, July 28, 1932)

Oops.

A.A. Higgins didn't think his pool was a problem; he'd been running a prune pool for the last four years, but probably spreading less fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the competition in previous years. But the Prune Pool didn't appreciate his attempts to break the pool and send prices lower, so they argue against the remaining wildcat packers and demand an investigation of Higgins-Hyde claim.

And they win, and the world starts believing the California Prune Pool will cause prices to go up. By August 13, the price of prunes in London (yes, San Jose was affecting London!) went up 1/2 cent per pound (on a crop selling for 2-3 cents a pound) on the assumption that the Prune Pool would go through, and Fred Lester and Otto Van Dorsten walked away from their contracts with Higgins-Hyde. By August 23, Higgins-Hyde explicitly released the others who had signed contracts with them. With that, the Prune Pool controlled 160,000 tons of California prunes, with all the major packers - California Packing Corporation, Guggenhime, Libby, Richmond-Chase, Roseberg Brothers, Anchorage Farms, Hamlin Packing, Herbert Packing, Inderrieden, Napa Dried Fruit, Warren Dried Fruit, and Harter Packing… but no Higgins-Hyde.

The Prune Pool slowly foundered over the next couple years. They suffered from off-grade prunes getting sold on the market and dropping prices further. They argued with New Deal architects about whether advertising would help, or whether it would just steal demand from some other industry. Mostly, though, they suffered from supplies that exceeded demand so significantly that there was little chance that growers could make a profit. The 1935 crop was 256,000 tons. The Great Depression was just too big for the world to buy all those prunes.

And Higgins-Hyde disappears from the news. Maybe they were doing the pool in a last-ditch effort to make their own mortgage payments. Maybe they thought they could make more by selling ahead of the Prune Pool, and pissed off the rest of the industry and the Valley. Maybe they just got doomed by the lack of any market to sell what prunes they could get. For whatever reason, there's not a trace of A. A. Higgins or Higgins-Hyde in the 1936 San Jose city directory.

So for my model railroad set in Spring, 1932, Higgins-Hyde Packing ought to be in that building, and if I'm particularly snarky I'll make sure to include a model of the salesman who thought he could sneak one past the Prune Pool by signing some farmers with a slight bit of misinformation...

(If you're interested in the gory details of prune prices, growers associations, and the effect of the Great Depression in the Santa Clara Valley, search for a copy of "The Sunsweet Story" by Couchman which provides more dtails than you'd ever want.)

And you thought nit-picking model railroaders were bad!

2011-11-12T16:51:00.001-08:00

Model railroaders tend to be an opinionated lot, and it's always interesting when an expert on a particular area sees a model and highlights the incorrect detail:

* Rio Grande didn't use that logo until 1945 - I thought your layout was set in the 1930's?!
* The barbed wire is on the wrong side of the posts - it should be on the cow side!
* Why didn't you update all the reweigh stencils to match your target year?

Turns out that Los Angeles historians can be just as picky, as the gang writing a blog about Los Angeles in the 1940's show in their critique of the LA Noire video game. Personally, I'm impressed the video game designers did as well as they did, even if they had 1959-era lettering on a 1947-era building:

We're careening up Fig, and in the distance, the Architects Building, but see those letters atop? They read "Douglas Oil" and weren't placed there until after Douglas purchased the building in 1959. Guess you should probably be more worried about the big scary car crashing into you, and all the flying sparks, but, well, we each have our own issues.

They're still nice people over there, and I've found their On Bunker Hill website has some nice photos and stories of Los Angeles's Bunker Hill neighborhood before it got razed for redevelopment in the late 1950's and early 1960's. If you're a fan of film noir movies filmed in the area, there's still some great articles here.

And Down At Fifth and Martha...

2011-11-07T22:02:00.000-08:00

I may seem completely biased towards the canneries and packing houses along the Espee's Los Gatos Branch, but that doesn't mean I'm bigoted towards other parts of San Jose. Some of my favorite canneries, in fact, are in other parts of San Jose.

Take, for example, the Barron-Gray Packing Co. located just south of downtown San Jose at Fifth and Martha. It started out as the J. F. Pyle Cannery, located on Mr. Pyle's ranch out in Berryessa at King and Mabury, but moved along side the old SP mainline down Fourth Street in 1907. Standing on its loading dock, you could have watched all the name trains - the Lark, the Daylight, the Sunset Limited, the... uh... Coast Mail - gathering up speed. They'd just finished a sedate trip down the middle of Fourth Street through the center of San Jose, and the enginemen were probably fed up with vegetable trucks and crazed pedestrians, and just waiting for the chance to let the engine "show what she can do."

By 1922, 300 people worked there during the season, and Western Canner and Packer includes a blurb that same year describing their new building at Fourth and Margaret (now under I-280), needed thanks to a "large tomato pack" the previous year. Ernest Barron and Herbert Gray bought it that year or the next, depending on the source. Like the Internet companies today, Barron was an outsider who worked his way up, and decided it was time for him to hit the big time. He'd come over from England on the Lusitania in 1915, and after several years at the Ainsley Cannery, decided Campbell wasn't big enough for him, so he went off to do his own startup.

Barron-Gray also changed the world in their own way by bringing us fruit cocktail. (Heck, we saw them making that very fruit cocktail at movie night a couple weeks ago!) However, by adding pineapple chunks to that mix, they sowed the seeds of their own destruction.

This photo, from the latest Willow Glen Resident paper, shows the Pyle Cannery around 1915-1920. It doesn't capture my image of a top-brand company; the corrugated steel for the garages and wooden water towers seem a bit functional, even for the 'teens, but it does hint at some very photogenic projects for the layout.

So now dash forward twenty years to May 1948. After the Second World War, "merger" seemed to be the key word as smaller canneries and packing houses got bought by the larger operators, and Barron-Gray gets an offer they can't refuse from the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, a.k.a. Dole. Dole's Pine Parade newsletter (placed online by the Lanai Culture Heritage Center) gives news of the buyout, but more importantly shows this great aerial photo showing the sheer size of the Barron-Gray plant and the American Can Company's plant nestled in the center.

And this is what industry should be. American Can stretches for an entire city block down the former SP mainline in the center of the picture. They need a separate yard just for fruit receiving and for storing the boxes for fruit. There's six buildings dedicated to warehouse space, one just for the pears, and four probably devoted to storing the year's canned crop and to dribble out a bit at a time to the grocers - the A&P, Safeway, Piggly Wiggly, the mythical corner store. Better, it wasn't just a string of modern buildings, but a hodge-podge of modern concrete buildings, modernist office buildings, and old brick warehouses from the turn of the century. (Obligatory model railroad reference: Silicon Valley Lines is in the building between warehouse 9 and warehouse 11, which I'd strongly suspect was part of the Barron-Gray plant.)

And if you're a model railroader, this ought to tell you to think big. The canneries needed huge amounts of space and and huge amounts of labor - room for marshalling the trucks of fruit, all arriving during the harvest rush. (Remember the comments from Vincent Nola about how his dad liked the San Carlos St. plant because it was easy for the truckers to bring in the dried fruit?) Room for the can company, because no one wants to ship the fragile, light, cheap cans all over, and the can company needs to work all year to have enough stock for the month or two of the canning season. Room for processing the fruit - the processing lines, the hundreds of women cutting fruit, the cooking rooms, and the boxes and packaging. And finally room for the finished goods, the cans of pears that were going to sit for months until the broker found a buyer for the fruit. And this is just one of the canneries that would have been running full-tilt back in the Santa Clara Valley's heyday as a fruit and vegetable processing center - the same chaos would have been happening around Contadina, Del Monte, Pratt-Low, or Libby's. It makes Internet startups seem sedate.

So don't put a single plastic building next to a siding on your layout and call it a cannery. Put ten.

SwitchList: Keep Those Sidings Open!

2011-11-05T10:37:00.000-07:00

If there's one problem all small layouts have, it's space. There's never enough yard tracks for the incoming freight cars, and the sidings never are long enough to hold the arriving cars.

The new version of SwitchList keeps your sidings from overflowing. SwitchList 0.9.0 now lets you name the length of each siding. If SwitchList notes that an arriving car will cause the siding to overflow, it'll hold that car at its current location till space opens up.

Don't worry, you don't have to go and measure all your sidings right now. Like SwitchList's door spotting location feature, you can turn the siding length checks on and off. SwitchList also doesn't demand you fill in every single detail about your layout. You can fill in the lengths of only the troublesome or short sidings, and then add information for the rest of your layout when you've got time. SwitchList works just fine with partial information.

Also in SwitchList 0.9.0: The new version also allows you to design your own report styles, just as you can design your own switchlists. If your railroad has a custom or recognizable style of paperwork for yard crews, you can now provide a template for SwitchList that matches that look, and SwitchList will print that report exactly the way you want. You can do this for the common report styles. The industry reports that show locations of cars grouped by siding, car reports that list cars in reporting mark order, and yard reports that show the train for each outgoing car all can be customized.

Check out the example custom reports in the Handwritten, Southern Pacific Narrow, and Line Printer reports inside SwitchList. Check out the documentation on how to write your own switchlist and report styles at the SwitchList development site, and consider sharing your favorite switchlist style with the rest of the SwitchList user community.

Finally, our next stop is SwitchList 1.0! What features do you think SwitchList needs before it can be declared "complete"? Add your suggestions on SwitchList's bug list, and join the SwitchList mailing list and discuss your ideas, and consider making your own changes to SwitchList!

[Photo: Snoboy transload facility on Seth Neumann's Niles Canyon layout.]

Movie Night 2: Watching Fruit Cocktail Get Made

2011-10-27T08:41:00.000-07:00

Just as the Sunsweet video a couple months ago showed us what happened at a fruit dryer and packing house, this video from Dole shows what happens in a cannery. Dole's cannery in San Jose was at Fifth and Martha, and had been (up until 1948) the Barron-Gray Packing Co. cannery. Some say fruit cocktail was invented there, and the video shows how to make several million cans of fruit cocktail in a season.

Dole closed the cannery in the 1970's; the Dole headquarters building on East Virginia St. still stands as an example of modernist architecture in San Jose.

WP and SP: Like Cats and Dogs, or Best Friends Forever?

2011-10-19T23:35:00.000-07:00

After the discussion a while back about the 'Friendly' Southern Pacific and Western Pacific's fight over Valley Wholesale Grocery's spur in Sacramento back in 1935, I'd have assumed that the two railroads would never get along, and certainly wouldn't encourage customers on their line to use the competitor even a bit.

Then we get photos like this one, again from the John C. Gordon collection at San Jose State. Go off and look at the full photo for a moment, then come back here; it's worth examining in detail.

Now, the photo's pretty innocuous - brick warehouse, lots of Western Pacific cars, non-specific industry name, some late 1920's color (like billboards and probably a Model A). My first guess would be that it's some random industry on the WP in San Jose, but a quick glance through Track and Time's track diagrams don't hint at any likely sites around San Jose... nor in Oakland.

But let's stare at that photo a little closer. The far right shows a long straightaway, and a masonry building off in the distance (along with a flat car full of lumber or telephone poles.) The isolated passenger cars suggest we're near a station, but the only passenger station on the WP would be over on the east side of San Jose near Santa Clara Ave. and 26th Street, and there's no signs of any industries over there. That building looks a bit like the PG&E generating plant just off Montgomery Street in San Jose, next to the Santa Cruz branch (and eventually just south of Diridon Station), but... nah, can't be - why would WP boxcars be there?

The warehouse itself gives us no clues, so let's look on the left side of the photo. Hmmm... gas holder - there were the ones at the current site of the HP Pavilion, but unless this warehouse sat on the eventual location of Plant 51, there's no way a railroad track would be in line with the gas holder. There's a building in front: "Henry Cowell B... and Cement". A quick check of an old city directory shows Cowell Cement's retail operation was at 583 West Santa Clara Street... right where HP Pavilion and the Shark Tank is now. Zoom in on the building, and see the number "591" suggesting that we've got the address right.

And if we look carefully to the extreme left, we see a *tiny* bit of wood trim that might match the original South Pacific Coast's West San Jose station. In fact, photos of that station in "South Pacific Coast: A Centennial" show the billboards behind the station.

So what we really have here is a photo of a warehouse along the former Cahill Street just south of the Alameda / Santa Clara Street and north of San Fernando Street. These warehouses would be disappearing in a few years, torn down so Diridon Station can be built on this exact location. If I could read that truck license plate towards the right of the photo, I might even be able to guess at the year of the photo, or perhaps the "Kopp's Transfer" gives another detail.

The warehouses appear on a 1915 Sanborn map, which correctly notes that the two side structures are 25 feet high, but the central warehouse section is 31 feet high. Sanborn also labels all as owned by the SP at the time. The Sanborn maps completely ignore the spur track in front of the warehouses, though. Behind the photographer would be the bulk of California Packing Corporation's Plant 51.

I still have no clue why Material Supply Corp. is receiving so many WP cars. Maybe the SP was remarkably friendly during the 1920's about spotting cars for the WP. Maybe those ICC reciprocal switching rules were iron-clad, even when the cars needed to be delivered to an SP-owned building. Or maybe Material Supply was getting most of its incoming supplies from the WP...

But the photo does highlight what the West San Jose area looked like before Diridon Station went in, and it almost convinces me to backdate my layout a couple years. I've modeled this area as if the construction and track raising for Diridon Station had started in 1932 or 1933, but the area for these warehouses is just an underused siding and a temporary station in a passenger car up on blocks. If I was willing to get rid of the Alameda underpass and the slightly raised ground level, I could get a lot of traffic from that warehouse... and I'd also get the advantage of the insane traffic levels that would be prototypical in the late 1920s.

Got ideas why there's so many WP boxcars spotted here, see something interesting in the picture, or got an opinion on whether I should move my layout back a few years? Add a comment and throw in your two cents!