"The San Jose Line Change"

EO, 4-30-24

Staff prides itself in getting its facts straight (when it matters), so it was quite disconcerting to us when Wx4 friend Jeff Asay - an authority on all things Western Pacific - good naturedly ribbed us last Fall about our coverage of two interlocking towers that formerly guarded WP's traverse of SP main lines in San Jose, to whit: "I was shocked, I tell you, shocked, to see some commentary about the Western Pacific Valbrick and West San Jose Towers that was, to put it mildly, completely without factual basis. How, I asked myself, could Staff allow this to happen?"

Staff admits that we are are somewhat stumped ourselves, although we wish to point out that we DID spell the towers' names correctly. Perhaps we should not have composed the piece while still suffering of the dire gastrointestinal effects of tainted talapia served up at Wx4's 21st Anniversary Fish Fry and Sock Hop. At any rate, our transgressions were bad. Very Bad.

By way of a curative, we have foresworn talapia and have otherwise purloined intelligence from Jeff's authoritative WP books, The Iron Feather and Track and Time, for our own narrow purposes, as seen below..

Should anyone find fault in our revised presentation, blame Jeff.

Incidentally, though out of print, we note that brand new copies of The Iron Feather are still available at Arizona Hobbies at a very attractive price. New and used copies of Track and Time are available elsewhere, but as a WP cult classic, it is rather pricey.

Revised 4-30-24:

"The San Jose Line Change"

The photo and map at below right appear in in J.R. Signor's Fall, 2023 Southern Pacific Historical & Technical Society Trainline article, "The San Jose Line Change".
It is a great read that serves as a nice overview and teaser for a book-length treatment currently being composed by well known San Jose historian Ken Middlebrook.
Below are bonus items contributed by Wx4 Staff, Shasta Division Archives and Jeff Asay.

San Jose's "Other" Interlocking Towers

Basset St., a.k.a. Market St., a.a.k.a. San Pedro St.
(take your pick) Station

Santa Clara Valley had six interlocking towers over the years. First, there were the well known and documented ones at College Park and Santa Clara, with the latter being preceeded by one located at the SPC crossing timetable east of the SP depot depot. At the time of the Forth Street line change on January 31, 1935, there were three additional towers: San Jose Tower immediately east of the Basset St. station; Western Pacific's West San Jose Tower which protected its crossing of SP's Santa Cruz main line; and Valbrick. which stood about a mile south of downtown.

Of the these three towers, only San Jose Tower (see photo at right) was still in service when Bassett Street closed. SP's Coast Division employee timetable #143 of 2-16-36 still listed it as active, but it was gone from #145 of 4-17-38. Lacking acces to #144, we presume it remained only as long as it was needed to facilitate scrapping of the Fourth Street line.

Both WP towers were already out of service when SP's new main track opened on 12-31-35. According to Jeff Asay's book, The Iron Feather, Valbrick Tower opened in 1922 and was torn down in 1937. It was replaced by a trainman actuated interlocking device in 1933, which itself was taken out of service before the issuance of aforementioned SP timetable #143, most likely on changeover day, January 31. Valbrick continued to serve as an interchange between the two railroads (see SP 1972 SPINS book). Sister West San Jose Tower, a like mechanical interlocking opened and closed at the same times as Valbrick, was also replaced with a trainman operated manual affair which survived until 1961 or 1962, when it was replaced by stop boards.

note: Many period SP and WP timetables are contained in Wx4's Historic Maps & Timetables pages.

click on the images to enlarge

above: Jeff Asay kindly forwarded these WP company images of its two towers as seen in The Iron Feather. At left is Valbrick Tower, looking eastward into wide open spaces along WP's line. In less than two decades from this circa 1925 photo, the area would become a jumble of warehouses and canneries. At right, the view looks westward up WP's single track in the direction of its (unseen) non-interlocked Peninsular Railway interurban crossing and finally, its West San Jose terminous fronting on The Alameda..

West San Jose Tower in situ

Given that they only existed for about 15 years and prior to the proliferation of railfan photographers, it is understandable that photos of WP's two San Jose towers are rare. Photos of both appear in The Iron Rooster, and here is another one that we were thrilled to discover at the Shasta Division Archives,...**

click on the image to enlarge

The photo looks up the Santa Cruz main line (now Vasona Branch) towards downtown from the corner of Race Street and Morepark Avenue (behind photographer), between the United States Products Corporation cannery on the left and the Contadina Canning Company's tomato cannery. In the distance the tower sits to the lower left of San Jose's first high rise, the 1925-built Bank of Italy (later, America) building that stood as a beacon for travelers until taller buildings began to obscure it in the later part of the 20th Century. The photo dates to 1931 and probably was recorded by an SP company photographer following a grade crossing accident. This image was cropped from a wider view.

...** but not for the reason you think. At first we did not even notice the tower sitting in the distance. Instead, it was the foreground that excited us. The location is on the Santa Cruz main line (now Vasona Branch) at the corner of Race Street and Morepark Avenue (behind photographer), between the United States Products Corporation cannery on the left (where Staff spent several college summers working on the fruit processing lines; also aluded to in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath) and Contadina Canning Company's tomato cannery. You local readers of advancing years may recognize the spur where the WP boxcar sits as where Corn Products Corporation corn syrup laden tank cars promenently sat until the operation closed in the early 1980's.

The all-important San Jose Wye

It used to be that nothing larger than a mikadoo or a pacific could turn end-for-end within the Santa Clara Valley, as San Jose Roundhouse's 80 foot (or less, earlier on) turntable was the only thing available. Prior to the time of the West Side relocation, this was not such pressing inconvenience that SP felt compelled to remedy the situation, for The Valley was "hog" country where diminuative engines thrived. Likewise, freight trains off of the Milpitas Line (along with those from/to the Mulford Lines) all yarded at Newhall to exchange between Western and Coast Division crews, meaning that no wye was needed at San Jose Tower to connect them to the Coast Division. The same held true once the new line went into service. The east leg did not host Milpitas freights for its first several decades, until an interdivisional pool union agreement created Oakland-Watsonville Pool 4.

The prospect of the new West Side relocation changed the equation, not for freight trains, but rather for Milpitas Line passenger trains, which needed a direct connection out of the new depot. Thus, the east leg of San Jose wye was born. The Milpitas main track through the middle of College Park Yard functioned as the west leg (as it does today, minus yard). Milpitas passenger service disappeared in 1940, but certainly by then the new wye had found its highest and best use as a turning facility for locos and cuts of cars of unlimited length. Beyond facilitating larger engines, the wye alleviated the turntable bottleneck during Commute hours with its ability to handle coupled groups of engines. At some point (perhaps at the start?), SP installed a second west leg directly between the roundhouse and the east leg, which obviated tying up the main track at College Park.

|C.M. Kurtz, SP Lines photo - Shasta Division Archives

The Basset St. - a.k.a. Market St., a.a.k.a. San Pedro St. (take your pick) station** - was literally in its last days when C.M. Kutz snapped this photo on december 12, 1935, but what really intrigues Wx4 is what was framed by the shed opening: an rare image of San Jose Tower. The (1700 pixel) full photo is here, while a (1700 pixel) larger version of the above cropped image is here.

Sharp eyes will note the express reefers spotted beyond the shed, as well as the high semaphore interlocking signal (above the train rear) guarding the exist from the diminuative yard. Staff was surprised to see one of SP's most modern P-10 heavy Pacifics on the head end of train #137. Heavy power on the Commutes at the time generally came in the form of ex EP&SW P-11 and P-12 Pacifics. Half a dozen years before, the train likely would have been handled by an E-27 4-4-0.

** ("station" , NOT depot in strict SP parlance: see the right hand column box above the Zukas photos towards the top of the page)

The thumbnail map below links to an enlarged, full version of the one appearing in the article, whose purpose seems to be to designate yard limits and union agreement points concerning pay for operating employees. Note that yard limits extended all the way to Los Gatos and New Almaden. This was a recent development on the latter after the long-time weekly mixed train was discontinued in favor of "as-needed" service by yard crews. Also note the short squiggle of Penninsular Ry. tracks leading to Luna Park at top left. The team tracks (just west of the old San Jose Flea Market on Berryessa Road) were served by SP until the 1980's.

Shasta Division Archives

Sour grapes, not wine grapes: San Jose parade float, early 1930's
Courtesy Ken Middlebrook, History San Jose

(Click on images for larger renditions - Shasta Division Archives)

Above are the 1925 permutations of SP's plans that ultimately were superseded by yet another version by the time that construction began at the end of the decade. In particular, the depot layout (upper right) is much more grandiose than what was actually constructed. The map at left shows three routes that were proposed over the years, but there were others. The final alignment opened in 1935 very generally followed Route #1 south from the new depot for a short distance around Willow Glen, but then struck directly for Route #3 and Lick.

above: A suburban coach served as a temporary West San Jose Depot while the grounds were torn up.
(Click on the image for a larger version - C.M. Kurtz, SP Lines photo, Shasta Division Archives)

SP contemplated moving its Coast Division main line away from downtown San Jose's Fourth Street from time to time over the course of more than four decades before construction began , even though executives had settled upon a general plan early on: A new depot located at the South Pacific Coast yard would replace the Bassett Street depot, and from there the relocated main line would thread through the vicinity of Willow Glen to a junction with the Fourth Street line...somewhere. The goals: no more fielding of irate letters by people marooned on the wrong side of Fourth Street during rush hour, along with higher speed track not inhibited by sharing the street face to face with pedestrians and vehicular traffic.

This SP photo shows condemned chair car #1939 serving as the temporary West San Jose ticket office and waiting room in the late afternoon of December 26, 1935. Five days later, West San Jose station and the main San Jose station at Bassett Street ceased to exist when the new San Jose station in the background opened for business. Many finishing touches remained to be done at photo time. Note the ladder resting on the side of the station building. Out of sight at photo left, a gas powered road roller was busy compacting the new Calpack macadam platform. A fair amount of ballasting remained unfinished, as well.

For further coverage of SP's activities in San Jose, see also Wx4's SP in San Jose & Santa Clara Valley pages.

Seen here is Santa Clara Valley's other big SP event of the era, the 1927 opening of the "new [San Jose] yard", which took over as the arrival-departure yard from overloaded College Park Yard, which itself had been dubbed the "new yard" after roughly two decades of augmenting the tiny "old yard" adjacent to Bassett Street Depot. Among others in the photo is Yardmaster Earl B. Isham, who hired out in 1902 as one of several generations of Ishams that worked San Jose's yards. Charley C. "Pop" Mathews was promoted to engineer in 1920, and much later had San Francisco's Mission Bay [roundhouse] Gardens renamed in his honor when he retired in 1949. Lyle H. Cleveland hired out as a fireman in 1925, but had to wait out the Depression to gain promotion to engineer in 1941. Wx4 has a PDF of his collected 1940-1962 time books, and Wx4 hosted Ernie Kiesel Collection of Southern Pacific Photographs has additional photos of all three gentlemen.

The flip side of the new San Jose Station

SP Lines drawing, Shasta Division Archives

Southern Pacific invested a considerable amount of brain power, not to mention expense, on arranging the station area "just so". As we see in this 1928 drawing, the company was originally inclined towards a layout that was a mirror image of the final design, plus a separate express house that did not make the final cut. Thus, when all was done, it was a minor architectural masterpiece...and an operational headache, for it was built on the wrong side of the tracks.