3 Railroad History Books
Published by The Western Railroader
The Guerneville Branch: Northwestern Pacific Railroad
By Fred A. Stindt
Western Railroader Vol. 19, No. 2, Issue 194
1955, Softcover, 40 Pages, 8.5 x 5.5 Inches
Ocean Shore Railroad: Reaches the Beaches
By Rudolph Brandt
Western Railroader Vol. 15, No. 7, Issue 151
1952, Softcover, 32 Pages, 8.5 x 5.5 Inches
Sacramento Northern's 50th Anniversary
Western Railroader Vol. 19, No. 1, Issue 193
1955, Softcover, 16 Pages, 8.5 x 5.5 Inches
Very Good Vintage Condition. The books are clean, covers attached, secure stapled bindings, vintage inscription written on the inside front cover of “The Guerneville Branch.”, otherwise all books are unmarked, no internal page writing, no highlighting, crisp inner pages, no fading, no stains, no ripped pages, no edge chipping, no corner folds, no crease marks, no remainder marks, not ex-library. Some light surface and edge wear from age, use, storage and handling.
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The Northwestern Pacific Railroad is a 271-mile (436 km) mainline railroad from the ferry connections in Sausalito north to Eureka with a connection to the national railroad system at Schellville. The railroad has gone through a history of different ownership and operators but has maintained a generic name of reference as The Northwestern Pacific Railroad, despite no longer being officially named that. Currently, only a 62-mile (100 km) stretch of mainline from Larkspur to the Sonoma County Airport in Windsor and east to Schellville on the “south end” is operated by Sonoma–Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART), which operates both commuter and freight trains with plans for future extension north to Cloverdale. The “north end” from Willits to Eureka (which includes connections to the California Western Railroad) is currently out of service, but saved by 2018 legislation to be converted into the Great Redwood Trail.
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The Ocean Shore Railroad was a railroad built between San Francisco and Tunitas Glen, and Swanton and Santa Cruz that operated along the Pacific coastline from 1905 until 1921. The route was originally conceived to be a continuous line between San Francisco and Santa Cruz, but the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, financial difficulties, and the advent of the automobile caused the line to never reach its goals, and remain with a Northern and Southern division. Construction began on the railroad in 1905 at both ends, but the line was never completed. The April 18, 1906, earthquake caused major damage and delayed completion of the railroad. A major tunnel was built at Devil's Slide; another tunnel was built near Davenport. There were numerous bridges and trestles along the route. The tracks from San Francisco were completed as far south as Tunitas Creek, south of Half Moon Bay. The tracks north from Santa Cruz were completed as far north as Swanton, north of Davenport. Trackage within the city of San Francisco was electrified, while the rest of the line was operated with steam locomotives, and later, with self-propelled railcars. Despite significant passenger patronage, especially on weekends, the railroad never recovered from losses in the 1906 earthquake and failed to attract enough freight traffic to cover increasing deficits. A never-built branch would have split from the mainline and run along what is now 19th Avenue, Eucalyptus Drive, 47th Avenue, Rivera Street, and 48th Avenue to Golden Gate Park. Completion of the Pedro Mountain Road in 1913 provided additional competition to the railroad, particularly since many farmers began using trucks to transport their produce to San Francisco, instead of paying expensive freight charges. Mainline service was abandoned in 1920. The line north from Santa Cruz was leased to the San Vicente Lumber Company, which continued to use the tracks until 1923. Electrified trackage within the city of San Francisco, which served major industries, was operated for many years, in part by the San Francisco Muni. A segment of the railroad in the southeast section of San Francisco was also operated by the Western Pacific Railroad. This section was in use until the mid-1980s and was the last part of the Ocean Shore in operation. Following abandonment, the railroad company fought for decades over ownership of their right-of-way, large portions of which they had purchased wholesale rather than as easements. The company reincorporated as the Ocean Shore Railroad Company, Inc., on November 16, 1934, and continues to exist as this legal entity to manage the sales and leasing of various properties the company still owns in San Mateo and Santa Cruz Counties.
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Wooden railroads, called wagonways, were built in the United States starting from the 1720s. Between 1762 and 1764, a gravity railroad (mechanized tramway) was built by British military engineers near the Niagara River waterfall's escarpment at the Niagara Portage (which the local Senecas called "Crawl on All Fours."). Railroads played a large role in the development of the United States from the industrial revolution in the Northeast (1810–1850) to the settlement of the West (1850–1890). The American railroad mania began with the founding of the first passenger and freight line in the nation of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1827 and the "Laying of the First Stone" ceremonies and beginning of its long construction heading westward over the obstacles of the Appalachian Mountains eastern chain the following year of 1828, and flourished with continuous railway building projects for the next 45 years until the financial Panic of 1873 followed by a major economic depression bankrupted many companies and temporarily stymied and ended growth. Although the South started early to build railways, it concentrated on short lines linking cotton regions to oceanic or river ports, and the absence of an interconnected network was a major handicap during the Civil War (1861–1865). The North and Midwest constructed networks that linked every city by 1860 before the war. State and local governments often subsidized lines, but rarely owned them. The system was largely built by 1910, but then trucks arrived to eat away the freight traffic, and automobiles (and later airplanes) to devour the passenger traffic. After 1940, the use of diesel electric locomotives made for much more efficient operations that needed fewer workers on the road and in repair shops. A series of bankruptcies and consolidations left the rail system in the hands of a few large operations by the 1980s. Almost all long-distance passenger traffic was shifted to Amtrak in 1971, a government-owned operation. Commuter rail service is provided near a few major cities, including New York City, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.. Freight railroads continue to play an important role in the United States' economy, especially for moving imports and exports using containers, and for shipments of coal and, since 2010, of oil.
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In the United States the earliest railed pavements were in or adjacent to Boston, where in 1807 (when it was decided to flatten the top of Beacon Hill in order to enlarge the Massachusetts statehouse) a tramway was constructed to carry gravel to the base of the hill to begin filling the Back Bay. The first railway in Canada was constructed by British military engineers in the 1820s at the Citadel at Québec city; it used a similar cable-operated tramway to ascend the heights of Cape Diamond. But it was in 1825 on the Granite Railroad just south of Boston on the side of Great Blue Hill that several of the characteristic features of American railroading, such as the swiveling truck and the four-wheel truck, were first put into use. The earliest locomotives used in North America were of British design. In 1829 the Stourbridge Lion was the first to run on a North American railroad. But on the Delaware and Hudson Railroad, where the Stourbridge Lion ran, as on the Champlain and St. Lawrence Railroad, the first in Canada, Stephenson locomotives proved unsuited to the crude track and quickly derailed. The British locomotive had virtually no constructive impact on North American locomotives. The only residual characteristic was the 4-foot 8.5-inch gauge, which was often thought to be a misfortune in being too narrow. It was the brute strength of American locomotives, their great tolerance of cheap and crude track, their durability, their economy of operation, and their simplicity of maintenance that determined almost from the first years of operation that there would be a distinctively American railroad sharing little with British practice. It seems reasonable to argue that once the British had shown that railroads could be made to work the Americans reinvented them for a very different terrain, economic climate, and demographic level. The creation of the American railroad was a contemporaneous but not a derivative development.
The American railroad came into existence because incomplete geographic knowledge caused the first British colonists to plant early entrepôts in what were later understood to be unfavourable locations. The uplands in central Massachusetts were already being abandoned for agricultural use when the railroad arrived in that region in the mid-1830s. Only when in the 1840s a railroad reached into the agricultural belt in the American Midwest could the port of Boston find a truly great hinterland. And by 1825 the Erie Canal had created a water connection between the Midwest and the port of New York. Two other colonial ports mirrored the conditions in Boston. In Maryland, the rivers did not serve the colonial port at Baltimore. The Susquehanna just to the north and the Potomac just to the south had falls near their mouths. A port had grown up at Alexandria on the Virginia side of the Potomac; and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania built a canal and later a railroad to keep inland trade from passing southward to Baltimore. In South Carolina the main port, Charleston, was, like Boston, on a short stream offering little access to the interior. These “mislocated” colonial ports were among the largest American cities, but they were denied the easy access to the interior that seemed essential for growth as the country spread inward. The creation of the railroad offered a solution to the access problem. Competition among the Atlantic ports meant that those with the poorest river connections to the West—Baltimore, Boston, and Charleston—became the earliest and strongest proponents of railroad promotion.
The first to take an active role was Baltimore, which in the 1820s had become the second largest American city. On July 4, 1828, Baltimore merchants began the construction of a railroad from the harbour to some point, then undetermined, on the Ohio River. The results of adopting British practice were generally bad, forcing the engineers to design a railroad from scratch. Locomotives designed and built in Baltimore were stronger than those of Robert Stephenson. Leveling rods kept those locomotives on the relatively poor track, and a swiveling leading truck guided them into tight curves. On the Camden and Amboy Railroad, another pioneering line, the engineer John Jervis invented the T- cross-section rail that greatly cheapened and simplified the laying of track when combined with the wooden crosstie also first introduced in the United States. Simplicity and strength became the basic test for railroad components in North America. On cars the individual trucks were given four wheels to allow heavier loads to be carried, and the outside dimensions of cars were enlarged. In western Maryland the engineers were faced with their steepest grades. These came to be known as the “ruling grade”—that is, the amount of locomotive power required for the transit of a line was determined by its steepest grade. Robert Stephenson had thought 1 percent was the steepest grade a locomotive could surmount. At the top of the climb over the Allegheny Front the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) engineers had to accept a 17-mile grade of about 2.2 percent, which they managed to achieve with the stronger American engines. Adopted later as the ruling grade for the Canadian Pacific and a number of other North American lines, the 2.2 percent figure has become so fixed that it now ranks second only to standard gauge as a characteristic of the North American railroad. The B&O was finally completed in December 1852 to Wheeling, Virginia (now in West Virginia). But by that time it was only the first of what turned out to be six trans-Appalachian railroads completed in 1851–52.
Three Massachusetts railroads were chartered and under construction in 1830, at first showing a strong affinity for British practice. The Boston and Lowell, Boston and Providence, and Boston and Worcester railroads radiated from the metropolis to towns no more than 70 km (45 miles) away. In 1835, when all were operating, Boston became the world’s first rail hub. As in Europe the pattern of having a metropolitan station for each line was established, though Boston had by the end of the century created a North Union Station and a South Station and an elevated railway to join them by rapid transit. Boston’s main contribution to the development of railroads was made in finance rather than in technology. The merchants who were interested in extending the city’s trade inland had invested actively in the 1830s, and by the 1840s they had connected all of New England to their port; but extending their influence farther was severely constrained by New York state. The New York legislature was unsympathetic to chartering a rail line projected from Boston. Boston capital’s role in American railroading came through investment in distant and detached railroads. It first gained control of the Michigan Central Railroad, then of its physical extension, the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad. This capital trail continued as Boston money dominated the Union Pacific; the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway; and other important western lines.
Merchants in Charleston launched an early railroad—the South Carolina Railroad—which at 130 miles was by some measure the longest rail line in the world when it opened in 1833. But it was constructed very cheaply. Where it could not be laid on crossties placed directly on the flat or gently sloping surface of the Atlantic Coastal Plain, it was borne on short posts that were intended to permit surface wash to pass beneath the track. Much of this fabric later had to be improved. The object of the Charlestonians was to divert the flow of cotton from the port of Savannah, Georgia, to the older and larger South Carolina port. Theirs was considered mainly as a regional rail line, which began service with a single locomotive. The hope was that the early years of operation would earn enough profit that the line might be improved on retained earnings and that success for the sponsoring port would come from increased trade at its docks and from the extension of the line to tap a wider hinterland.
The first phase of American railroad development, from 1828 until about 1850, most commonly involved connecting two relatively large cities that were fairly close neighbours. New York City and New Haven, Connecticut, Richmond, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., or Syracuse, New York, and Rochester, New York, were examples of this phase of eastern railroad development. By 1852 this first phase was followed by six crossings of the Appalachian mountain chain, which were essentially incremental alignments of railroads first proposed to tie neighbouring cities together, and there was a need for a new strategy of routing. What followed was an extension of railroads into the interior of the continent and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In the 1850s and ’60s the B&O projected a line from Wheeling to Cincinnati, Ohio, and from Cincinnati to the east bank of the Mississippi opposite St. Louis, Missouri, then the greatest mercantile city in the American interior. The Pennsylvania Railroad reached Pittsburgh in 1852; and the company began to seek the merger of second-phase railroads in the Midwest into a line from Pittsburgh to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and thence to Chicago, which was emerging as the dominant junction of the vastly productive agricultural and industrial region of the eastern prairie states. The first railroad from the east reached Chicago in February 1852, and soon thereafter lines were pushed onward toward the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers. In 1859 the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad was completed to the middle Missouri valley; it remained the most westerly thrust of railroad during the Civil War. By the beginning of the 1850s it had already become clear that there would be considerable pressure to undertake a transcontinental railroad.
The first public proposal for such a line was made by the New York City merchant Asa Whitney in 1844. At that time the United States did not hold outright possession of land west of the Rockies, though it exercised joint occupation of the Oregon Country until 1846, when under a treaty with Britain it gained possession of the Pacific coast between the 42nd and 49th parallels. Whitney’s Railroad Convention proposed a line from the head of the Great Lakes at Duluth, Minnesota, to the Oregon Country. The Mexican War, by adding California, Arizona, and New Mexico to the American domain, complicated the matter greatly. North-South sectionalism intruded when it was appreciated that west of the Missouri any rail project would require a combination of federal and private efforts, the American practice. In the hope of resolving the regional conflict, the Corps of Topographic Engineers was authorized in 1854 to undertake the Pacific Railroad Survey, which studied almost all the potential rail routes in the West.
The survey on the 49th parallel was in the mid-1890s transformed into the Great Northern Railway. A near neighbour, the 47th parallel survey, had in the early 1880s been followed by the Northern Pacific Railway. The 41st parallel survey, only a partial investigation, sketched the alignment on which was to be built the first transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific east of Great Salt Lake and the Central Pacific west thereof. The 35th parallel route became the Rock Island line from Memphis to Tucumcari, New Mexico, and westward from there the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway to Los Angeles. The southernmost route, the 32nd parallel, was to run from Shreveport, Louisiana, across Texas and then, through the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, to San Diego; this route became the Southern Pacific line from Los Angeles to El Paso. Construction began in 1862 of the 41st parallel route, which had been selected to receive federal grants, but because of the outbreak of the Civil War relatively little was accomplished on the Union Pacific Railroad before the end of fighting in 1865. In California, little affected by the war, construction was more rapidly advanced. By 1865 the original juncture of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific was moved eastward; the meeting took place on May 10, 1869, at Promontory, Utah.
The opening of the Pacific railroad in 1869 demonstrated that the market for the profitable operation of such a line still lay somewhat in the future: one eastbound and one westbound train a week were adequate to meet the demands of traffic. It took almost a generation before additional rail lines to the west coast seemed justified. In 1885 the Santa Fe reached the Los Angeles basin and the Northern Pacific Railway reached Puget Sound. Each western railroad now had to shape a new economic and geographic strategy. In place of the natural territory gained through monopoly the western lines tried to accomplish regional ubiquity, under which the Southern Pacific (originally the Central Pacific), the Union Pacific, or the Santa Fe attempted to have a network of rail lines that reached to the Pacific Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, and northern California; only the Union Pacific succeeded. The American rail network was essentially complete by 1910 when the last transcontinental line, the Western Pacific Railroad to Oakland, California, was opened.