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    Alameda by Rail
    Alameda by Rail
    Alameda by Rail
    Ebook177 pages1 hour

    Alameda by Rail

    By Grant Ute and Bruce Singer

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    About this ebook

    Across the great bay from San Francisco, the city of Alameda evolved into an island hometown of fine Victorian and Craftsman architecture and a port containing a naval air station, shipbuilding center, and the winter home of the long-gone Alaska Packers fleet of tall ships. But Alameda also was a busy railroad town. In 1864, a passenger railroad with a ferry connection created a commute to San Francisco. In 1869, the city became the first Bay Area terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad. Alameda became an island because a railroad allowed construction crews to dig a tidal canal, separating it from Oakland in 1902. Later generations rode steam, then electric, trains to a grand ferry pier where ornate watercraft guided them the 20 minutes to San Francisco. An auto tube, and later the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, hastened the demise of ferry, then rail, operations before World War II.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateMar 14, 2007
    ISBN9781439618202
    Alameda by Rail
    Author

    Grant Ute

    Authors Grant Ute and Bruce Singer compiled this evocative collection of vintage images to celebrate Alameda�s railway heritage using the archives of the Bay Area Electric Railroad Association�s Western Railway Museum. Singer rode the Pacific Electric �Red Cars� in his youth and, after he retired, realized his dream of becoming a motorman. Ute, the grandson of a San Francisco motorman, is a founder of the San Francisco Railway Archive.

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      Book preview

      Alameda by Rail - Grant Ute

      Wurm

      INTRODUCTION

      The railroads are gone from Alameda. The present Fruitvale railroad bridge carried its final freight train in 1998. A passenger train in revenue service took its last riders over an earlier version of that bridge in 1941. Ferries have not departed the Alameda Mole since 1939, although the 1991 Loma Prieta earthquake induced a modest restoration of ferry service to the East Bay.

      For nearly 75 years, however, Alameda was laced with a tight mesh of railroad track, carrying passengers to ferry boats bound for San Francisco and over bridges to Oakland. The obvious signs, such as tracks in the streets, are largely gone, and the few that remain, like the rail still left in Blanding and Clement Avenues, were part of the freight-carrying Alameda Belt Line. The less obvious but more durable traces are seen in the streets that once carried the passenger rails: the width of Lincoln Avenue, the long curve of Tilden Way, the gore corner where Encinal and Central Avenues intersect, Marshall Avenue’s reverse Z connection of Lincoln and Pacific Avenues, and the diagonal segments of Eighth Street and Constitution Way.

      Alameda first became part of the railroad age in 1864. It was then a land of oak and marsh with three distinct settlements—Woodstock in the west, Encinal on the estuary, a tidal creek whose proper name is San Antonio Creek, and old Alameda, centered on Encinal Avenue and High Street. In its natural state, the estuary was one-quarter mile wide at its mouth and three miles in length, terminating in a shallow basin. About midway, it had a northerly reaching arm that drained the Oakland Hills and was dammed in 1869 to form Lake Merritt. Depths varied between 10 and 20 feet, depending on the tides. The loss of velocity as the creek flowed into the bay produced a sandbar within a mile of the mouth that, during low tides, came within two feet of the surface. In 1874, with the urging of Oakland, by Act of Congress and the hand of the Army Corps of Engineers, construction of a tidal canal was begun. Twenty-eight years in the making, it connected the basin to San Leandro Bay and turned Alameda from a peninsula into an island.

      By the end of 1864, the trains of its first railroad, the San Francisco and Alameda, ran easterly from Woodstock and reached a station built in the area of what is now Pearl Street and Fernside Avenue. Westbound passengers could transfer in Woodstock at the railroad’s ferry pier, just to the west of today’s Pacific Avenue and Main Street, for a boat to San Francisco. Within five years after that beginning, Alameda became the first tidewater terminal of the first transcontinental railroad.

      Alameda was not the intended end of track for the Central Pacific, which initially built eastward from Sacramento in a race with the oncoming Union Pacific for land and money that finally ended at Promontory, Utah. Oakland was where the grand plan took the railroad. Alameda, however, was in the right place at the right time when, after the rails met on May 10, 1869, the Central Pacific began its rush from Sacramento to a saltwater port.

      The route from Sacramento coveted by the Central Pacific, which ran to Vallejo in a line that generally parallels today’s Interstate 80, had already been taken by the California Pacific and was not for sale at the time. The prize finally fell to the Central Pacific in 1871, when, ignoring Vallejo, they built south from Fairfield-Suisun to Benicia, crossing the Carquinez Straits by ferry until 1930, and then continued by way of Martinez and Berkeley to Oakland. In 1869, however, they were forced to follow a more circuitous route, buying and building their way down the Sacramento Valley to a point near Lathrop, then westerly toward Tracy and Pleasanton, and through Niles Canyon to what is now the town of Niles.

      In sight of San Francisco Bay, the railroad turned to the northwest, and as it passed Hayward, it began to run parallel with and about a quarter of a mile westerly of the San Francisco and Alameda Railroad, which in 1865 had made that community its final rail head. Still Oakland-bound, the Central Pacific ran headlong into the rails of the San Francisco and Alameda as they emerged from the marsh at a place called Simpson’s (by some) and Melrose (by others), near San Leandro. Straight ahead lay Oakland, with more miles to go and more construction to do, including a pier when the rails reached tidewater. To the left was Alameda, with track in place, although in need of some upgrading, and a pier that already sent ferries across the bay.

      The Central Pacific, by now the owner of the San Francisco and Alameda Railroad, made the left turn, and the rest is the story that is told in the words and photographs that follow.

      No railroad helped make a more indelible mark on Alameda than that of the San Francisco Bridge Company. This double-headed train, being loaded with spoils by a steam shovel, is assisting in the geo-surgery that created the 400-foot-wide, mile-long tidal canal that linked the estuary with San Leandro Bay and turned Alameda from a peninsula into an island.

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