8-14-25:

For nearly 25 years The Dome's front page has been a helter-skelter mishmash of random stuff, placed there with the singular purpose of making things fit together in some sort of presentable fashion prior to relegating these items to the vast rabbit hole that constitutes Wx4's interior pages. All these years later Staff has finally come to terms with the realization that this may not be the optimum arrangement for the 2020's attention deficit plagued foamer, who is conditioned by the Internet to scan at least 500 sites per day. Staff estimates that there were 34 websites devoted to foaming in 2002, whereas today there must be at least 340,000,000.

Accordingly - although we passionately hate the word, and the implicit regimented format - we are caving in to the concept and largely turning the front page into a blog to better conform to the lifestyle of today's foamer.
You're welcome! - Staff

Items removed from this page into the interior: You shall find links to them HERE.

two PDF's re SSW humor and disturbing weirdness
It is Staff's experience that the best railroad humor is/was unintended to be so. Unfortunately, this is true for St. Louis Southwestern's 1950 foray into joke-making.

A similar bias of ours is that, in the past, railroad promotions could disturbingly weird, (an impression repeatedly born out on Wx4's Silly Johnny page - enter at your own risk). A present case in point is SSW's advertising artwork of the 1930's, such as this anthropomorphic hourglass that impresses us as a creature of Satan, albeit with nice legs. Another ad, featuring an image of Napoleon's ghost, strikes us as extolling the virtues of totalitarianism. Please consult the PDF.

Ryan Heath has added CGW Minnesota Division dispatchers' train sheets and Milwaukee Road St. Croix Tower train sheets to his previous contributions, which now all appear together on his new Miscellaneous Documents page (Misc. Docs., page 3).

Perhaps the appropriate safety message should have read BYOB.

June 15, 1890 SP Western Div. #17 employee timetable (includes rules on reverse) - Shasta Div. Archives

REVIVED! Back in 2018, we posted Train Master era "Fleet" photos taken by a fiend of Wx4 at Third & Townsend and Visitation. We have lately discovered, however, that they had disappeared from these pages for reasons we cannot ken. Well, they are back!

Primary source material for the serious SP historian:
Electrification, San Francisco to San Jose; Six -track railroad between Visitation and Broadway [internal correspondence]
I admit that I previously thought that most internal discussions over electrifying The Peninsula occurred before World War I, but no! As it turns out, a lengthy investigation took place throughout most of the 1920's, beginning with a 1921 request for same by President Wm. Sproule. During the next seven years, all manner of possibilities were contemplated that would, in the process, turn the entirety of the Peninsula run into a four-to-six track railroad. Included for awhile was a plan to run a separate freight service only double track railroad from Redwood City to Alviso and Santa Clara. The discussion appears to have ceased in 1928 after Chief Engineer George W. Boschke became "disappointed" that projected costs were "much beyond my expectation".

The above link will lead you to 120 pages of related internal company correspondence scanned at Shasta Division Archives. I have as of yet barely surveyed the pages, so should you feel compelled to comment, please do! One interesting story line that runs throughout these communications is the company's paranoia over possible encroachment onto The Peninsula by WP.
- EO

Stereopticon of SP C-1 2-8-0 #2505 at Dunsmuir Roundhouse sometime before or about 1910:
This loco became Twohy Brothers #12 in 1910, and in 1915, California & Oregon Coast #127, but saw little use, apparently because it couldn't pull worth beans. You'll find a larger copy of the below on Wx4's rather extensive California & Oregon Coast / Hobbs, Wall & Co. page.

ca 1931 Peninsular Ry. cost study with (nice) map - see also: 1933-10-10 Present Status of Branch Line Train Service (Asay)

1981-10-25 SP Los Angeles Div. rules for operations over UP,x LAUPT and AT&SF, plus a ca 1981 City of Industry SP
xxxIntermodal Terminal map

1983-02-24 Mission Bay & 4th Street Depot S.F. engineering map

1929-09-18 Tucumcari Yard - west end engineering map
1929-09-18 Tucumcari Yard - east end engineering map

1910-10-00 Coast Div. map; this and the below San Joaquin are "timetable style", but larger, with additional info

1918-06-00 San Joaquin Div. map

Cahill (Diridon) depot area, the wye and some of the main tracks survive today, but the rest has been obliterated. A Trader Joe's food market now sits about at the former gantry crane location in College Park Yard.

(click on the image for PDF)

Rewritten story with additional intelligence: You are looking at Caltrain #43 - me, the rails, one of our Real Railroad Stories in the Wx4 Grab Bag (They're entirely true, as far as you know.) If nothing else, it gives us a second chance to gaze at David Rector's gorgeous photo.

BIG news! This Summer, CSRM Library has placed most of its collection of SP Employee Timetables online at Internet Archive, where it joins CSRM SP SPINS books and their complete set of SP Bulletins. Their extensive, but by no means complete ETT collection progresses from what SP termed the "New Form and Series" of 1892 through the horse blanket era all the way to 1971. We are talking thousands of timetables, here.

A few WP and Santa Fe Timetables ETT's are lately there, as well. Unfortunately, 1909-1913 SP ETT's will not be available for awhile due to the need to work around the originals' physical frailty issues. These are streaming-only files, so one can only download low resolution jpeg files by right clicking the page. Alternately, note that Wx4 still has hundreds upon hundreds of SP employee & public timetables in PDF form that can be downloaded for later perusal (many of which do not occur in the CSRM offering).

Many thanks to Jeff Asay for keeping us apprised of developments and especially, to the library's Chris Rockwell for his perserverence in getting the timetables online, despite several lumps and bumps.

Stalwart contributor Tim Zukas has sent us 175+ more PDF files for his Maps & Timetables page: everything from Southern Pacific to Southern Ry. and a whole lot of railroads in between. Several date to the 19th Century.

Tim was the guy who really got the ETT PDF's ball rolling on Wx4 in 2016, BTW and since then several other websites blossomed with PDF offerings of their own. We like to think that Tim's work provided them with the inspiration.

Note: All Maps & TT's pages have dates of their latest additions at the top. These you can copy for insertion into your Web browser's search box.

Let's say you were a cowboy rounding up strays near Red Bluff in December, 1887, when your foreman - Uncle Bob -, rode up to you with the news that "the railroad" [Southern Pacific] had opened up all the way to Portland, meaning that you now had a realistic way of visiting his sister, your Dear Ol' Ma, for Christmas in Ashland. Happy day! Otherwise, it was several days ride, even if you and your horse Dobbins did not succumb to hypothermia in the snowy Siskiyou Mountains. (What you did not know was that roads connecting the two states would remain primitive for another two+ decades.)

The only issue was scrounging enough cash for the train tickets. SP was apparently trying to recover its construction expenses overnight, because a round trip to Ashland would run nearly 16 bucks (2025: $530), about a month's "spending money". But, bless his heart, good old Uncle Bob, despite barely earning a buck off his hardscrabble place on Hooker Hill, came through with a Christmas bonus exactly matching the train fare.

In a few days, you would be experiencing the wonders of such places as Elmore, Chromite, Acme and Zuleka from the cozy comforts of an overheated coach. Even cowboys were entitled to a taste of luxury once in awhile.

Disambiguation. A goodly number of stations seen on the fare chart have changed their names or disappeared entirely. Acme became Black Butte, while the others have long ceased to be. Luckily for us, as previously noted Jerry Harmon has produced an "Operating Limits and Stations of the Shasta Division" chart", a working list of all known Shasta Division stations and their former names, included on Wx4's growing Shasta Division Maps page.

12-17-1887 Shasta Division Local Ticket Rate Chart - Note that Black Butte was originally called Acme. (click on image)
Shasta Division Archives

Online records at California State Museum tell us this about Curtis:
In 1891, the Southern Pacific Track Department and Bridges & Buildings Department were combined to form the Maintenance of Way Department. Since the Track Department was the senior department, then former Track Department head W.G. Curtis became the Engineer, Maintenance of Way and Arthur Brown, who was the Superintendent of Bridges & Buildings, became Assistant Engineer. In 1892, Brown retired and W.G. Curtis was awarded a new job title: Engineer, Assistant to General Manager and Engineer Maintenance of Way. In 1902, J. H. Wallace replaced Curtis.

We easily conclude that this booklet appeared before Curtis's appointment as Engineer, Maintenance of Way in 1891, but exactly when? Perhaps more telling about its publication date is that Wx4 already has an almost identical book put out in 1888, SP Portland to Roseburg Division Instructions to Sectionmen. There is, however just enough formatting difference between the two to suggest that they were published at different times, but not too far apart. Content-wise, they are identical.

Thus we would say that the booklet dates pretty darn close to 1888. Given their identical content, why there was not a less expensive omnibus book for all SP holdings is interesting to contemplate.

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