Have added details (or a better map) of the events described here? wx4org@yahoo.com

My recall of the California DOT-planned Pullman Way Maintenance Facility in South San Jose is about as coffee-stained and rumpled as the original photocopies (lately scanned and stitched together) that I made back in the mid-1990’s. In the early 90’s California DOT, Amtrak, and I believe the predecessor organization to ACE, came up with the idea for an enormous facility, which was to be located at Lick, where the former Almaden/Lick branch connected with SP’s Coast main. All Caltrain equipment was to be maintained there. Amtrak planned to close most of its Oakland terminal in favor of Pullman and begin running the California Zephyr and some San Joaquins out of San Jose.

The project showed promise of being a fine example of interagency cooperation, but in a proverbial cart-before-the-horse move, somebody authorized the installation of a lead switch and a few feet of dead end track at the north end of the proposed facility, about 1/2 mile north of Lick at a spot named, appropriately enough, CP Pullman Way. The control point was just beyond that rickety bridge seen behind the 4449’s train in the 1977 Wx4 photo. (Today homes and a mobile home park occupy those vacant fields. If I remember it right, the control point materialized when CTC was installed from Tamien to Gilroy.

That was as far as the project ever physically progressed, because the participating public entities had put the cart before the horse. The switch appeared before they had secured the land for the shops and yard. Thinking that he had them and their deep pockets cornered, the landowner jacked up his asking price to a preposterous amount and refused to back down. The project apparently had no hope of raising the required additional funds and quietly killed the plan in 1997, but there may have been more to it than that.

Another expensive-to-resolve issue was mercury contamination, I believe. Lick was once the location of a small, short-lived quicksilver mine and smelting retort, which later may have processed cinnabar brought over from the New Almaden mines (I have no idea if any hauling was actually done, let alone by rail by rail).

So, the state instead allocated the funds to Amtrak to improve their Oakland yard, and to Caltrain, whom I believe used some of the money to construct an engine house next to Diridon station, and later the balance for its CMOF maintenance facility at the former SP roundhouse site. The ACE organization came into being at about the same time that Pullman died. I doubt that Pullman would have fit into their plans very well, other than as a mid-day layover place to park trains.

It would have been an impressive operation, don’t you think?

EO