For items posted from 2012 to 8-26-2025, go HERE

We've added a smattering of NYC and I-GN employee timetables to Tim Zukas's page(s).

The following comes from Railway Employees Magazine of October, 1912:

Speaking of HW&Co., we have added a new photo of Shay 2nd #2 to our lengthy California & Oregon Coast RR page , as well as an image of a Forney 1st #3 sister as built for South Side Rapid Transit (Chicago),. No. 3 apparently was the only one of the bunch that remained a Vauclain Compound until scrapping, BTW.

J. Nathan McDonald has kindly forwarded pdf's of a 1955 Virginian system public timetable (now in Section #3 of Tim Zukas's collection) and a 1967 Long Island Babylon suburban timetable (now on the cards84664 page).

• Sheldon Pery has forwarded a few more timetables for inclusion in his massive M&TTs page.
• With Wx4 Staff being half Canadian and all, we are pleased to receive an alert from Timetable Curator David Stremes of Ottowa's C. Robert Crail Memorial Library that his organization currently hosts 901 Canadian employee and public timetables online, plus large numbers of maps and drawings.

• Most importantly, we have split Tim Zukas's timetables page into three sections. Tim's early contributions were the impetus for creation of the Maps & Timetables pages, and since then his page has become so large as to overwhelm Wx4's ancient webpage editor. This continually caused links to randomly fail or misdirect, ultimatelt to your and our collective frustration. This was a lengthy project that involved testing all the links, as well as fixing various typographical errors and incorrect file dates. Note that you will find an index by railroad at the top of the first section. Now Tim's webpageX3 is running smoothly, at least on current version of Firefox. We no longer test Wx4 pages on other browsers, so your non Firefox results may vary.

We have just concluded splitting the SP maps & timetables page into two: Part 1, employee timetables; Part 2 maps & public timetables. In the process we have added >eight< supplements courtesy of Tim Zukas to Western Division Ferries/Suburban employee timetable #23 of 1911-08-01. Next, we are going to dive into Tim's page (2) with the intention of splitting it into three (?) based upon geography.

These supplements underscore the fact that any given timetable might have been partly obsolete by the time its ink was dry. Creating an entirely new timetable every time a schedule change occurred was understandably an unrealistic option, so SP resorted to other methods to alert employees to changes. Supplements such as we see with timetable #23, were fairly common, although so many associated with a single timetable is something that we have not run across in the past. It is quite possible that supplements were more frequent than now seems apparent simply because they were not tracked with an overall sequential numbering system. We don't know which supplements remain unidentified.

Another way to modify a schedule was by a combination of train orders and timetable bulletin. If a train was temporarily or permanently discontinued, a Form K train order was issued stating something akin to, "NO 51 DUE TO LEAVE FEB 3 IS ANNULLED IN ITS ENTIRETY" or "NO 51 IS ANNULLED IN ITS ENTIRETY FOR THE DURATION OF TIMETABLE NO 67". In the latter event, this order would appear for a certain number of days (we don't recall the precise number), after which the annulment notice appeared only in a timetable bulletin.

Ultimately, this meant that some employee timetables listed schedules for ghost trains, but sans any other info, one has no way of knowing when a train was discontinued. A good example of this is the last pair of passenger trains on SP's Ocean View Line in San Francisco. Although California Railroad Commission authored SP to temporarily suspend service on November 15, 1928 (while Bernal Cut was being widened), then in-effect Coast Division #129 was not superseded by #130 until June, 1930. This may be why some historians claim that these trains were discontinued in 1930. CRC did allow their permanent abandonment in March, 1930, however, some sixteen months after they stopped running.

And then there are trains that ran although no SP records have surfaced (so far) that authorized or governed their movements. SP's humble McKeen Car #7 is our favorite example. It was the one that made the nautical journey to Marshfield (Coos Bay) Oregon in January, 1913 to operate between there and neighboring North Bend to comply with a franchise agreement that mandated passenger service on this newly acquired stretch of railroad. The rails were owned by under-construction Willamette Pacific, but still isolated from the outside world. The trains were operated by SP's Coos Bay, Roseburg and Eastern, which connected with the line's southern end. According to timetables published in newspapers, #7 operated there several times a day until the line was physically connected to greater WP in early 1916. As regularly scheduled runs, one would assume that they would have appeared in either company's timetable, but nothing - not an employee/public timetable, supplement, train order nor timetable bulletin - has surfaced so far. At the time, SP's East San Francisco Bay Halvern Branch was ICC certified main track, but no listing of it ever surfaced in employee timetables, so one might conclude that SP did not dwell much upon operational legalities for lines of minimal import.

Finally, "regular" trains sometimes were operated before a timetable listing them went into effect, although they operated as extra trains. This was simple enough to do using a "column wait" and "right over" train orders. The elusive-to-history Dumbarton Bridge passenger service was initiated this way, as passenger and mixed trains that operated as extras from December 26, 1911 until Western Division timetable #142 became effective on January 15, 1912. Even so, they may have been ghosted before #143 became effective on April 28, 1912, as neither pair of trains is listed. The mixed trains later resurfaced in employee timetables, which further adds to the uncertainty.

This all is the long way of pointing out that, by themselves, timetables were not final authorities about what actually was taking place out there in the ballast in ancient times. - Staff

From all this, it is easy to deduce that this is the Sequoia in late afternoon during its daytime layover in between runs . Eastbound #58 was scheduled to terminate there at 9:35am, and the opposite number was carded to leave after dark at 7:45 pm.

The consist undoubtedly is sitting near the one stall enginehouse located inside the wye at the bottom end of town. The the steam pipe allowed the fire to be killed to save fuel and eliminate the need to mind a fire. Awhile before departure the fire will be lit, and the train will pull up to the depot at Olive Street for loading prior to departure for Oakland via Goshen and Martinez.

Sometimes it is a blessing to encounter an old photo lacking in descriptive data. In the case here, this allows us to immerse ourselves in an simply glorious moment, sans the distraction of burdensome details. We are left free to speculate.

click on image for larger version; postcard photo from Wx4 Collection

Whatever the event it was, it exemplified a time when railroads were integral to small town life, and catered to 'the locals' in befitting home spun fashion. The big city Main Office held minimal sway here. The occasion of this humble little excursion may have been Easter, Mayday, or merely a daisy picking expedition. Regardless, the preponderance of fedora hats on the gents, rather than straw boaters, suggests that this was a celebration of spring. And the shirtsleeves in those formal times indicate a warm day at that. The festivities may have been held at one of Southern Pacific's Great Central Valley towns, perhaps on the San Joaquin Valley's West Side, but why should we care?

How can this scene not make one lament that there is no time machine that would ferry us back amid the crowd of men in their "good" suits, women in their holiday finery, curious children and wandering fidos. Hey, is that Aunt Ivy ensconced in the caboose cupola and cousin Hope peering out the back door? For myself, I would rather be there up atop, leaning over the cupola with Uncle Clarence, perhaps sharing a secret snort out of his ever present hip flask. Where are we going? It does not matter. It is a most delightful day to be appreciated on its own terms.

Shasta Division Archives

Our latest batch of files from Tim Zukas includes more Southern Pacific horse blankets, some East Coast miscellany, plus more street and Port Authority maps for the New York Metropolitan Statistical Area (NYC-New Jersey.

Jeff Asay has forwarded a couple of SP's final regional timetables from 1996, along with several Northern Pacific employee timetables which now reside on Sheldon Perry's page.

Tim Zukas has turned out another large bunch of maps and employee timetables, including SP (tt's & SF industrial map), AT&SF, SCL, NYC&HR, among others.

NOTE: Several SP timetables that appeared on Tim's page in late 2024 somehow failed to male it to the dedicated SP timetables page. They now appear as 2-16-26 listings.

Also now on his page: a collection of 1920's & 30's Port Authority and Manhattan street maps, plus 22 scans of 1998-2006 Union Pacific employee timetables kindly contributed by Gary House.

It has been awile since we added to Wx4's extensive "Railroad Rules and Regulations" and "SP/Western Railroads Seniority Rosters" pages. The latest:

Pacific Electric Rules and Regulations for 11-15-43, as amended 6-1-46 - This one is a monster with 238 pages plus 24 pages of amendments, and includes everything but the kitchen sink, including "Motor Coach Operation" (page 149). By way of comparison, SP's 1943 rule book is 100 pages lighter.

1954 SP Coast Division seniority rosters for enginemen, trainmen and switchmen - We've been looking for a mid-1950's list containing all of these crafts, and here it is.

Jon Habegger has sent us 22 more ETT's, this time for Milwaukee Road in the Midwest, circa 1926-1973.

For the large and vocal Rock Island in Manley, Iowa contingent, Wx4 has a new photo of the yard and shops, circa 1912. Note, Wx4 has at least the second-most popular Manley page on the entire Internet! Actually, we have not encountered any others, but we don't want to take chances on overstating our case.

We say "nominally", because some intensive investigations by Evan Josa led us to conclude that the map's creator, one R. F. Morton, must have performed his cartographic efforts using liquid tools provided by an Antioch watering hole.

Over the years, the page has blossomed to include all things related. Now, Ken Martin has forwarded a significant find, two pages pertaining to the Pittsburg Railroad that appeared in the February 17, 1871 issue of the journal Engineering. As you shall note, these pages contain a wealth of data about the Sampson and its operations over the depicted profile. Mention is also made of an "engine of the same class and dimensions" operating on the nearby Black Diamond Mining Company railroad. Great stuff!
- Teodoro Gusano, Wx4 Honorary Assistant Editor

1) A June, 1993 SP Mechanical Department Locomotive Data Book to accompany the 1994 one further down this column.

2) List of SPINS TAG numbers generated for Oakland Terminal by TOPS (the acronym for Total Operations Processing System used from 1960-1980): TOPS perf edged, dot matrix printouts containing consists (aka conductor's work or "wheel" reports), and train tonnage profiles were given to road crews during this period, and to the novice who is lucky enough to have one of these vintage pieces of history, they can be a bit confusing.

The SPINS (Southern Pacific Industrial Numbering System) TAG column is one of the easier ones to figure out, if you know the locations corresponding to the three digit numbers. These numbers denoted the terminals to which the cars were headed, and once delivered, switch lists were created using SPINS spot numbers found in those orange SPINS books that you have been hoarding.

The Oakland Terminal example is not an all inclusive list of destinations for reasons Staff does not ken. At least one heavily used local location, Shin Siding at Niles, TAG #315, which we have added to the list. Once WP shut down its trans-bay car ferry service Shin became the major interchange point for cars headed to WP at San Francisco. Also, on wheel reports you will note "setouts" with five digit numbers, for instance 30210 and 30200 for San Jose Yard. The first three digits correspond to the list. The last two indicate the west and east end of the yard, respectively. The 313 TAG, again not on the list, covered the lower San Francisco Peninsula. Setout 31335 was Sunnyvale; 31310 was Menlo Park. Hopefully you modeler "operators" will find some use for all of this.

3) SP 1972 Train Handling Instructions: The first thing that new hire fireman wanted to learn about in a training class of old was the mysteries of train handling. Conversely, train handling is the last thing that instructors want to teach. This is because a rookie needs a thorough immersion in the basics of a host of equipment mechanical, electrical and pneumatic systems, plus a thorough grounding in operating and air brake rules. Otherwise, train handling instructions will not make much sense.

This said, we are offering a shortcut here in the form of a 1972 version of SP's Train Handling Instructions book. A separate pdf shows a large chart included with the manual, "Universe of Physical and Dynamic Characteristics Affecting Train Performance".(below) Beyond questioning the chart's practical utility, our wonder if it really is a roadmap to earth for alien space invaders.

We assess that posting this is a rather passive-aggressive act towards you otherwise unversed railfans, but we suppose that enginemen of today might find it interesting to investigate how things were officially done back then. Real world operating techniques may have varied, however.

In return, we hope that one of you current engineers writes us about how you balance a grade nowadays. Staff worked the mountains long before electrically controlled air brakes, PTC and DPU's. For instance, can you guys still crack off an additional one pound reduction to your existing set?

Michael Lowe recently sent us a heads-up about an intriguing a 644 page 1920 California Railroad Commission document that he found in Google Books, entitled Railroad Grade Crossing and Terminal Investigation Los Angeles.

As the title suggests, it is comprised studies looking into the reduction railroad grade crossings in downtown LA, as well as investigations upon constructing a new union passenger terminal. Beyond the mounds of information - including a history of LA railroads -the volume includes several score of photos and nearly 90 maps and other drawings. Unusual for Google is that many of the maps were scanned in color at reasonably high resolution.

Looking at this volume sends one down the rabbit hole, so what Staff has done is separate the photos and maps into separate files at original resolution, along with creating a 36 meg reduced size copy of the original 88 meg behemoth. Hopefully this will make things more manageable.

Railroad Grade Crossing and Terminal Investigation Los Angeles - low resolution
Maps - original resolution
Photos - original resolution

New to the Miscellaneous Documents page is a 100 page, August, 1994 edition of SP Mechanical Department's "Locomotive Data Book" (think: diesel roster for SP, D&RGW, SSW).

	Some time ago Staff posted a page of commentary regarding various badges and pins that SP put out over the years that in retrospect, failed to achieve their intended purposes. Here are some more:
	Staff has never encountered one of these before, but we figure that this was a Mechanical Department ID. The institutional appearance of the badge suggests that SP was indeed a family - a crime family. A couple of SP rails that we knew occasionally spent time in jail in between switching boxcars. Did these badges also function as prison ID's?
	As near as we can tell, this rather startling Action Comics style button appeared in the mid-1980's to promote some long-forgotten trains on the T&L lines. Now who in the hell would wear one of these things without a gun held to his head? Traffic Department guys were not exactly Versace models, but they had their pride, after all. We can see a customer uttering the F-word under his breath as an SP salesman walked through the door wearing one of these babies. This image was contributed by a guy who wishes it to be firmly known that this button pre-dated his tenure as an SP graphic design contractor.
	This button is the most attractive SP button that staff ever encountered. It advertised a 21st Century band whose members probably had never heard of the Southern Pacific Railroad.

Shasta Division Archives

One of our Questions for People with Answers:
xxxxxxxx'What gives' with this mystifying 1935 Coast Division "Motive Power Restrictions" map?

These clippings come from one of the more interesting SP maps that we have run across lately. It appears to be a paste-up for reproduction, because the legend seen here was literally pasted onto the map. More remarkable is what it in essence says: SP's 4-4-0's were banned from Coast Division branch lines, save Tres Pinos and Surf. Frankly, Staff is stumped as why this was so, especially given that, by this time, SP's 4-4-0 roster consisted of a handful of E-23's, mostly assigned to San Joaquin Valley branch lines and secondary passenger runs. The ban was almost a moot point. So, what gives?

Shasta Division Archives

Employee timetable #13 comes to us courtesy of Tim Zukas, who has likewise supplied us with a copy of a public timecard for that date. He also has lately forwarded nearly a hundred timetables (Midwest, East, South, Canada), all of which are now online on his Maps & timetables page.

Tucumcari Yard, 1929 - LARGE 1929 Engineering Department stations maps for EAST and WEST ends; by the time Wx4 staff arrived there in 1984, it was a ghost of its former self - Shasta Division Archives; see also Jawbone Dispatching Comes to Tucumcari


Six more Shasta Division Maps, including what you have been waiting for - Zuluka!

"The Complete Deetz" in our SP Shasta Division Engineering Maps section is now even more complete with the addition of a 1904 "Dietz" Station Map. Hold off on your celebrations, for several more Shasta Division maps will appear shortly. In the meantime, Staff anticipates being diluged with questions pertinent to this flag stop's history and evolution, many of which are already answered on the page, BTW.

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] - LATE EDIT: Now on a dedicated page that includes maps referenced in the correspondence

Staff admits that we 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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