IMG035-SP-130-departing
There was a little alley in San Francisco back of the Southern
Pacific station at Third and Townsend in redbrick of drowsy lazy
afternoons with everybody at work in offices in the air you feel
the impending rush of their commuter frenzy as soon they’ll be
charging en masse from Market and Sansome buildings on foot
and in buses and all well-dressed thru workingman Frisco of
Walkup ?? truck drivers and even the poor grime-bemarked Third
Street of lost bums even Negros so hopeless and long left East
and meanings of responsibility and try that now all they do is
stand there spitting in the broken glass sometimes fifty in one
afternoon against one wall at Third and Howard and here’s all
these Millbrae and San Carlos neat-necktied producers and
commuters of America and Steel civilization rushing by with San
Francisco Chronicles and green Call-Bulletins not even enough
time to be disdainful, they’ve got to catch 130, 132, 134, 136 all
the way up to 146 till the time of evening supper in homes of the
railroad earth when high in the sky the magic stars ride above
the following hotshot freight trains--it’s all in California, it’s all a
sea, I swim out of it in afternoons of sun hot meditation in my
jeans with head on handkerchief on brakeman’s lantern or (if not
working) on book, I look up at blue sky of perfect lostpurity and
feel the warp of wood of old America beneath me and I* have
insane conversations with Negroes in second*-story windows
above and everything is pouring in, the switching moves of
boxcars in that little alley which is so much like the alleys of
Lowell and I hear far off in the sense of coming night that engine
calling our mountains.
Jack Kerouac-October in the Railroad Earth
On 12 Februrary 1974, a friend and I visited the Bay Area for a first ride on BART as well as a trip on the SP commutes. We were planning to go over Christmas break, taking the Coast Starlight from Davis to Richmond, riding BART, then going to the SP's 3rd and Townsend Street station to catch a commute, pulled by an H-24-66, to San Jose and the Starlight back to Davis and home.
This was the very end of 3rd and Townsend, the station SP had built for the 1915 Pan-Pacific Exposition as a temporary structure that somehow held on for almost 60 years, through wars and streamlined Daylights and Larks and dieselization and Amtrak ending long distance passenger service into SF, and now, here it was, with a couple of SDP45s supplementing the F-Ms and Geeps that had been the commute power since the day I was born when diesels took over the commutes from the last of SP's steam.
Within a year or so, the F-Ms were gone and a new station was built south of 4th Street, which Caltrain still uses and is now over 40 years old itself, as old as 3rd and Townsend was when Kerouac and Neal Cassady were working for SP and they and their fellow Beats were having poetry readings in North Beach.
In 1974, there were flagmen who would block 4th Street to traffic when a train was due to leave or arrive at the station during the day. They would come out with their STOP signs from their little cabins and hold up cars for a few seconds until the train cleared, then go back to doing whatever they had been doing.
When rush hour approached and some of the trains extended beyond 4th Street, they would extend a chain across 4th Street and open up 5th Street a block south and flag that for the evening commute parade. 130, the first train that Kerouac mentions in Railroad Earth left at 514 and ran non stop down to what we now call Silicon Valley, before making its stops. In 1974, it was one of the first trains to have an SDP45 and ran with 9 gallery cars, which extended over 4th Street, as did some of the other trains. SP dispatched trains at 3 minute intervals at the rush hour, and my 1958 Official Guide shows the same train numbers and times as prevailed at rush hour in 1974.
Today, Caltrain runs a different service, reflecting that many people are commuting south in the morning and north in the afternoon as Santa Clara County has turned from a bedroom community to an economic powerhouse. The whole neighborhood has changed with former SP yards and freight houses now apartments and condos, and the Giants' 3 Com Park a few blocks north. Streetcars again serve the station with Muni's E, N and T lines.
IMG035-SP-130-departing
There was a little alley in San Francisco back of the Southern
Pacific station at Third and Townsend in redbrick of drowsy lazy
afternoons with everybody at work in offices in the air you feel
the impending rush of their commuter frenzy as soon they’ll be
charging en masse from Market and Sansome buildings on foot
and in buses and all well-dressed thru workingman Frisco of
Walkup ?? truck drivers and even the poor grime-bemarked Third
Street of lost bums even Negros so hopeless and long left East
and meanings of responsibility and try that now all they do is
stand there spitting in the broken glass sometimes fifty in one
afternoon against one wall at Third and Howard and here’s all
these Millbrae and San Carlos neat-necktied producers and
commuters of America and Steel civilization rushing by with San
Francisco Chronicles and green Call-Bulletins not even enough
time to be disdainful, they’ve got to catch 130, 132, 134, 136 all
the way up to 146 till the time of evening supper in homes of the
railroad earth when high in the sky the magic stars ride above
the following hotshot freight trains--it’s all in California, it’s all a
sea, I swim out of it in afternoons of sun hot meditation in my
jeans with head on handkerchief on brakeman’s lantern or (if not
working) on book, I look up at blue sky of perfect lostpurity and
feel the warp of wood of old America beneath me and I* have
insane conversations with Negroes in second*-story windows
above and everything is pouring in, the switching moves of
boxcars in that little alley which is so much like the alleys of
Lowell and I hear far off in the sense of coming night that engine
calling our mountains.
Jack Kerouac-October in the Railroad Earth
On 12 Februrary 1974, a friend and I visited the Bay Area for a first ride on BART as well as a trip on the SP commutes. We were planning to go over Christmas break, taking the Coast Starlight from Davis to Richmond, riding BART, then going to the SP's 3rd and Townsend Street station to catch a commute, pulled by an H-24-66, to San Jose and the Starlight back to Davis and home.
This was the very end of 3rd and Townsend, the station SP had built for the 1915 Pan-Pacific Exposition as a temporary structure that somehow held on for almost 60 years, through wars and streamlined Daylights and Larks and dieselization and Amtrak ending long distance passenger service into SF, and now, here it was, with a couple of SDP45s supplementing the F-Ms and Geeps that had been the commute power since the day I was born when diesels took over the commutes from the last of SP's steam.
Within a year or so, the F-Ms were gone and a new station was built south of 4th Street, which Caltrain still uses and is now over 40 years old itself, as old as 3rd and Townsend was when Kerouac and Neal Cassady were working for SP and they and their fellow Beats were having poetry readings in North Beach.
In 1974, there were flagmen who would block 4th Street to traffic when a train was due to leave or arrive at the station during the day. They would come out with their STOP signs from their little cabins and hold up cars for a few seconds until the train cleared, then go back to doing whatever they had been doing.
When rush hour approached and some of the trains extended beyond 4th Street, they would extend a chain across 4th Street and open up 5th Street a block south and flag that for the evening commute parade. 130, the first train that Kerouac mentions in Railroad Earth left at 514 and ran non stop down to what we now call Silicon Valley, before making its stops. In 1974, it was one of the first trains to have an SDP45 and ran with 9 gallery cars, which extended over 4th Street, as did some of the other trains. SP dispatched trains at 3 minute intervals at the rush hour, and my 1958 Official Guide shows the same train numbers and times as prevailed at rush hour in 1974.
Today, Caltrain runs a different service, reflecting that many people are commuting south in the morning and north in the afternoon as Santa Clara County has turned from a bedroom community to an economic powerhouse. The whole neighborhood has changed with former SP yards and freight houses now apartments and condos, and the Giants' 3 Com Park a few blocks north. Streetcars again serve the station with Muni's E, N and T lines.