Nostalgia & History > SP Coast/Valley (CA) train register - June 22, 1981

Had more requests to see additional registers so here is another one showing westbounds leaving LA for San Luis Obispo and Bakersfield.  I will be posting a few more later with some interesting info:

8323 West, YUWJS (Sugar beets), conductor Wolford, engineer Hellikson (LA to SLO)
9223 West, LAEUY (detour via the Coast), Hampton and Neal (LA to SLO)
8504 West, WCOAT, Lowrey and Waage (LA to SLO - Ken Waage was an SLO based hoghead)
9113 West, LAWJY, Mitchell and Cipolla (LA to SLO - yes, that is the "Godfather" Vince Cipolla)
9284 West, LABKY, Driscoll and Siembieda (LA to Mojave/Bakersfied - hoghead is a TO member)
9228 West, LAOAC, Kadluboski and Craig (LA to SLO)
8667 West, YUWJS, Kracht and Hull (LA to SLO)
8571 West, LABRF, Vaughan and Senior (LA to Bakersfield)
9362 West, LABRT, Baca and Kerste (LA to Bakersfield)

Allen



 

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YUWJS- Yuma (az) Watsonville Jct- sugar beets
OALC OA-LA containers

rantoul Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> How did San Louis Obispo become WJS or OAT or OAC
> and what is YU for Los Angeles?  I do not
> understand the naming convention.  In advance,
> thanks.
>  

WJ = Watsonville, Jct.
YU = Yuma, AZ
OA = Oakland

As an example the "OAT" listed is short for train WCOAT (West Colton to Oakland Trailers) that ran at the time, via San Luis Obispo.

The sugar beet trains ran with a couple of different symbols but here the loads are listed as YUWJS (Yuma to Watsonville, Jct Sugar Beets).  At the time SP was running sugar beets up the Coast Line to both Union Sugar near Guadalupe and Spreckles Sugar near Salinas, which was a rare event.  1981 was probably the last really big year for sugar beets on SP.  It was a slow decline from there as corn syrup stated taking over the sweetner market.

Allen
 

Thanks very much for posting these.  They bring back great memories of the crews that went by me at Gemco a couple years prior to this Register page.  Of course, I had the "opportunity" to run into a couple of them again as Assistant Superintendent of the Division.  Engineer Ernie Hull was a regular on the Northridge Switcher while I was at Gemco along with Conductor John Binford.  They had one of the few female fire"persons" on the railroad in the late 70s as part of their crew for awhile.  Believe her name was Robin Hornbuckle?  The "Godfather" and I got to know each other very well as I completed my testing requirements around Raymer.  "San Joaquin Engineer" Guerin showed up a lot on extra Chats Haulers with the Auto Parts late 70s early 80s.  All great people who knew how to get a train over the road on a great railroad!

Pete

Nice lineup!

rantoul Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> How did San Louis Obispo become WJS or OAT or OAC
> and what is YU for Los Angeles?  I do not
> understand the naming convention.  In advance,
> thanks.
>  


To put it simply, the first set of letters in the ID are the initials of the originating terminal and the second set for the terminating terminal. Thus the YUWJS symbol would be Yuma to Watsonville JCT, and the train would route through Los Angeles, up the SP Coast, through San Luis Obispo where you see the register is located, as SLO was a crew change point and the reason for the register. for the west and east crews
Hope this explains your question.




V

SLOCONDR

I was browsing through the N&H forum this morning and looking a little more carefully at the train register form itself I spied
something that might be an interesting bit of trivia.

In both the 'Cars in Train' and 'Handled on Trip' columns, to the right of the Loads/Empties column are the letters 'MS'. The conductors
on these trains have entered the tonnage of their train but the Espee for many years used a peculiar way for indicating tonnage.
An 'M' was a unit of 1000 pounds. The term M's was one used by SP and PE for calculating weight and can be found in employees
timetables back into the 1940's and beyond to  show how many units of 1000 pounds a particular locomotive was rated between specific points.
I wonder if what we see on these train registers was a hold over or a typo from years past that was never corrected, at least not as of July 1968,
the date these forms was printed. 

If 'MS' means 'M's' as it was known back in the day then those tonnage figures shown in 1981 were seriously in error and to be fair to the
brothers, SP had long ago discarded the M = 1000 pounds system of calculating weight of trains so no real harm was done. Just my thoughts.
Any comments worthy brothers?

Charlie 
 

Tunnage is right for those trains