Nostalgia & History > U.P. Tidewater Job street running in Modesto

Sometime in July of 1988 we headed to Northern California for a family vacation and, of course, a little railfanning along the way. One of my targets that trip was to get a train operating over a stretch of trackage down the middle of busy 9th Street in Modesto. This was originally part of the old Tidewater Southern Railway but was now owned by the UP and it hosted a local that ran from Stockton to Modesto, often using ex-WP power. I’m not sure how I knew the train was coming but I remember waiting in a curbed island at a crosswalk in the middle of 9th St as the local approached. Former WP GP35, UP 790 slowly makes its way north through traffic before making a sharp curve to join the more conventional right-of-way back up to Stockton. Today, the tracks in the street are gone, last I could find the 790 was part of Watco, an overpass now runs above where I was standing, and the gas prices…nothing needs to be said there. Thanks for looking back.

OYW  
 

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Nice catch!
JB

Yea and the gas prices too.

Interesting image and a very unique horn.   What is it?

Fizzboy7 Wrote:
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> Interesting image and a very unique horn.   What
> is it?
Mounted backwards?

Fizzboy7 Wrote:

> Interesting image and a very unique horn.   What is it?

Looks like either a Leslie S-3L or its doppelgänger, the Prime 920.  They were fairly common horns used extensively by UP and Santa Fe in the west as well as by a number of roads in the midwest and east.  The three bells could be mounted in just about any arrangement forward or backward on the three positions of the manifold (I don't think the two largest bells could be side by side facing the same direction, but anything else was fair game).  The standard configuration had the two largest bells on the outermost positions facing forward and the smallest bell in the middle facing backward.  The horn on UP 790 looks like it has the largest bell on the center position facing forward and the other two on the outer positions facing aft.  So it's an uncommon arrangement of a common horn, and it may have sounded a shade different from the norm, but it probably worked just fine as a warning device.

If you think 9th Street was busy then, imagine it 25 years earlier, before the freeway was built some 4 blocks to the west. At that time Modesto's 9th Street was also the "99" highway. A TS train running down the middle could get a driver's attention of even a non-railfan.

Ahhhh, the Red Lion Hotel and parking garage tower in the distance.  Spent many weeks there while working at a plant out on Crows Landing Road.

Thank you for the image.  I have some Kodacolor prints I took while out there (......let's see,  <rummage> <rummage>)