Nostalgia & History > The Lark with one tunnel to go

The "Lark" headed by PA 6024 rolls out of Tunnel Two and past the 23rd st station. Tunnel One is just ahead and and in a few minutes it will be pulling into San Franciscos Third & Townsend Station. The "Lark" had about 8 more years of life in her after this 1960 photo was taken. This train use to follow SP's "Fleet" up the Peninsula on weekdays.

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Difficult to imagine what those giant sized PG&E tanks held, sheesh.

geez, wish parts of SF looked like this today. Dumb people with their automobiles and freeways!

comparison shot from what this place looks like today except looking the other way (North) towards the City...

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~~~ looking the same way but with the hillside cut off on the right. Hey, but you can still walk down those same rickety old wood steps as shown in P-Bob's photo today to reach the station platform. Main change today is CalTrain calls it 22nd Avenue station...

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What's the deal with the "hanging chains" above both tracks, looks like those "check your height" thingys when entering a parking garage?

Tell tales left over from the old days to warn trainmen to get down or get off the tops of cars. Low clearance or tunnel ahead.

Natural Gas tanks and tell tales. Gaaaaah I can't be getting that old. Those tanks used to be all over the place. Used to be several down by LAUPT, Pasadena City power plant by the SP, UP and Santa Fe tracks. San Francisco among other places.

The tanks held natural gas as the volume and pressure increased they raised telescoping sections. The sections had gas seals, and the tanks basically kept the pressure fairly constant and expanded and contracted automatically.

Not sure where I saw the last one, but it's been years. Anybody seen one lately?

TCnR Wrote:
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> Difficult to imagine what those giant sized
> PG&E tanks held, sheesh.

They were full of money...Untill the Texas Enrons took it all a few years back!
We don't use them anymore. The boys from T&R said the great compresor stations we have did away for the need for storage. The boys in the hood used to at shoot the one in Bobs photo. When our crews scraped them they found darn near a coffee can full of lead! No danger in them exploding, but did the shooters know that? Would of made a good Darwin award.

espeeboy Wrote:
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> geez, wish parts of SF looked like this today.
> Dumb people with their automobiles and freeways!

The same could be said for the once beautiful city of Los Angeles. What a horrible place compared to what it used to be in the pre-freeway and automobile days.

As I remember, they used to call those big tanks - - gas holders.

n6nvr Wrote:
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<SNIP>
>
> Not sure where I saw the last one, but it's been
> years. Anybody seen one lately?

There iwas one right alongside the 405 freeway west of the Long Beach airport until about 4 or 5 years ago, when they tore it down. Don't think it was near any rail, though. Local legends talk about it being hit by light planes on an occasion or two

jose

distantlightsecho Wrote:
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> espeeboy Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > geez, wish parts of SF looked like this
> today.
> > Dumb people with their automobiles and
> freeways!
>
> The same could be said for the once beautiful city
> of Los Angeles. What a horrible place compared to
> what it used to be in the pre-freeway and
> automobile days.
>
>
>


I beleive it, and the sad part is LAncaster and Palmdale are starting to get just as bad becuase of all the crap in LA is headed up that way! Glad I left when I did!

>What's the deal with the "hanging chains" above both tracks, looks like those "check your height" thingys when entering a parking garage?

"tell-tales"

>Natural Gas tanks and tell tales. Gaaaaah I can't be getting that old. Those tanks used to be all over the place. Used to be several down by LAUPT, Pasadena City power plant by the SP, UP and Santa Fe tracks. San Francisco among other places.

>The tanks held natural gas as the volume and pressure increased they raised telescoping sections. The sections had gas seals, and the tanks basically kept the pressure fairly constant and expanded and contracted automatically.

Gasholders are a left over from the days of gasifying coal. The gas plant for this gas holder was about three blocks to the left, next to Potrero Powerplant at Humbolt and Louisiana Sts. There was another over by the foot of Market St in Oakland, which had two telescoping gas holders. Coal was heated in an inert atmoshpere, and the resulting gasses were pumped into these holders for later use when demand was high. There were two types of holders. One had telecsoping sections and a water trough seal--these are the ones which rose and fell in sections. The other type were like the one in the pic; there was a large internal piston with a rubber seal (and, I was told by a reliable source, a free swining elevator inside to get to the top of the piston for servicing). After the gas plants were shut down, these holders were used for storage purposes only (there is also underground gas storage at McDonald Island in the delta, where PG&E pumps gas back into the ground for later use).

In 1965 I had a summer job working on the construction of Potrero Unit #3, and the coal gas plant was still there, completely there. As with all PG&E installations of the time, the place was absolutely spotless, floor to ceiling, even though the Company had ceased gasifying coal around 1920. I though about taking some pictures, but never got around to it--some of the machinery was quite antique. I'm not sure when this was torn down, but the one in Oakland was demolished in favor of container storage yard expansion in the mid 1980s. They cut open the holders and let them sit for several weeks. Since I still had my key, I snuck in and took several pictures of the interior. It turns out that with the telescoping holders, the bottom section was always completely filled with water. As gas was pumped in, a section would start to rise (commencing with the center one and then sequentially to the outermost one) and a trough around the outside of the rim of the bottom of the section wall trapped enough water to make a gas tight seal with a lip which extended down from the inner top of the section below it. This means the pressure inside the holder was never greater than about 15 inches of water (the gas in your house runs at a pressure of something like 3 inches of water). It's also difficult to conceive of gas pressure this low supporting all that weight, but it did. This weight was also the pump which forced the gas out into the distribution system.

Also see: http://www.gasometer.org/en/ an English language page of an Austrian site.

Thanks to photobob and espeeboy for those great comparison shots of 22nd/23rd Street. Hard to believe it was ever out in the open.