Nostalgia & History > Old days on the SP: SFO & OAK coachyards?

60 years ago, the SP dispatched coast line trains from San Francisco and Oakland sent cars in all directions. Having two coachyards had to be an expensive proposition. How much servicing could be done in San Francisco? How much car repair could be done there before the car had to go elsewhere - like to Oakland?

Don't quite understand the question, but Oakland was a larger center of operations. SF just serviced the Daylight and Lark, plus the commuter cars. The only consolidation of operations was when LA was closed in 1968 and SF did the Daylight servicing. It's the number of employees that counted and Russell made sure the pasenger department had bare bone amounts if that.

The closure of the LA shops resulted in the Sunset equipment deadheading to San Francisco on the Daylight.

I guess I could rephrase the question: Oakland had the larger yard withgreater capabilities. At what point did a job become something that San Francisco could not do? Changing a wheelset? Rebuild after a fire? Repaint?

There used to be a lot of that done in the buildings at Bayshore, but I don't know when that ended. One of the old switchmen in SF once told me a story about shoving a cut of passenger cars into a track in the shops at Bayshore and someone missing a stop sign. By the time they got stopped, the end of the cut of cars had punched through the closed doors, and they were just short of a car up on horses. The door hinges, now devoid of doors, flapped back and forth in perfect time to break all the windows dead center on each side of the car which went through the doors.

The OAKLAND Coach Yard could repair just about anything. Quite a facility in its own right.
Supported by a very active Commissary Dept.
And the world's largest industrial laundry-- over one million pieces of linen per month.
"Eddie Hoagland" was the Master Mechanic in the 50's and 60's. Great guy. Knew him well
I'll have to find a couple of old photos in my archives. Thanks for bringing it up.

"Key Route Ken"...