Nostalgia & History > variety on UP's San Pedro Branch . . .

. . the eighties provided alot of variety on Los Angeles area UP locals which included the two regular locals as well as "extra Pedros" that ran on UP's twenty one mile San Pedro Branch that ran south from the west end of UP's East LA yard to end of track litterally at waters edge on Terminal Island. In June '83 a pair of exWP GP's led an "extra Pedro" coming off SP's Long Beach Branch onto UP's San Pedro Branch at Manual with an empty unit grain train from Koppel Bulk in the Port of Long Beach. Of interest is the Terminal Island Freeway off to the left. This three mile State Hwy 103 which is used mostly by trucks running between the Ports and SP's large Intermodal Container Transfer Facility on week days is very popular with Hollywood and was used for the filming of chase and crash scenes for many movies including "Terminator 2" "Mr and Mrs Smith" "Get Smart" to name just a few. Also in the distance can be seen the Gerald Desmond bridge linking Terminal Island with Long Beach also very truck heavy and amazingly will be replaced in the near future with a higher bridge as it is not high enough for todays super container ships. In FEB '85 a pair of exMP GP's were leading the appropriately nicknamed "Tuna Fish" local returning to East LA yard northbound passing through North Long Beach with six loads of tuna fish from the canneries on Terminal Island. For a short period UP brought some of it's B23's to the LA area for local service as three were southbound with the afternooon "Harbor Local" near Bell on the branch. The signal in the distance is the "automatic interlocking" protecting the crossing of SP's La Habra Branch.
JB



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/02/14 09:04 by 3rdswitch.

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Good bunch. I wish I had railfanned it more.Bill Webb

Great set of 3 and neat story about the Hwy. I never got to see much Western Pacific. Thanks.
Brian Stevens

Thanks, JB. Reminds me of the KP in the early 80s.

Bob Helling
PRose

I always liked running the B-23s but they rode terribly on the 'Pedro branch. The max speed on the branch was 20 and the "baby Bs" had a major harmonic rock between 15 and 18 mph which ended up getting them banned from the "Pedro branch due to the crews complaining. One certain crew (who will remain nameless) threatened to pull the air on the engineer if they went over 15 mph. Fortunately I never had the air pulled on me while working with them.-BMT

Oh man, I'd take a guess at who that might have been Brian but there are too many possibilities. Send me a PM. LOL! But yeah, the harmonics on the "high line" could get pretty crazy.

By the time I got there we were mostly using ex-WP GP35s (painted yellow by then) and occasionally SD40-2s. They rocked pretty good too on that stretch but nothing like the baby boats.

Great shots, JB. Love the scene with the two WP GP40-2s.

Thanks for sharing.

~Ryan

And that first photo has a great view of the power lines running north from the Long Beach generating stations. Hard to tell at this distance, but it looks like the stacks for the Long Beach #3 plant are still in place. This plant was completed in 1929-30, and at the time had the two largest generating units in the US. The building was concrete, but the west wall was of steel construction, and I was told that the plant was originally planned to have four 100 megawatt units, but start of the Depression caused the expansion to be postponed for better times. By the time system load increased to where another 200 mw would be needed, power plant design had changed, and the "temporary" wall was still there when the plant was finally retired and dismantled in the 1980s or 90s.