Nostalgia & History > Auxilliary Transbay Terminal-- Key System Days

How many of you know that the State of California and Bridge Railway engineers had originally studied the idea of having an Auxilliary Transbay Terminal for all of the Bridge trains, a few more blocks uptown from the one we are all familiar with at 1st & Mission Streets.  This could have been extra fun for the GRS train control and signaling systems.  The MAP shown in the photo, gives you an idea of what kind of plan was thought of...   See if YOU understand it and how it might have worked !

Cheers.

Ken Shattock
KRK

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What a crazy idea. All that expense to end up behind the Emporium!  Guess they forgot about the Muni and the Market Street Ry running up and down Mission Street  all the time; on the other hand you would be only one block from Powell St and the heart of The City.

Since the drawing is dated December, 1934 I susoect the auxially station idea was to get riders closer to Powell & Market where that area was the busiest for shopping. Just a thought!

How close would that have put them to the SP station? Looks pretty close, maybe even right across the street?

​One thing I would have done differently to avoid a LOT of signaling complexity is made the northernmost tracks at the Transbay only able to depart via the auxiliary terminal/loop (which would connect to the outbound side of the Transbay loop instead of running back throough the station) and the rest would have had to loop out as was ultimately built, with NO access to the auxiliary terminal. Cut down on a LOT of switches and having to run bidirectional out the east end of the Transbay.

Not sure whether IER or Key would have been the best choice initially to serve the auxiliary terminal, although it would have fallen all to Key System in short order. SN would have been out of luck in my book.

In such a high-density operation as was designed, you want to avoid having to run bidirectional at near ANY cost, that will cut your throughput.

NZ



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/22/17 17:35 by NebraskaZephyr.

In addition to providing a connection to the Union Square commercial district, this facility would provide additional layover daytime capacity for East Bay trains.

j.k