Nostalgia & History > Cab Ride To Alameda Island, OT 97 Swap With AB 44, 6/5/93

Once upon a time there were two unique shortline railroad operations in the Oakland area, The Oakland Terminal that served the former Oakland Army Base and portions of
The Port of Oakland and The Alameda Belt that served various industries on Alameda Island and the large Navy base there. Both railroads were under the same management
in the early 1990s and used the same locomotives, fomer Santa Fe low nose GP7s formerly 2197 and 2144.
On June 5th, 1993 Howard Wise, of locomotive restoration fame who worked for OT, arranged to let me ride along when 97 was taken to Alameda Island to replace 44.
Phil Copple, OT and AB Manager was on board and since we had to run over the SP mainline in Oakland, the late Errol Ohlman, veteran SP hoghead ran the locomotive.
I've posted segments from the SP portion of the trip here and will attempt to add the Alameda Belt portion seprately.
Little is left of either railroad today and all track on Alameda Island has been removed.

Regards, Jim Evans

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These are awesome Jim, so much of West Oakland changed when 880 was moved. I recognize a couple of the old buildings that I saw with my Dad when we went poking around there, but were gone by the time I started my first job in The City.

Never did see a train on Alameda, wonder if that old bridge could even move now.

Nathan

Posted from iPhone

Was that the back of Brian Copple's head in the first clip? He typically wore those blue pen striped shirts.

Thank you Jim. So much has changed. No more trackage on Alemada Island. No more Fruitvale Tower, etc.

Great videos thanks so much for sharing. Right before you get to the bridge, it sounds like the engineer is talking about switches being removed following a derailment. There appears to a switch removed for the spur into the last industry on the Oakland side of the bridge. I was looking at Google Earth and it appears that the switch was put back in because there are cars at their spur in early 2000s. That's kind of cool. 

Drove through Alameda other day all the streeet running is paved over. 

Wow, that brought back memories. For a couple of months I worked the Alameda Job out of Oakland (for SP of course in the very early '80's) and I was shocked at all the changes in your video, especially around Fruitvale, that had happened after I worked the job going over there. Neat stuff.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/20 15:00 by Railbaron.

Right across the bridge was a derail that had to be correct and nobody there had the right key.
Had to call SP MW and they took a while to show up.
Regards, Jim Evans

Thanks again for sharing these.....

Thanks for posting these made my day Thanks Dennis

Wow! Thanks for posting these Jim.

         The DRGW 3024 spent many years on the Cimmaron Valley RR  at Satanta, Ks and has now moved on to its third owner in 2020.