Nostalgia & History > Signor's SP in San Francisco Tome

Great book, recommend it to all. Unfortunately, not a word on the SP's extensive car ferry operations at their Mission Bay slip which lasted into the 30's nor anything on the mysterious carfloat barge no. 1, the SP's 1927 Moore Drydock-built steel carfloat that was used in the SP's Tiburon-San Francisco(presumably to the State Belt) carfloat service probably up until the  NWP's Puerto Suello tunnel burned in 1961, which cut off Tiburon, and the NWP-SP interchange, from nearly all of the railroad.   

You can't blame Mr. Signor as the marine operations were an awfully tiny part of a huge operation that he had to cover. But the field is clear for a very lengthy, very in-depth Trainline article on SP's maritime freight navy operations on San Francisco Bay, with many details on the use of carfloat barge no. 1, and copious pictures of switching activities at Mission Bay slip. 

  



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/22/23 10:22 by phthithu.

I would welcome Maritime information as my Grandfather worked for SP maritime but passed when I was six years old. Side note. He was a very good baseball player and turned down a major league contract to stay employed with the SP. Money was better. That's the story anyways. Boy have times changed. 

It's too bad that "Uncle" Fred Stindt is long gone as his NWP/Tiburon knowledge was encylopedic and would surely have known all about this service.  It also served Sausalito after a freight slip was installed there during the war years, yes?

WP-M2051 Wrote:
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> It's too bad that "Uncle" Fred Stindt is long gone
> as his NWP/Tiburon knowledge was encylopedic and
> would surely have known all about this service.
>  It also served Sausalito after a freight slip
> was installed there during the war years, yes?

I'm not sure about Sausalito after the war because the San Francisco-Tiburon service is something that shows up in the Port Series books which were a USACE publication detailing each port's infrastructure and services. So, there's an entry in there listing the SP's service as San Francisco-Tiburon and I believe showing carfloat barge no. 1 as the vessel. Haven't come across anything yet that includes Sausalito's slip. If that slip did get postwar carfloat service perhaps it was just Santa Fe traffic. 

Tiburon's stationmaster and agent W.R. Bent wrote a piece on Tiburon yard activities during the 1920's. He detailed, briefly, how a yard crew would break up an arriving freight for loading onto a carfloat. There would be some hot cars with export freight destined for a ship that was about to leave and those would be segregated and then loaded in a particular way to expedite their delivery I guess. Perhaps in the 50's that kind of freight, be it for export or a NWP shipper with a spur switched by the Belt, would have required the SP to be able to dispatch their carfloat pretty quickly, I'm guessing employing a Crowley tug but that's a guess, to Tiburon to move those cars as quickly as possible. Fruit for example headed to the produce market, although by the 50's that was probably trucked? 
 

  

 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/23/23 12:50 by phthithu.

A lot of little errors like saying the Hamms used to be Lucky brewery when it was Rainer before Hamms and Lucky beer was always way over by Carrol.