Railroaders' Nostalgia > Booze & Beer Bottles: SP's Visitation Shanty Collapse

OK, if you worked for Southern Pacific, you've likely heard the tale about the Bayshore Yard Visitation switchmen shanty's ceiling collapse under the weight of an accumulation (probably many decades - worth) of empty booze and beer bottles, purportedly onto a gathering of employees lolling-away their spot time. I have never been able to track down an eyewitness, despite having worked as a trainmen out of S.F. for several years in the 70's and 80's.

Did this really happen? When? Any further intelligence on the matter?

Also, does anyone have a photo of Visitation shanty that I could post on my DomeO'foam website? Since the Dome is in part a tribute to the dysfunctional side (meaning the majority of) railroading, the Visitation mess seems like a natural.

Say that it really happened, boys and girls!

- E.O. Gibson
Wx4.org



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/18/14 17:02 by hogheaded.

Never saw anything like this in the Visitacion shanty, but the top end one's ceiling was like this until some of the switchmen cleaned it out so it wouldn't collapse (I know of at least one empty glass gallon jug of wine which was put up there). I did hear a story that Big Daddy was caught banging on the top end's walls one day trying to determine how many hollow spots were full of beer cans. Someone asked him about banging on the ceiling, and he replied that he didn't want it coming down around his ears.

I don't know if this is an industry wide rumor or not--For I have heard the same thing told about the old crew office at Bellefountaine, Ohio by the old NYC men I hired out with...Perhaps it happened once--as all good railroader stories have an ounce of truth in them--along with a pound of embellishment--but it seems that it would be a "likely happened somewhere sometime on some railroad" and it's too funny not to bear repeating elsewhere!

Something must have happened for The Bear to take his fist to the walls. I recall him as having a generally 'hands-off' policy towards employees unless trouble arose. He was pretty good at making his point without resorting to discipline. Certainly Visitation, and especially South City, were not exactly known as teetotalers' hangouts, yet I don't specifically recall hearing of any 'raids'.

Good point about the story possibly being an industry-wide 'urban legend', like the coupled-up-guy-kissing-momma-goodby story that we all were subjected to as new hires.

If the story is true in the context of Visitation, it would be interesting to find out how local officials reacted.

hogheaded Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Good point about the story possibly being an
> industry-wide 'urban legend', like the
> coupled-up-guy-kissing-momma-goodby story that we
> all were subjected to as new hires.
>
> If the story is true in the context of Visitation,
> it would be interesting to find out how local
> officials reacted.

Okay, I'll bite. . . . .

What is the "coupled-up-guy-kissing-momma-goodbye" story??

I remember the shanty up at the west end. (There was nothing left at Visitation. The herder was up near the yard tracks.) It was up, near the puzzle switch and the signals to get on the main line into Tunnel 4. They said when they went to tear it down, the walls were full of mty booze bottles. A lot of pints and half pints, they fit just right in a back bib pocket.

I was firing a switch engine one morning and we were switching the Lucky Lager Brewery. The switch Foreman gave us a coffee sign and we all went up to the tap room. Everyone was sitting around drinking the free beer when the boss walked in. He went over, got a beer and sat down with the Foremen. They went over some new switch lists and what he wanted done when we got back to the top end. That's the way they did things back then.


Nudge

>Good point about the story possibly being an industry-wide 'urban legend', like the coupled-up-guy-kissing-momma-goodby story that we all were subjected to as new hires.

A few years after hiring out, one of the guys about 20 numbers ahead of me told of personally witnessing just such and incident at South SF involving a passenger train which had broken in two and was being put back together.

>I was firing a switch engine one morning and we were switching the Lucky Lager Brewery. The switch Foreman gave us a coffee sign and we all went up to the tap room. Everyone was sitting around drinking the free beer when the boss walked in. He went over, got a beer and sat down with the Foremen. They went over some new switch lists and what he wanted done when we got back to the top end. That's the way they did things back then.

I remember the tap room at Burgermeister (off the old main going up Division St), but ISTR Lucky Lager had an ice machine with unlabeled beer bottles (OTOH, I might have these backwards). I was told beer with lunch and coffee breaks was in the brewer's union contracts. At the time I couldn't stand either of the beers -- still can't stand beer brewed with rice.

>I remember the shanty up at the west end. (There was nothing left at Visitation. The herder was up near the yard tracks.) It was up, near the puzzle switch and the signals to get on the main line into Tunnel 4. They said when they went to tear it down, the walls were full of mty booze bottles. A lot of pints and half pints, they fit just right in a back bib pocket.

The top end shanty has been torn down? Last time I rode the train by about two or three years ago, it was still there, used as someone's storage facility.

Narniaman Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> What is the "coupled-up-guy-kissing-momma-goodbye"
> story??


I heard it as his wife, but basically goes that a guy on another division/road was switching and got caught and impaled between the couplers. Knowing he'll die the instant they pull them apart, he has them call his wife/momma down to the yard so he can say goodbye first.

I heard a simaler story when I was stationed at Ft Sill for my MOS training. We were the Marine Battery of the 2/80th field artillery training battalion. The story we heard was the ceiling colapsed in one of the squad bays. The beer cans and bottles dated back at least a decade but of coarse the current crop of jarheads took the hit. Of coarse you could never find anyone that witnessed this event but every once in a while one of the Staff Sergants would check up in those ceiling tiles.

First, I'm still hoping that someone has a photo, however poor, of the Visitation shanty.

Otherwise:

>I heard it as his wife, but basically goes that a guy on another division/road was switching and got caught and impaled between the couplers. Knowing he'll die the instant they pull them apart, he has them call his wife/momma down to the yard so he can say goodbye first.

I heard the coupling-up story, pretty much as you describe, as a new-hire switchman in San Jose (accident location: Oakland), and several times thereafter, including 15 years later while training in Delaware (accident location, Philadelphia). It got around, and the drama's location always was close-enough for immediacy, but far enough away to prevent convenient fact checking. I suspect, with absolutely no supporting evidence, that the story may have been printed in an old pulp novel or magazine, accounting for its wide circulation. I would not be surprised that last-kiss incident happened...once.


>A few years after hiring out, one of the guys about 20 numbers ahead of me told of personally witnessing just such and incident at South SF involving a passenger train which had broken in two and was being put back together.

So, about when was the passenger train coupling accident at South City, pre WWII? Pretty unusual for a passenger train to break-in-two, eh? I can see how it might have happened, given the brakes on the old Subs and Harrimans.

When I began braking on the Peninsula Commutes, one of the first bits of wisdom from my ancient-head conductor was about how to plug a train of Subs using a car's emergency valve. You would make a split reduction by first cracking the valve just enough to feel the brakes set, then yank all of the way to pop the vent valves. He claimed that otherwise the train would likely break-in-two (as you might suspect, the further back in the train that you hit the valve, the better your chances) because the Subs' cast iron clasp brakes would lock-up the wheels. I never witnessed this in action, but I soon found out what he roughly meant. A few days later the engineer big-holed our train at about 5-10mph as we departed Menlo. It was like hitting a brick wall! Some of the standees wound up on the floor on top of me.

>I remember the tap room at Burgermeister (off the old main going up Division St), but ISTR Lucky Lager had an ice machine with unlabeled beer bottles...At the time I couldn't stand either of the beers -- still can't stand beer brewed with rice.

Surely free beer at breweries (distributors too!) was another universal in railroading. Show of hands: How many of you switchmen lost your free beer privileges after one of your brothers got caught getting a little too greedy?

Amen about rice beers. On of my greatest laments is that I never got a chance to switch a whiskey distillery.

>I heard a simaler story when I was stationed at Ft Sill for my MOS training. We were the Marine Battery of the 2/80th field artillery training battalion. The story we heard was the ceiling colapsed in one of the squad bays.

Well,the railroads closely molded themselves after the military organizational model, after all. You taught us well, old soldiers!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/20/14 11:59 by hogheaded.

>So, about when was the passenger train coupling accident at South City, pre WWII?

Post WWII. As for that similar incident in Oakland, I worked there for over 20 years and this is the first I'v eheard of it.

>Pretty unusual for a passenger train to break-in-two, eh?

Yes. The only times I know of it happening in the last 25 years are #5 coming into Davis when the draft gear-coupler pin fell out (keeper hadn't been installed properly), when the engineer running the special train of Talgo equipment made too heavy a brake application at Berkeley and pulled something out of the [European toy] Talgo cars, just north of Chico when a motorist drove around the gates one night and struck the cutting lever between the engines just at the right angle to lift the pin, and on several occasions nationwide which were the result of the pin/knuckle mechanism being so fouled with dirt the pin didn't drop properly when the joint was made in the process of putting the train together in the originating passenger yard.

>I can see how it might have happened, given the brakes on the old Subs and Harrimans.

Nothing to do with brakes, everything to do with keeping the pin mechanisms relatively free of dirt. The SSF incident, which my source claimed to have witnessed, may have involved 98/99, the Lark, Del Monte, etc, and not a commute train.

A herder I used to work with once told me a story about a passenger train which broke in two when he was relatively new. He was herding at the top end (the Bayshore end of Bayshore yard), when the phone rang. Someone told him to go out and flag (i. e. stop) 98, which had just left the 3rd & Townsend. Upon stopping, the engineer imperially asked the guy "Young man, why did you stop THIS train?" When the herder pointed towards the rear and asked him "Where's the rest of it?" the guy completely lost his cool. What had happened was that near tunnel #1 the train had gone over a rough spot which was severe enough to cause the knuckles to pass. The air hose on the leading part of the train whipped around and wedged itself in the still-closed coupler, pinching off the brake pipe, which is why the engineer didn't know his train had parted.

>He claimed that otherwise the train would likely break-in-two (as you might suspect, the further back in the train that you hit the valve, the better your chances) because the Subs' cast iron clasp brakes would lock-up the wheels.

Sandhouse gossip. FIrst off, even a train of 10 or 15 subs -we used to call the subs "80-footers"- isn't heavy enough to cause a coupler or drawbar to fail (unless of course a knuckle is badly worn etc, which still happens on frt). Second off, the cars had been coverted to composition shoes sometime in the 1950s-1960s.

>On of my greatest laments is that I never got a chance to switch a whiskey distillery.

If you'd worked the Newark local which came across Dumbarton to switch Hublein, you could have sloshed the tank cars containing the 200 proof around enough to get them to leak out the safety valve, collect the run-off in a hard hat, and mix it with equal parts water to make 100 proof.

> As for that similar incident in Oakland, I worked there for over 20 years and this is the first I'v eheard of it.

My point precisely. It always took place somewhere else, Oakland, Philadelphia, Kalamazoo...

> the engineer running the special train of Talgo equipment made too heavy a brake application at Berkeley and pulled something out of the [European toy] Talgo cars

I ran the Talgo up the Peninsula, and the first thing that the equipt. rep told me was, when departing, keep the loco (a Caltrain F40) in run 1 until the train began to move. When moving, a 10 lb. set caused the train to squat down like I've never seen. A day or two later, I talked to another engineer who did not get that advice, and broke the Talgo in two the first time he attempted to move it.

> Sandhouse gossip. FIrst off, even a train of 10 or 15 subs -we used to call the subs "80-footers"- isn't heavy enough to cause a coupler or drawbar to fail (unless of course a knuckle is badly worn etc, which still happens on frt). Second off, the cars had been coverted to composition shoes sometime in the 1950s-1960s.

This is all contrary to my experience, but its cocktail hour...

>> Sandhouse gossip. FIrst off, even a train of 10 or 15 subs -we used to call the subs "80-footers"- isn't heavy enough to cause a coupler or drawbar to fail (unless of course a knuckle is badly worn etc, which still happens on frt). Second off, the cars had been coverted to composition shoes sometime in the 1950s-1960s.

>This is all contrary to my experience, but its cocktail hour...

Now that cocktail hours are over . . .

The 80-footers were routinely moved in freights between Mission Bay and West Oak Psgr Yd for servicing, paticularly after about 1974 when the wheel pit at Bayshore stopped being used. If what you say about plugging a 4-6 car train of them would routinely break them in two, hauling them in freights would have been even worse, and the SP wouldn't have ever done it. But they did.

Composition shoes produce more friction than cast iron, so when a car is converted from cast iron shoes to composition, its braking power has to be reduced. This can be done in one of two ways: reduce the leverage ratio (make a new set of brake levers) or bush the brake cylinder (reduce its diameter). If you have an 80-footer handy, take a look at the piston end of the brake cylinder. The 16" dia to 12" dia conversion kit is readily visible. All the 80-footers had this done, I don't know any thing specific about the "Harrimans", the shorter, main line coach verison of this type of car, but I wouldn't be surprised to find many were also converted, particularly the ones which ended their days in commute service.

The big difference between composition shoes and CI is that with CI the coefficient of friction increases as speed decreases, leading to a very abrupt stop if you don't back off on the brakes at the moment of stopping. Composition shoes have a constant coefficient of friction, which, if you're used to CI shoes, leads to the subjective feeling that you aren't slowing down as well as with CI. The big advantage of composition shoes is that they don't burn up the wheel treads as readily as CI does.

The two that happened in the mid to late 60s were at San Bruno and between 4th & 7th St. at the depot in the City.

The San Bruno one was a east bound commute. A contractor was working in the curve with a crane and was in the clear. As the train went past "something" happened and a piece of pipe hanging from the crane spun around and went thru the side of a coach. Killed a commuter.

The other was a east bound commute leaving SF, between 4th & 7th St. An engine was moving west out of the 7th St. diesel area and down to the station for their east bound train. Again, "something" happened and the engine side swiped the train and there was a loss of life on the commute.

I am sure there were others but these two involved the public.

Nudge

>The two that happened in the mid to late 60s were at San Bruno and between 4th & 7th St. at the depot in the City.

I remember these, and they both occurred just before I hired out.

>The San Bruno one was a east bound commute. A contractor was working in the curve with a crane and was in the clear. As the train went past "something" happened and a piece of pipe hanging from the crane spun around and went thru the side of a coach. Killed a commuter.

That contractor decided to move some pipe with a crane before the SP's flagman had come on duty, and the train's air currents caused it to rotate into the side of one of the gallery cars, decapitating someone in one of the upper seats. In England in the 1860s-1870s this effect was called "railway magnetism".

>The other was a east bound commute leaving SF, between 4th & 7th St. An engine was moving west out of the 7th St. diesel area and down to the station for their east bound train. Again, "something" happened and the engine side swiped the train and there was a loss of life on the commute.

10/?/1968. Hostler ran into an engine waiting at 7th St to go to the depot and wound up shoving it into the side of the 3721, a two-tone gray gallery car in an EB going by on the curve. I have some slides I took of the clean-up, which is how I came up with the car number, but I haven't scanned the one of the GP hanging from the crane, which was brought down from the BART construction on Market St. For area lighting, the carmen would adjust their acetylene torches so they burned with a bright white light and hold them up over their heads when not actually cutting. Nowadays they used those diesel/gasoline generator light poles with the HID lamps.

>I am sure there were others but these two involved the public.

As I've been given to understand, these two were the only passenger fatalities in the history of the SF-SJ commute service, which goes back before 1900.

EtoinShrdlu Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------


>
> The 80-footers were routinely moved in freights
> between Mission Bay and West Oak Psgr Yd for
> servicing, paticularly after about 1974 when the
> wheel pit at Bayshore stopped being used. If what
> you say about plugging a 4-6 car train of them
> would routinely break them in two, hauling them in
> freights would have been even worse, and the SP
> wouldn't have ever done it. But they did.

Regarding "80 footers", I cannot remember ever hearing that term. It must have been SF switchmen vernacular. The commute trainmen and San Jose switchmen that I worked with always used the term "subs". Car spot marks painted on the field rails at SJ depot referred to "subs" and "gals". Perhaps when the Harrimans were still around, this all was different.

I bow to your expertise regarding brake equipment, although we snapped a cut of 6 or 8 subs in-two one night at the west end of Cahill when the engineer big-holed a movement to avoid hitting a dog, or something. I remember this because, curiously, the steam line held. One of the knuckles showed the telltale rust of a hairline fracture.

This was what my wise old-head conductor fundamentally was talking about. You could not be sure that reality was going to mimic theory (you sure as hell weren't going to depend upon a high quality of SP maintenance, either). One particularly didn't take chances on a passenger train full of people. This was one of those early career lessons that repeatedly served me well later on.

Sorry that I got a little preachy, but I'm always a little ragged before cocktail hour...

>Regarding "80 footers", I cannot remember ever hearing that term. It must have been SF switchmen vernacular.
The commute trainmen and San Jose switchmen that I worked with always used the term "subs".

It appears that this was the case, because I never was a brakemen and I don't really recall hearing "sub" used for these cars in the City, which isn't to mean that it never happened.

Speaking of brakes, the engineers I knew all said that the most difficult train to stop was an F-M with one gallery car. The F-Ms had really strange brakes, almost like the things wouldn't stop when light, which I discovered early on when herding power at the Depot and making a joint a bit too hard.

EtoinShrdlu Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> Speaking of brakes, the engineers I knew all said
> that the most difficult train to stop was an F-M
> with one gallery car. The F-Ms had really strange
> brakes, almost like the things wouldn't stop when
> light, which I discovered early on when herding
> power at the Depot and making a joint a bit too
> hard.
TM's disappeared long before my running days, so I can't directly address them. From my later experience, a basic hindrance to repeatedly stopping recalcitrant commute trains every few minutes was that you had to lay off of the engine brakes at speed, because the wheel rims would quickly overheat. Anything more than 22-23 of brake cylinder pressure on the locos would knock-out the dynamic, anyway. Merely one stop using excessive independent could set the wheels a' smoking, which could be awkward if the RFE was skulking about in the weeds. The fewer cars that you had meant the less combined braking that the train had to retard that big, heavy TM. You could feather-in some straight air when the dynamic faded (15 mph for old TM's & Geeps) without worry, but by then the die was pretty-well cast. Emergency was an oft-used last resort. Heck, passengers were used to getting off in the rocks at short platforms, anyway.

I did have experience running with ex-CNW galleries that Caltrain leased for awhile, and I must say that even a five car train of them was a handful! Smoothest stops that I ever made in emergency.

I got to thinking more about the Subs-in-two incident at Cahill, wondering why I remembered it after nearly 40 years. Much to my embarrassment then, and my amusement now, I now recall the actual reason why the hoghead plugged the cut. The field man was standing out on Cahill 10 or 11 next to where he was going to bring our cut to a joint with some standing equipment. Because of a curve, he was passing signs to me, which I was supposed to pass to the engineer (Butch Nesbit, I think). At the time I was a green and nervous a new hire - basically useless - and I pulled probably the most common rookie mistake. I was out of position. The engine passed me just as the field man began giving easy signs, but before the hoghead could see him. All that I could do was stand there with my thumb up my butt. The first sign that the engineer actually saw was a frenzied wash out, followed by a looping toss of the lantern up in the air for added emphasis. We welded the cars together pretty good. The rest is as described, busted knuckle, but an intact steam connection. I still don't recall how we discovered the broken knuckle before making a pull and yanking out a bunch of steam line guts onto the ties. Ah, the glory days of youth...

Darn, I've overshot happy hour!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/23/14 05:20 by hogheaded.

The commute engines and freight power still used cast iron brake shoes. The trouble with them, if the pressure was set too high they would slide the wheels. Some engineers would take a star wrench to work and "adjust" the brakes to a higher pressure. The SP then started filling the adjustment hole with brass and welding it.

I had a 3000 class on #126 on day. When we got to Montery, we would unload the passengers and then shove the train back into a siding. The hoghead would get off with our grips, and I would take the engine and run around the train and put it on top of the cars in the siding, ready for the trip back to the City the next morning. I wasn't use to the jam on these motors and when I went to a joint, it was a hard coupling. Full jam and hardly any decrease of speed. Its a sh#@&y feeling, watching the passenger car coming up and no way to stop. After that, I always tested the brakes to get the feel on the engine brakes when ever I moved some power.


Nudge