It's a Heritage Railroad Today

This train line through Niles Canyon near Oakland, California, was part of the Transcontinental Railroad. It was eventually abandoned by the Southern

Pacific Railroad. Today, it is a heritage railroad.
The tracks were laid by the first Western Pacific Railroad Company (formed in 1862 - there was another one formed in 1903). They started construction from San Jose towards Sacramento. They built twenty miles of track that reached into Alameda Creek canyon in 1866. The first passenger excursion entered the canyon on October 2nd of that year. In September, 1869, four months after the famous golden spike ceremony at Promontory Summit, Utah, the Central Pacific Railroad completed the transcontinental rail link between Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay, finishing the track through the canyon. The Central Pacific had acquired the Western Pacific and other local railroads and built track to connect them at a waterfront terminal at Alameda Point. The Central Pacific constructed a freight terminal at the west end of the canyon and a town quickly sprang up around it. The town was named for Addison C. Niles, a prominent judge and former railroad attorney. The Southern Pacific Railroad purchased the Central Pacific and slowly, over many decades, finally abandoned this part of their line through the canyon. They gave the right of way to Alameda County. Then, on May 21, 1988, almost 122 years after the first Western Pacific excursion, the Pacific Locomotive Association brought railroad passenger operations back to life in Niles Canyon. Presently, Niles Canyon Railway provides train rides to the public year-round between Sunol, California and Niles in Fremont, California. The above information is gleaned from: https://www.ncry.org/about/

The former Southern Pacific route from Oakland to Tracy via Niles Canyon is now abandoned, except for the portion from Sunol to Niles Station operated by the heritage railway known as the Niles Canyon Railway. This line was the original westernmost section of the First Transcontinental Railroad from Sacramento to San Francisco Bay (by way of Stockton and the Altamont Pass). It was completed in September 1869 by the Western Pacific Railroad (1862-1870), but lost its transcontinental traffic in 1879 to a shorter route through Benicia. The Southern Pacific tracks in Niles Canyon are on the north side of the canyon. Southern Pacific, being the first railroad in the canyon, chose the best route. The Union Pacific Railroad (formerly Western Pacific Railroad) has an active mainline on the south side of the canyon. The Altamont Corridor Express runs along this line on weekdays. This information was taken from Wikipedia.

This post card

continues the Edward Mitchell series (though not on purpose on my account) of post cards in this blog.

I blogged about this place - Shasta Springs - back on April 19, 2014; but, there was a different post card picture featured then. It was published by the Newman Post Card Company. These two post cards were both printed by Edward Mitchell out of San Francisco - just like the post card from last week's blog. These both show the very popular tourist spot in northern California, Shasta Springs. In the late 1800s and early 1900s people used to flock to a summer resort on the Sacrament River for their health and enjoyment. It was so popular that the Southern Pacific Railroad built a train station for those who were going to disembark there. It was near the small town of Dunsmuir, California whose population came in at 1,650 in the 2010 census. Dunsmuir is where the Southern Pacific makes a couple of wicked hairpin turns to get up the river valley.

The resort closed in the early 1950s when it was sold and continues to be owned by the Saint Germain Foundation, and is used as a major facility by that organization (you can look up this organization on Wikipedia). It is no longer open to the public and the lower part of the resort - the bottling plant, the train station, the incline railway, the kiosk and the fountains are all gone. The falls that were visible from the railroad tracks and what ruins are left of the lower part of the resort are all overgrown by blackberry bushes.

Here is what the back of the post cards look like - a typical Edward Mitchell look. The bottom post card has a very short message written on it. According to this article, that message is not so innocent.... http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/06/sex_and_pop_the_forgotten_1909_hit_that_introduced_adultery_to_american.html

In the spring of 1909, American popular song got sexy. Of course, love and courtship, and by extension sex, had been Topic A in pop music for decades. But while songwriters had long trafficked in euphemisms and innuendo—coy talk of “sighing” and “spooning” beneath the old oak tree and by the light of the silvery moon—it was a 1909 hit by composer Harry Von Tilzer and lyricist Jimmy Lucas, “I Love, I Love, I Love My Wife—But Oh! You Kid!,” which opened Tin Pan Alley to brasher, bawdier, more raucously comic songs of lust. The comment written upside down and on a slant on the back of this post card is ......... "Oh, you kid."

Now Begins the Hard Part!

I wonder if the post card was trying to show the train or show what a

passenger could see while on the train. It is a view from Cape Horn looking at the American River in northern California (about 100 kilometers - 60 miles - from Sacramento). Many times the train would actually stop and let the passengers off so that they could admire the scenery and the view. While the notes on the front of this post card tell us that this view is on the "Ogden Route, S.P.R.R." (top right-hand corner of the front), this section of rail was actually built by the Central Pacific Railroad as part of the Transcontinental Railroad. Part of this article in https://www.sierranevadageotourism.org/content/cape-horn-and-the-transcontinental-railroad/sie3cf4cac0c3aa88ff9 tells us that "By September 1865, the Central Pacific Railroad had extended east from Sacramento as far as Camp 20, which was later renamed Colfax. The real assault on the Sierra Nevada began here. Colfax became a staging area for construction further uphill. Beyond Colfax, construction began in August 1865, with much of the basic work to Dutch Flat completed by year's end. Major obstacles remained at Long Ravine, Secret Ravine, and Cape Horn. Trestles bridged the ravines, but Cape Horn loomed forebodingly. At Cape Horn, aided by a veritable army of Chinese laborers, railroad engineers carved a roadbed around the steep peninsula high above the American River canyon. Construction took a year. More than 300 Chinese workers fell to their deaths in the process. This next article tells us that the "rumour" about Chinese labourers being lowered down in wicker baskets to do the drilling and dynamiting was exactly that - a RUMOUR. There is no truth in the matter. http://cprr.org/Museum/Cape_Horn.html In 1885 the Central Pacific Railroad was purchased by the Southern Pacific. This post card is definitely from after that year!!

The post card was printed and published by Edward H. Mitchell. He was a prolific post card printer, owning several printing companies in the San Francisco area. This back of the post card is very typical of what one of the backs of his post cards looked like.

California, Here I Come!

It is hard to tell from the picture on the front of this post card, but I think the locomotive is a "Ten Wheel" or 4-6-0 wheel configuration style of engine. The first of this style of locomotive was built in 1847 for the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad by the Norris Brothers. This locomotive is parked in front of the new Southern Pacific depot in Santa Barbara, California. The following information can be found at https://www.independent.com/2017/03/23/southern-pacific-railroad-station-209-state-street/ After the Southern Pacific Railroad completed the Coast Line in 1901, making it possible for passengers to travel uninterrupted from Los Angeles to San Francisco, rail excursions became popular. The increased rail traffic, however, necessitated larger facilities in Santa Barbara. When the railroad realigned the local tracks in 1905, it also built a new passenger depot, the fourth to be constructed in the city since 1887, when the railroad first arrived. A local architect, Francis W. Wilson, active here from the 1890s to the early years of the 20th century, was engaged to do the new building. The Mission Revival style was selected so that the depot would “conform in general style to the Mission Architecture so appropriate and so popular in Southern California.” The station was sited to allow passengers and their escorts easy arrival and departure by way of State or Chapala streets.

The back of the post card only tells me that it was published between 1907 and 1915; it is from the Divided Back era of post cards. It is representative of the fact that the United States Postal Service finally allowed more than only the address on the back of the picture. You can see that there is a reminder that the message goes on the left and the address is to be written on the right-hand side of the back of the post card. I have looked in many places to see if there is any history on the publisher, California Sales Co. out of San Francisco. So far nothing!!!

I do know that it was published to promote the Southern Pacific Railroad. The theme "ON THE ROAD OF A THOUSAND WONDERS" was used by the Southern Pacific on many, many post cards.

The Devil's Slide

The geological formation on the front of this post card is called “Devil’s Slide”.

It is a chute of two pretty parallel slabs of limestone 6 meters (20 feet) apart, each 12 meters (40 feet) high and 30.5 meters (200 feet) long. This slide is near Croydon, Utah in Weber Canyon. I blogged about Croyden on January 5, 2018 and about Weber (It’s pronounced Weeber) Canyon on both October 18, 2014 and December 16, 2014.

The first maps of the area referred to phenomenon Weber Canyon as “Gutter Defile”.
According to Lynn Arave on this website: https://www.standard.net/what-s-the-story-behind-devil-s-slide-in-morgan/article_08d618c3-93e2-5ead-b6b5-f0d1153434b0.html

“James John Walker (1830-1896), an early resident of Croydon and a railroad worker, is very likely the first person to have called it Devil’s Slide. A Walker family history states that James Walker was a contractor on the railroad, installing the first tracks through upper Weber Canyon. Probably around 1868, he was asked (being a local resident) by a railroad crew what to call this unusual rocky chute and his reply was Devil’s Slide and the title stuck. The first official mention of that name for the rock formation in a newspaper was in 1875. By 1904, someone discovered that the limestone was not just in the geological formation, but was abundant in the area. The Portland Cement Company set up a town and tried to name it Portland, after itself. But, in 1907 the post office was reflecting the name Devils Slide. The town reached its heyday in the late 1920s, before the Great Depression, when it boasted 529 residents. By the 1940s, its school closed and by the 1980s, only a few families still resided there. Soon after, the cement company closed the town and today a gravel pit and rubble mostly cover what remains of this ghost town. Ogden began promoting Devil’s Slide as a tourist attraction in the mid 1920s, with signs. Devil’s Gate, at the lower end of Weber Canyon, was also boasted of in numerous Standard-Examiner reports of the 1920s. ” - End of article by Lynn Arave.

This is the back of the post card:

There isn't a lot to know about the publisher of this post card. The name down the left-hand side says that it was published by The Gray News Company out of Salt Lake City, Utah. The company was a publisher and distributor of regional lithographic view-cards. Many images were produced of sparsely populated rugged areas. They only existed for 16 years; between 1906 and 1922. That makes this post card almost 100 years old! However, looking at the number at the bottom, middle of the post card raised my curiosity.

It looked an awful lot like a file number that Curt Otto Teich's company would use when they printed the post card for The Grey News Company. I looked at my files and saw this: "1908-1928 Cards numbered A or R 1 to 124180. The cards they printed for Woolworth have a W prefix. The letter N prefix was used to designate a reprinted image from this series." I thought that I was on the right track; then I saw this:

That little logo under the letter "T" is the company logo for Curt Otto Teich's company!! So, doing some math, if this is lot 7967 out of 124,180 printed between 1908 and 1928, this post card was probably printed in April of 1909. This does make sense because this is a divided back era post card. That era covers from 1907 to 1915. That means that this post card would be over 100 years old!