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Northern California Railroads The Silver Age Vol 1 by Fred Matthews Hard cover
Northern California Railroads The Silver Age Vol 1 by Fred Matthews hard cover
Northern California Railroads
The Silver Age Volume 1
Fred Matthews
Hard Cover with plstic protective covering
224 Pages
Copyright 1983
1st Printing December 1982
Contents
I - The Old Order Crumbling, 1945-1948 9
II - Indian Summer of the Standard Passenger Train55
III - Boxcars to the Horizon:
The Great Valley and its Approaches 99
IV - Across the Mountain Barrier 149
V - Steam in the Desert195
These volumes constitute a personal, or more exactly a family's survey of the railways of Northern California during the decade and a half after the end of World War II. Northern California is a somewhat blurry concept; for our purposes it refers to the cultural and economic hinterland of San Francisco. The definition of a metropolis and its hinterland is partly a matter of fact where are goods sent for transshipment to final markets, where does a small company look for financing, where do people go if they want to see legitimate theatre or symphonybut it's also a matter of subjective feeling, a sense of being in one's own territory. In the case of Northern California a test of this subjective hinterland would be the zone in which "going to the City" could be taken as meaning San Francisco. My sense of this zone in the late 1940s would include Bakersfield and San Luis Obispo (just barely) on the south (but not Santa Barbara), the western fringe of Nevada (with the close historic ties of the mines to Bay Area finance) on the East, and more arguably the lumber towns of Southern Oregon, with their businessman's Pullman to Oakland Pier, on the north. The enormous economic ascent of Los Angeles in the last 35 yearsit was already much more populous but San Francisco was then still the financial center of the Coasthas probably pushed this barrier a good ways north, if indeed freeways, suburbs and short-hop planes have not blurred it beyond recognition by creating such standardization and constant mobility as to abolish sense of place. In the Forties, at any rate, there was a distinct Northern California, and this is a record of its railways.
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