New Reference Shots of Oakland Street Trackage

Last Saturday, I arrived back from San Diego early in the morning. I took advantage of the sunny winter weather to document the Oakland Terminal and BNSF tracks on the east side of UP’s yard under the MacArthur Maze in west Oakland.

Street trackage looks cool and is hard to convert to model form. Often the road looks way too neat and tidy. And the track just looks like track with styrene or plaster on top.

I thought it would be worthwhile to get a collection of reference shots to assist in modeling street tracks. Besides, these street tracks are endangered species so I wanted to get picutes while I could.

BNSF West Oakland

BNSF has a small yard that was built a few years ago after the UP/SP merger to take advantage of trackage rights granted as part of the merger deal.

 

This area in West Oakland is not always a nice place to hang out, so I shot with the intention of minimizing the need to have to go back and shoot more! I have uploaded about 260 reference shots of the street track and surroundings to my Flickr site.

Interesting Features

There are some interesting track configurations there. The Oakland Terminal Railway is a micro-shortline that operates a few miles of track around the old Oakland Army base. The OTR utilizes a steep wooden trestle to get from there to the east side of the UP yard and main tracks. The whole thing is located under the freeways so it’s a little hard to see, even fom Google maps.

View Larger Map
View Larger Map

The area I was shooting is on the right of the freeways.

There are plenty of street tracks in varying degrees of repair in this area to the east of the freeway. If you explore the satelite view, you can see where old tracks used to run by the curved walls of some buildings. The photos on my collection include closeups of switches, buildings, signs, freeway structures and landscape views of the area. The shots on my Flickr site are not yet annotated but feel free to email me if you want information about a particular shot.

Operations

There is a pink ballasted connector can be seen sneaking out from under the freeway lower in the Google view above. This BNSF track connects the interchange to the UP main near the trestle. The 6-days a week BNSF Oakland local uses this track to access the small interchage yard, and make setouts and collect the cars left by the OTR.

I have an incling that the BNSF simply exchanges cars with the OTR here at West Oakland and the OTR probably switches the local street tracks.  I’ve routinely seen small cuts of BNSF cars sitting on the siding near the freeway. On the day I visited, there was only a single BNSF 2-bay hopper. Sometimes there are up to ten cars there. The whole thing would make an interesting switching layout with the trestle, UP main tracks, BNSF exchange and street trackage.

My understanding is that the tracks to the east of the freeway are OTR tracks. There are a handful of industries in this area. Some are on the other side of the UP tracks and poorly accessible. On the east side, there is a steel fabrication plant with a track that runs up 20th street. There’s a customer with a spur at 26th and Wood St that receives hopper cars. There’s also a customer that receives steel slab. Loaded flats are sometimes left on the track that runs along 26th street. Steel slab delivered to this area may be related to the construction on the new Oakland Bay Bridge that is being built.

Enjoy the pics. I hope you find something to model in there and feel free to ping me if you need more info.

Coxy