Emigrant Gap depot closure date?
From: "Carol Guida" jguida@pacbell.net
I was wondering if you know when the Train Depot and Telegraph Office at Emigrant Gap closed? I own the old Emigrant Gap Hotel (Annex) and would like to add that information to our historical data for the town.
—Carol Guida
I was wondering if you know when the Train Depot and Telegraph Office at Emigrant Gap closed? I own the old Emigrant Gap Hotel (Annex) and would like to add that information to our historical data for the town.
—Carol Guida
posted from CPRR Discussion Group at 1:22 PM
7 Comments:
Closing of the Emigrant Gap depot sounds like something that might have appeared in a local newspaper. Search using the California Newspaper Project.
Search for Emigrant Gap historic newspaper articles.
Search for Emigrant Gap depot closed in historic newspapers.
From: "Carol Guida" jguida@pacbell.net
Subject: Re: EMIGRANT GAP DEPOT CLOSURE DATE?
Thanks. ... I was hoping some railroad oldtimer would just remember. I know that the closure would have been during or after the 1940's since I have a contact whose parents used to own the Emigrant gap hotel, and who took the train home from school in summers until at least WW II.
If train service stopped with the depot closure then you might want to find a research library with a fairly complete collection of the Official Guide of the Railways for that era to check the Southern Pacific train schedules year by year. Some years are available on CD.
From: Hsweetser@aol.com
According to the informal records of the California Public Utilities Commission, the SP notified the PUC on 8-10-61 that they intended to abandon the station building at Emigrant Gap. On 9-25-61, the SP apparently notified the PUC that the abandonment was completed.
However, the above information does not necessarily mean the train order office was closed around August-September of 1961. To find out approximately when this happened, I suggest looking at SP Sacramento Division employee timetables in the collection of the Calif. State Railroad Museum Library. In timetable pages, look for the letters "TO" immediately to the left of the Emigrant Gap station name. Their presence means Emigrant Gap was still an open train order office.
Employee timetables were usually issued twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall. If you come across the first Sacramento Division timetable in which the letters "TO" are absent, that means the train order office was closed sometime in the previous six months. If you are lucky, info from timetables might back up the dates in the PUC informal records.
If traveling to the State Railroad Museum Library in Sacramento is difficult, you could contact the staff there by phone or email and have them send you photocopies or scans of the Sacramento Division timetable pages for Emigrant Gap for several years, say from 1959 through 1961, and then make the determination of closure yourself.
—John Sweetser
From: Hsweetser@aol.com
Additional comments about Emigrant Gap:
John Signor in his book Donner Pass indicated Emigrant Gap was still an open train order office in 1952.
If there was no regular freight or passenger business at Emigrant Gap at the time of its closing and the depot was just being used for train orders, it is highly unlikely any newspaper would note its demise.
My feeling is that looking up issues of the Official Guide to the Railways as has been suggested would be useless.
Instead of the staff of the California State RR Museum Library making photocopies or scans of Sacramento Division employee timetable pages as I previously suggested, it probably would be better to simply ask them "What is the last issue with the letters 'TO' next to the Emigrant Gap station name" and "What issue is the first one without the letters?" (Make sure you get the effective dates for the timetables, not just the issue numbers.)
—John Sweetser
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