A new SP Shipper’s Guide

I have often posted about the superb railroad resources represented by what are generically known as “Shipper’s Guides,” though they often have somewhat different names, such as “Directory of Industries.” The latest one is especially interesting to me, as it’s a Southern Pacific guide. I have often heard rumors about these but have never before seen one. Now Ted Schnepf (as Rails Unlimited) has produced copies of a 1952 guide for sale. See his website for purchasing info: http://railsunlimited.ribbonrail.com/.html ).

I show below the cover of the new Guide, which contains 118 pages, 8.5 x 11 inch size. I can only say that this is a phenomenal amount of information. It only covers the trackage assigned by SP to its Terminal District, but that was a lot of territory and a really huge number of industries, as I’ll show below. There were other industrial territories in the area, so this is far from all of the Los Angeles Division of the SP. 

Inside is on page 10 a map of the territory covered, from Burbank Junction in the north (where Coast and Valley routes diverged), to  South Gate to the south and Alhambra to the east. It’s shown here, though of course lettering at this size is too small to read. North is to the top of the map, and the orientation of the spine of the territory aligns with the Los Angeles River.

Note in the map that zones are marked out, from 1 to 16. Individual maps of each zone are then provided, which I will come back to. 

I was interested, in examining the map above, to compare it to the SP’s 1925 map of the same area provided in John Signor’s superb book, Los Angeles Division (SP Historical & Technical Society, Upland, CA, 2020), on pages 138 and 139. I haven’t tried to show what is in the gutter between the pages. It happens to be oriented so north is to the right of the map, and the Los Angeles River is thus approximately horizontal in this map. More importantly, Alameda Street runs horizontally across the upper part of the map.

Naturally, many of the industries and their locations are quite different between 1925 and 1952. But a similar intensity of of industrial location is evident. This was obviously a major part of SP’s industrial traffic base. Below is a photo from page 135 of Signor’s book, a 1925 aerial looking north (Spence Air photo collection, UCLA Dept. of Geography),with Alameda the dark street crossing from lower right to upper left. 

Signor points out that of the 340 industries listed on the map above, 278 of them were so located that they were switched from Alameda Street. The street contained double track, in some places triple track. One can imagine multiple switch jobs working up and down the street, dodging auto and truck traffic.

But back to the guide. This guide is a remarkable collection of specific industrial and operational information, even for the modeler of places far from Los Angeles. I will explain and illustrate some of that in a future post.

Tony Thompson