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Old Posted Jun 4, 2007, 4:47 PM
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wburg wburg is offline
Hindrance to Development
 
Join Date: May 2007
Posts: 2,402
I don't know the historic landmark status offhand, but the still-standing Shops buildings are between 100 and 140 years old. Sometimes it's kind of hard to gauge because many of the structures were built, expanded and rebuilt over the years.

One of the main points of discussion is how much of the existing Shops building will become part of the Railroad Technology Museum. The two buildings on the far west of the lot, the Boiler Shop and the Erecting Shop, are currently used to store, maintain and restore the CSRM's equipment, and the Sacramento Southern's maintenance of way, signals, and other departments work out of there. They have rebuilt the transfer table and use it to shuffle equipment between the two shops.

The rest of the buildings, including the blacksmith shop, a car shop, the paint shop/traction motor shop, and the lavatory, are kind of in flux right now. CSRM would like to have control of most or all of them to really expand the Railroad Technology Museum, and because they are a public agency they would have access to restoration funds that aren't available to private organizations like Thomas Enterprises. Thomas has expressed some interest in having part of the Shops under their control, but probably not the Boiler Shop/Erecting Shop, and has made public statements that they are willing to spend $100 million to do restoration work on the structures. Exactly who gets what and what goes where is going to be...interesting.

I'm currently a CSRM docent and have been through the Shops several times. It's a neat place, although things are considerably scruffier now and a lot of the buildings in those shots are gone. Just replace all those SP bloody-nose units with an assortment of equipment ranging from 1870s steam locomotives to 1960s era diesel-electrics, stacks of spare parts and tools and assorted heavy-duty gear of all sorts.

One of my pet peeves is when people refer to them as the "Union Pacific shops." All UP ever did there was shut the place down, let it go to pot and sell it off. Southern Pacific (and its predecessor Central Pacific) were there for over a century, and built the place up from a swamp.

It's not a "skyline" shot, but I do have this gigantic 4'x4' aerial photograph of downtown Sacramento from the early seventies that shows the shops, K Street, assorted state buildings, and the sea of parking lots that were a legacy of development. The Delta King is barely visible on the West Sac side of the river. The shops are clearly visible and there was quite a bit of activity, although of course not as much as during their heyday. The place was HUGE--biggest industrial complex on this side of the country, one of the biggest steam locomotive construction shops anywhere in the nation and the biggest employer in town by quite a margin.
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