Shadows of Our Forgotten Railways:
In Memory of the Key System
by Judith Goldsmith
April 1983 / Published in the East Bay Express as "Losing Track"

To archaeologists, a cavity is an extremely precious space. More than being just an emptiness, it presents the possibility of a mold which can be reused, much as the space created in the lost-wax process of making jewelry. The archaeologists who uncovered Ur in Mesopotamia in the 1920s and 30s were very careful when they came across two curiously-positioned holes in the ground. Pouring liquid plaster into the holes, they obtained the cast of an ancient Chaldean harp, from which it was possible to make a complete reconstruction.

In similar ways, it is almost possible to reconstruct a transportation system by putting on negative glasses and looking for the vacuum that it left. Even when the routes are gone, you can trace them by the skeletal structure which grew up around them. Of course, growth patterns resulting from later developments obscure the structures, but still, basic concentrations remain.

Take the East Bay's corner of Adeline and Alcatraz, which was at one time an important center of town. Cars and buses still use it as a main thoroughfare, and the BART station occupies the big central island. But the stores and houses, though well built, are dilapidated and to some extent outdated, left from an earlier time of more intense foot use of the street. For at one time, no less than six railroad tracks occupied the center of Adeline Street, and people made connections here for many parts of the metropolitan area. As a result of a local line which left from here and traveled up Alcatraz, stately apartment houses were built which still line both sides of that avenue. And other parts of the city, like Rockridge and Thousand Oaks, grew up around other lines. Transportation systems have an impact on the growth patterns of a city, and our East Bay cities still show the impact of an earlier, highly successful transportation network, the East Bay's Key System Electric railroad.

In its prime, the Key System covered the Bay area efficiently. It went where people wanted to go. It was a "suburban" system, fanning out from the Key Route ferry pier (and later from the Bay Bridge) along Yerba Buena Avenue to the south, east, and north to pick up and deliver its passengers. In the 1940s and 50s it also had its own streetcar lines which extended from the main routes. Sacramento Street, Shattuck Avenue, College, Claremont, Fortieth Street, and Piedmont all carried Key System tracks.

We recently passed the 25th anniversary of the last passage of a Key System train along those now disappeared tracks. The last run by a Key Route electric car along Shattuck Avenue, East Fourteenth Street, Trestle Glen Road, and Piedmont Avenue took place 25 years ago, on April 20, 1958. The day of the electric railroad was over, it was said. Cars and buses were the vehicles of the future and they were well on their way. Of course, it also helped that the system was being by a company 25% of whose stock was owned by General Motors, General American Aerocoach, Phillips Petroleum, and Firestone Tire and Rubber Co.

Nevertheless, there are many in the Bay Area who haven't forgotten the big roomy electric cars with their comfortable wicker seats, clanging bells, and uniformed conductors. One of those who remembers them well is Wayne Gallup, currently of North Oakland, who came to this area in 1952 to attend U. C. Berkeley. As far as Wayne is concerned, the Key System was infinitely better than BART. In fact, he says, "it worked better than any system I've seen before or since. I never had to wait for one - - in all my years of riding them, I never experienced one break-down. They were spacious, clean, didn't start with a jerk or slam you around, didn't smell. . . . I actually looked forward to riding them.

"The trainmen were courteous and careful," he adds. "Maybe because they were railroad types - you know, they always carried around those big pocket watches - you could set your watch by their arrivals and departures. I would leave my house just five minutes before the train's usual arrival time, wait two or three minutes at the stop, and there it would be.

"Also, they stopped every few blocks, so it was close for everyone. You didn't have to drive somewhere first, or transfer from a bus."
In those days, with little money, Gallup would spend his days off from school riding the Key System trains across the bridge to the East Bay Terminal in San Francisco, then walk over to Cliff House or the museums for the day (being sure to stop at the Ukranian Bakery on McAllister on the way - another Bay Area fixture whose passage is sorely missed!). If he traveled with friends, they would swivel the backs of their wicker seats so that they could sit facing each other. "Both sides of the backs were faced with wicker," he remember, "and they could easily be pivoted to make the seat face the other way."

The nicest thing about the Key Route cars - their comfort - was also sometimes one of their biggest problems. "I had to be very careful, coming back from one of those day-long hikes, not to fall asleep," Gallup says. "Or I'd wind up at the end of the line on Solano Avenue with no way back to campus except more walking! And there was this steady pleasant hum that really made you want to go to sleep."

Florence Jury, another Bay Area resident, remembers the Key Route trains with just as much pleasure. "When I moved here in 1923, of course all commuters to the city used the Key System, or the Southern Pacific trains. There was no other way. I was in college then, and we used it mostly to go to the city for weekend dates. Both ferries ran late on Saturday nights (until 1:00 and 1:20 as I remember), so it was no problem; although during the war there was sometimes a problem from the drunken sailors crossing to Treasure Island after their 'night on the town'." Jury rode the main Key line to Adeline and Alcatraz, then transferred to the local which ran along Alcatraz, up College, and west on Durant to Bancroft and Telegraph. "There was no wait to transfer at commuter times. The system was absolutely wonderful, much better than what we have now. And there was always a touch of romance when you got on those cars."
Gerard Hurley, who arrived here in 1948, also used the Key System for weekends in "the city". However, he came home on the very last F train to Berkeley, which, in the 50s, he calls, left at 2:06 a.m. ("If you left the bar at just 2:00, you'd be at the station on time"). The car would be filled with other late-night cafe and bar regulars, many of whom knew each other from other weekend returns. "It was fine public transportation. The city terminal was buzzing, with food, flowers, newspapers. You'd run into the same people over and over. It was convenient, it took you where you wanted to go, and it was cheap. But best of all was the view from the Bridge. The cars were high off the ground, so you could see very well, and when you came out on the other side of the tunnel, a whole panorama opened up."

On the other hand, Kenneth Pettitt recalls what the Key trains were like for a kid. As a child in the 1930s, he would accompany his mother and aunt to the city on shopping excursions. "There weren't many big stores in the East Bay then, so the ladies would go over to the City of Paris or another big department store in San Francisco." Pettitt particularly remembers Christmas shopping, when a merry-go-round and a ferris wheel were set up on the roof of the Emporium. As he recalls them, the Key cars were high off the ground - you had to step way up to get in - and driving over the trestle out to the Key Pier was kind of scary; "you couldn't see the track, just the water, until you got way out to the pier." Riding on the ferry, he says, wasn't much fun as a kid, but looking back he realizes that the trip must have been quite pleasant for the adults.

Marion Reynolds, a Berkeley native, also remembers the trains from a kids' point of view, especially one of the inherent dangers of a rail-based system. "Mostly I remember Halloween, in the 1920s, when I was in elementary and junior high school. There was one very steep hill in Claremont, right near the end of the line. The kids' big thrill was to rub paraffin on the tracks on Halloween night, so the car couldn't get up the hill. No one was too badly inconvenienced though; they just had to walk up the last hill themselves."
No doubt about it, the Key System once was an institution in the East Bay, taken for granted for the service it rendered. But of course, that was not always so. It took a bit of doing to get a good comprehensive transportation system established.

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If you had moved to the Bay area in the 1880s, you would have found only one transportation system connecting the cities of the East Bay, and that was the Southern Pacific Railroad. The line ran along Seventh Street in Oakland, from the Oakland "Long Wharf" (where S. P. ferries took passengers over to San Francisco), down the coast to the south, and up Third Street through Berkeley to the north. Control of the crossbay traffic had been highly contested in Oakland from even before the city's birth, and at this time it had fallen into the hands of the all-powerful Southern Pacific, started by the famous "Big Four" (Stanford, Huntington, Crocker, and Hopkins).
This meant that the S. P. alone determined the quality, cost, and convenience of the city's trans-bay services. Probably for this reason, it had built almost no intracity connecting lines. One historian has commented, "With only two lines at their disposal, one of which hardly served the city, citizens of Oakland had every reason to be dissatisfied with trans-bay service. Not only was the service of inferior quality, but the equipment also was unattractive and antiquated. Such a minor improvement as placing gas lamps in the cars in 1895 was considered remarkable in those days."

There were, to be sure, horse-drawn cars and steam dummy-pulled cars carrying passengers around the city streets, especially along the main thoroughfare between Oakland and the University, Telegraph Avenue. But these were rather slow and couldn't carry too many passengers at one time, and there was a feeling that a more capable transportation system would soon be needed.

San Francisco was building its cable car lines in the 1880s, and the East Bay tried one experiment along these lines (the Piedmont Cable road). Then in 1890 the Grove Street Electric line was built, and the following year, another company began running electric cars along Washington Street to Fruitvale Avenue in East Oakland. This second line was a big hit, some of the cars being double-decker and perfect for taking one's family out to the hills (which is what the area was then) for a weekend excursion.

But it awaited the entry of another moneyed investor to get the show really underway. In those days of mining-nouveau riche, it didn't take long for one to arrive. In 1893, Francis Marion "Borax" Smith set his #30,000,000 Twenty-Mule Team Borax fortune to challenge Huntington's design for a monopoly of land and ferry transportation in California.

1893 was probably the perfect year for a man with a stash of cash to go on a buying spree. The U. S, was having one of its periodic bust cycles, marked as usual by depressed prices, bankruptcies, and unemployment. Coxey's army of mendicants marched on Washington and the great Pullman railroad strike was brewing.

Losing no time, Smith first acquired the California and Nevada Railroad, which actually only went to Orinda, but which had a wharf in Emeryville that, as we shall see, was to become of great importance. Then he set about acquiring controlling or minority interest in six of the other independent street car lines in the East Bay.

Smith planned an underwater tube to Yerba Buena Island to link up with ferries to San Francisco, but the U. S. government, which used the Island as a military base, refused permission. (It had earlier also refused the S. P.'s similar request for alink-up.) There was no hope of using the Southern Pacific's ferry wharf at the Oakland Mole. So instead, Smith followed through on a stroke of brilliance and extended the old California and Nevada Railroad Wharf in Emeryville 3 1/2 miles out into the water, thus connecting the new line to its own ferries, and bringing it closer to San Francisco than had ever before been possible.

The first train of Smith's new consolidated system pulled out of the Shattuck Avenue and University station on October 26, 1903 and connected with the ferryboat Yerba Buena to San Francisco at the new wharf in Emeryville. From the day of its birth, it was a resounding success. Not only did the new long wharf cut the travel time between the East Bay and San Francisco from 58 to 38 minutes, but passengers were glad to have another choice besides the Southern Pacific trains, which belched smoke and cinders and were noisy and poorly lit by oil lamps. Thirteen days after opening, 67 trains a day were running on the new system. Passengers increased from 12,714,000 in 1901 to over 20,000,000 in 1903, with net income jumping from $60,000 to $270,000. Smith's attempt was considered similar to Penn Station in New York's "affront to the Vanderbilts".

On the cap of each ferryboat captain was a gold key, and a key symbol appeared over the ferryboat docks. The tines of the symbol stood for the ferryboat slots at the wharf at the end of Yerba Buena Avenue; the body of the key stood for the line from the wharf along Yerba Buena into the city; and the handle curlicues stood for the routes from Berkeley, Claremont, Piedmont, and Oakland, as was inscribed on some versions of the logo. This key symbol and name stuck and stayed with the system throughout its existence, and during some periods even became part of the official title.

Success seemed assured. The S. P. had been challenged and the new system had emerged victorious. But it was not enough for Borax Smith. In 1910 he formed the United Properties Company, with the intent of monopolizing the water, light, and power utilities for the entire bay region, as well as purchasing 45,000 acres of real estate (in addition to the 13,000 prime acres of hills between Mills College and Berkeley which had already been purchased by his Realty Syndicate). The attempt undid him. By January 1914, the United Properties Company had to be dissolved, many prominent San Francisco lawyers taking part in the "unscrambling".

Well, the Southern Pacific evidently was not about to let a good opportunity pass. By 1911, in the midst of Smith's financial crisis, it electrified all its interurban transit lines. Its new trains came to be called the "Big Red Cars" and they well deserved the name, being over 72 feet long and carrying 116 passengers. Besides electrifying, the S. P. also built some new lines; some reached areas not served by the Key System, but others competed directly along the same routes. It was at this time that Adeline Street had not only four interurban tracks (those of the Key System and the S. P.), but also two tracks belonging to the Key System local. Some residents profited greatly from the competition between the two companies; if they missed one company's train, they could pick up one of the other's. And both companies worked harder to run a better service.

After the United Properties Company mess had finally been cleared up, a new operating company was formed for the Key System. The Key System Transit Company, created in 1923, finally incorporated the system's symbol into its name. In the 1920s, the Key System was in its heyday, 1924 being its peak patronage year. In that year, 800 trains went through the Key Pier each day and over 18,000,000 passengers were carried.

The S. P. couldn't compete for much longer. When the Bay Bridge opened in 1936, the Southern Pacific's I. E. R. (Interurban Electric Railroad) and the Key System, as well as the Sacramento Northern, all shared the bottom level of the bridge. But the number of riders was starting to decrease, as more and more individually-owned automobiles came into use, and also a smaller fraction of East Bay residents commuted to San Francisco to work. The Southern Pacific began to sell off some of its local street car lines to the Key System, and in 1933 they even made an agreement to honor each other's commuter tickets. By 1939, the end of the depression years, the S. P. and the Key System were both reducing service (for the first time); finally in 1940 the last Big Red Car ran and the Southern Pacific gave up on intracity service. (S. P. ferries continued in service until 1958 though.) The Key System took over some of the S. P.'s lines and continued its own fine service.

The rest is not such ancient history. In 1946, the Key System was purchased by National City Lines, a holding company of American City Lines which was purchasing transit systems around the U.S.; the stock of this company, as mentioned earlier, was held in part by automobile-building, gas, and tire interests. It was no surprise when the company began one by one dismantling electric car lines and running bright new shiny buses over the same routes.

Wayne Gallup remembers the change well. "I went into the army in 1956, and when I came out two years later, they were gone. I've never met anybody who liked the buses better."

Kenneth Pettitt adds, "It was only ears later that articles started to be published exposing the interests that had been involved. In those days if you said anything bad about big business you were lucky to be called a radical, if not a communist."

The death sentence for the Key Route had been read. Finally, the entire system was sold to the newly created Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District (A/C Transit) which still operates buses over most of the old electric car routes. And then the big surprise. In 1961, voters of San Francisco, Alameda, and Contra Costa counties voted to restore the trunk of the Key System, and the I. E. R., and the southern portion of the Sacramento Northern, as well as part of the Market Street Railway in San Francisco. BART was on its way. The Key System, the last interurban railway in Northern California, thus became probably the first electric railway to be reborn from the bones of its old skeleton. The vacuum it had left still needed to be filled.

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If you want to see a Key Route train in action now you have to go to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they shipped 30 of them. A few of the rest can be seen closer to home, though, at the California Railway Museum on State Route 12, halfway between Fairfield and Rio Vista. The Museum is a project of the Bay Area Electric Railroad Association, which now has over 600 members. "We came into existence in 1945," explained John Plytnick, President of the Association, in between phone calls asking for information. (They're open noon to 5 p.m., Sat., Sun. and weekend holidays. Admission i $3 for adults, $2 for seniors and juniors, and $1 for kids.) "Eight or nine guys got together to try to save some of the old electric cars they heard were being scrapped. In the beginning there was no place to store them. Sometimes we had to keep them on the rails of the company we got them from, and no one was very happy about that. Then, in 1959, one of the first cars we'd acquired was burned by vandals. That, and the abandonment of the Key System in 1958, really got things moving. We started looking around for some property, and found this spot here near the Delta, right on the old Sacramento Northern lines between San Francisco and Chico."

It's a lovely site. When I went out to visit, the grass was lush green in between the picnic tables, and chickens, ducks, cats and dogs frisked around happily. My first stop was one of the three colorful yellow and red-trim buildings which once used to house the area's "house of ill repute." As the heart-shaped metal plaque outside announces, "Here between 1942 and 1948 the painted ladies serviced the needs of our men from Travis Air Force Base. Closed by order of an unsympathetic sheriff." Inside a nickleodeon plays from time to time, recreating the atmosphere of yesteryear. However, most of the building's contents nowadays is a serious and very good collection of books on electric and steam railroads. Also for sale are patches, watch fobs, engineers caps, and photos that celebrate the glories of railroading, as well as timetables and a pocket diesel guide for those who really went to be well-informed about the identity of the systems still in use.

I wandered out from the bookstore and took a ride on one of the electric trains being driven that day, a San Francisco Muni car, around the miles and a half of track that has already been laid. Much in evidence were the nattily attired drivers in their trainmen caps and dark blue vests and suits with stars on the sleeve, pulling out their pocket watches and looking every bit like the old-time spit and polish train conductors.

Our driver, Bill Moreland, took the car past the old Sacramento Northern depot on the S. N. tracks, then, in the same way the old Key System drivers did at the end of their lines, got out and quickly switched the overhead cable connection to the other end of the car. (As Kenneth Pettitt recalled, there was a characteristic sound at the end of the Key System lines when the driver would go through the car turning the seat-backs the other way.) Being drivable from either end as these electric cars were, Bill then climbed back in at the car's other end and drove the other way!

I wandered among the car barns, where the most important work of the museum goes on: the restoration and preservation of the old cars. The B. A. E. R. A. now has some 65 cars in its possession, many of which were in deplorable condition when they arrived. Since all labor is volunteer and done on the volunteer's free weekends, it can take a considerable number of years to restore a car to its former state of glory. In the car barns, I stumbled across some faded beauties that were certainly worth the effort; one was an observation / parlor car from the Oregon Electric Railway, with stained glass and oval windows, and ornate brass railings. And also, there was the collection of Key System cars, painted their early orange and white with black trim, or their later "Fruit Salad Scheme" of orange, light green, and white. Still in place were the overhead ads (WARNING: SPITTING & SMOKING PROHIBITED. COOPERATION OF ALL PASSENGERS IS REQUESTED IN ORDER TO REDUCE THE SPREAD OF VICIOUS GERMS; Food Will Win the War; Fels Naptha; Wrigley's; Burnett's Vanilla; Sloan's Liniment). The cars <were> high off the ground, and roomy; and sure enough, there were those flip-around wicker seats. Also there was a neat mechanical device that flipped the platforms down automatically when the doors opened and up when they closed.

The California Railroad Museum is an admirable attempt to make a home for these cars that did such good service and were so well loved. It also provides a weekend home to many of the electric railroad admirers and some of the Key System's former employees who were set loose when the System shut down. All are pitching in excitedly to make this a true monument to the great systems that were.
The car barns and stations of the Key System have not been as well preserved as the trains. The horse-car barn at 51st and Telegraph Avenue, built in 1870 on the edge of Temescal Creek, later a Key System Car Barn, became a division point for motor coaches in 1947, but was finally torn down. Some aging stores now occupy the spot. The "Central Divsion," the city's largest street car barn at Second Avenue and Foothill Boulevard in East Oakland, was opened in 1906 and lasted until 1948; its site is now occupied by a shopping center. Many other car barns dotted the East Bay (at 47th & Grove Sts., 27th & Harrison St., East 21st St. & 20th Ave., 13th Ave. between East 11th & East 12th Sts., and the Elmhurst Car Barn on East 14th St. at 9th Ave., in use since 1892) which are no longer in existence. The Piedmont station at the southwest corner of 41st is now partly a hamburger stand. The only former Key System property still in transit use today is the Richmond A/C Transit yard.

The Southern Pacific's stations have fared a bit better. The 16th & Wood terminal is still in use by Amtrak. The stations at University & Third Street in Berkeley, and at Seventh Street near Broadway in Oakland, house, respectively, the restaurant China Station, and Mi Rancho Mexican market. The Claremont and Domingo station is also a restaurant, appropriately named, "The Station". The island between Shattuck and Adeline (at Oregon & Russell) where now stands a Safeway was also an S. P. depot; the big S. P. terminal at University and Shattuck was replaced by the stores that now occupy Shattuck Square. Many other stations were of course located on spots now used as stations or roadways by BART or the freeways.

The pride of Smith's Key System was the enormous ornate Key Route Inn on Broadway at 22nd Street, which the B line to Piedmont passed right through. It is no longer there, but the Claremont Hotel which Smith built at the end of the E line still is (the line ended between the hotel's tennis courts - a unique finish). Also developed by Smith as an attraction to increase use of the Key Route was Piedmont Park (on the C line), around the old Piedmont Mineral Springs, and Idora Park in North Oakland, which has now vanished but was a big attraction for many years.

Also all but disappeared are the many railway car factories which flourished in the Bay Area. Some of the finest wood cars on the west coast were produced right here at Emeryville, from about 1906, for the Key System and for Oakland-Hayward street car service. One of the features of these cars was graceful, complex curved window sashes which took much skill to build. After about 1916, steel was used along with wood to build the cars, and finally it became the principal material. However, all of the railway car building shops were shut down as a result of the railway car building shops were shut down as a result of the changeover from electric cars to buses. The awarding of the contract to build 250 BART cars to a California company was a hopeful sign that the industry might someday return to this area.

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To many others in the East Bay besides the railway car factory and electric railroad employees, the closing down of the Key System was a great loss. But to city planners, it was a real nuisance. Frank Ehrhardt, Senior City Planner for Oakland, remembers the changeover to BART as a "reinventing of the wheel. . . . The Key Route was a fine system, a great adventure to ride, not polluting, fairly quiet, with efficient electric motors, and a minimum of moving parts to wear out. But all the changes converged at one time: the veterans returning home, the developers already planning suburban developments for them, the automobile becoming affordable, the freeways of the fifties. Housing followed the freeways, and soon we had urban sprawl." Queried about the parking situation in downtown caused by the increased use of cars, Ehrhardt agreed that it was one of the biggest and most persistent problems. There are plans afoot to build more parking facilities, institute downtown shuttle loops, work out better interfacing with BART, and even require peripheral parking, but the situation in the inner cities these days is highly complex, with many factors requiring resolution.
I asked Ehrhardt if he'd heard about the new light rail streetcar system San Jose is planning to put in (bypassing entirely the older, poorer, and Chicano-dominated parts of town - but more about that another time), and he noted, somewhat sadly, that it would be nearly impossible to restore an electric system here. "It would require a whole new infrastructure, new right-of-ways . . . just too many basic underpinnings."

I had to agree; but around the country interurban rail systems are regaining their popularity. A number of other cities (Seattle, Baltimore, Atlanta, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Washington, D. C.) are said to be planning or building electrically-powered railway systems. Amtrak, the national passenger railroad, now has all-electric engines and cars, and has recently announced it will soon be in the black and be relying less and less on federal aid. Even without higher gas prices, electric rail systems seem to fill an important niche.
Actually, I love BART, never having known its predecessor, and having all too recently migrated here from the transportation wasteland that is Los Angeles. But on this 25th anniversary of the end of the Key System's service, it does seem appropriate to raise on question: when oh when will the BART have direct service to either Oakland or San Francisco airports, as they do in other intelligent civilized places? Will it take another F. M. Smith to accomplish that feat?

The pattern of a city's transportation does much to determine usage of its facilites. Certainly the inertia that has come to characterize downtown Oakland was made stronger when people stopped using the Key System and started driving their cars; in a car they could travel anywhere, to any shopping center or mall, and the inner city was the loser. Among the longtime East Bay residents whom I queried, there were many who loved the older public transportation system but could not compare it to the new, because they had given up using any public transportation and now drove cars instead. These were the people who thought nothing of hopping on a public vehicle in the days when it took them quickly and efficiently where they wanted to go. To me, it means that a lot of people's needs aren't being fully met.

Whatever pattern this urban area's future transportation systems take, it would be wonderful to restore the fun of the older one. The Bay area should know how to do this, with style. I can just see it: ferries with avant garde French restaurants, light rail vehicles with sun platforms, different rail lines competing to have the best gourmet ice cream or the best Dixieland jazz bands, or the best mime artists. Maybe we could do it - put the life back into the system. The space is certainly still there to be filled.