Shipyard Railway
The Shipyard Railway was a temporary electric railroad line, rapidly constructed during World War II to transport workers to the Kaiser Shipyards in the city of Richmond, California.
The Shipyard Railway was built and operated by the Key System, a local transit company in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. The Key System also provided commuter rail service between San Francisco and the East Bay over the Bay Bridge.
The Shipyard Railway ran from a specially-constructed depot at 40th Street and San Pablo Avenue in Emeryville, up San Pablo Avenue northward to Grayson Street in Berkeley then two blocks west to Ninth Street, then a far stretch north along Ninth, across a bridge over Codornices Creek, then diagonally northwest across Albany Village, a federal housing project for war workers, then up and over a specially-constructed trestle above the main line of the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Eastshore Highway, thence continuing northwest along the bayshore in Richmond, and terminating in a loop line servicing the four massive shipyards of Kaiser.
The Shipyard Railway utilized the cars of the Key System's transbay lines ("bridge units") as well as a number of old New York City subway cars.
The tracks on Ninth Street used by the Shipyard Railway were formerly the tracks of the Ninth Street Line of the Southern Pacific's transbay Interurban Electric Railway (East Bay Electric Lines).
The Shipyard Railway was quickly dismantled at the end of World War II.
References
- A Selective History of the Codornices-University Village...with special attention given to the Richmond Shipyard Railway..., by Warren and Catherine Lee, Imprint (Albuquerque, N.M.): Belvidere Delaware Railroad Company Enterprises, Ltd., (2000)
- The Key Route, 2v., Harre Demoro, Interurban Press, 1985.
