Courtesy of historian Bill Wulf.
This letter is evidence of the mischief local boys created for the Southern Pacific Railroad.
There was much mischief along the old railroad running through Los Gatos.
Today's illustration, a letter written in 1893 from a local Southern Pacific Company agent, asked town trustees to control boys who were making a practice of jumping on cars in the local yard.
As sure as small boy plus rock plus window equals broken glass, boys back then were bound to "horse around" railroad tracks, wherever they might be. Placing pennies and other objects on the tracks as trains approached was a nationwide sport with boys.
Los Gatos was no exception. The Southern Pacific rails ran from the northern border of town, through the middle of town and into the mountains. The station and water tower stood at the site of today's town plaza and post office.
Our informant is historian Bill Wulf, a lifelong train buff.
Wulf recalls that a few years before service into Los Gatos was discontinued in 1959, tunnels through the mountains fell into disrepair and were closed. Thus Los Gatos, rather than Santa Cruz, became the starting point of the morning-evening commute run to San Francisco.
On one particular evening, the train was headed for the barn in San Jose, engine backward and engineer without perfect vision. From the Telephone Corporation yard near Roberts Road, mischief-makers had rolled giant cable spools onto the tracks and the engine was derailed on contact.
Boys were thought to be the villains, but adults, too, could cause the railroad headaches.
Wulf recalls Sunset Park (1885-1910), built by Southern Pacific at Wright's Station to promote weekend traffic. The company park was a roaring success--as in roaring drunk, despite a park rule against selling alcohol. Weekend and holiday passengers brought hard liquor and wine. A six-station privy supported by railway tracks was toppled. Coach windows were broken on the return trip to the Bay Area and the drunkest of the drunks were kicked off in Los Gatos.
The l8th Amendment bringing about Prohibition was soon to follow.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, June 5, 1996.
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