Where That Lonesome Air Horn Blows : A Train Lover’s Tour Through Downtown Los Angeles

I find train tracks too tempting not to follow. They don’t go where streets and roads go. They pass few front doors, pre ferring alleys or their own rights-of-way, and they seldom lead to any place you would normally go. Following them can be an adventure--often into the past--because most of the rails that curve through Los Angeles were laid a long time ago.

The tracks that pass by my house in West Los Angeles were first spiked into place in 1875 for the Los Angeles & Independence Railroad. They were part of a scheme to connect the silver mines of Nevada with a port in Los Angeles, a port that was perched on pilings in Santa Monica Bay. Things didn’t work out (the port moved to San Pedro), and the tracks became the property of the growing Southern Pacific. They then served commuters as the Air Line for the interurban cars of the Pacific Electric before reverting again to the Southern Pacific when freeways put the big Red Cars out of business.

Now I hear that the tracks are to be abandoned, and already I miss the lonely sound of the locomotive’s air horns as it makes its gentlemanly way through the garrulous Westside traffic. I decided to follow the tracks, to learn more of their habits and haunts before they became only words and pictures in a book. Following the rails led me to the unheralded, historical heart of the city, a part of Los Angeles I would preserve under a bell jar if I could.

Bounded by Alameda Street and the Los Angeles River, buried between the Santa Monica and Santa Ana freeways, is an area that was once the domain of these iron dinosaurs, and their tracks and traces are everywhere. Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, the Santa Fe and the Pacific Electric all converged here. Tracks and yards still line the river and from these staging areas fan out to the old commercial district. The rails run down streets and alleys, between buildings, over bridges, in every direction through a world built of brick.

Amid this grid of urban streets, the rails make graceful curves through the canyons of downtown, cutting blocks and buildings into pie shapes and semi-circles. Against the black asphalt, the polished, worn tops of the rails sparkle like rivulets of steel, though here and there they simply vanish, like a stream gone underground.

Or sometimes a straight section of track running between buildings disappears. Like a bend in a river, these sudden curves usually signal adventure. It was just beyond one of these bends in the rails, near the corner of Industrial and Mill streets, that I found one of my favorite buildings, though it’s the rails that make it so.

There’s something intriguing about a train disappearing into a tunnel; tunnels are perhaps the first thing a child adds to a Christmas train set. This building is as close to a railroad tunnel as you’re likely to find in downtown Los Angeles. The rails cleave the building in two, and the contouring brick walls parallel the rounding of the tracks with no room to spare. The sign by the portal to this urban tunnel--WARNING. STRUCTURES ON THIS TRACK WILL NOT CLEAR A MAN ON THE OUTSIDE OF THE CAR--is neither kidding nor cautious.

It is easy to imagine a hissing steam switcher, the kind that trailed a slope-backed tender, so popular in toy-train sets, disappearing into this brick slot, the flanges squealing on the tight radius, dragging reluctant red boxcars behind, or perhaps pushing them ahead so it could back out after delivery.

Despite the weeds and the rust on the rails, the route has not been abandoned. Occasionally, a rather large, blue-and-yellow Santa Fe diesel assigned to inner-city switching chores plies this piece of track. If you’re like me, you’ll keep coming back to the corner of Industrial and Mill streets, hoping to catch it on its erratic afternoon rounds, coming through this Tuscan-red tunnel, creeping cautiously along like a skater on thin ice, unsure of the footing underneath where most of the rails have 1915cast on their sides.

Continue to follow the rails on foot across Industrial Street toward Santa Fe Avenue, and you find among the grasses track work of incredible complexity, with rails crossing one another at amazing angles before leading off in a dozen directions, each one worth exploring.

Everywhere you look, you find a Los Angeles of another era that is refreshingly rich in texture and color, in sharp contrast to the slick, new office buildings visible in the distance. Everything has been weathered, eroded, rusted or polished, and the materials are coarse or natural--stone, brick, wood and iron--materials you want to touch even though you’re going to get your hands dirty.

At your feet you come across, amid the modern rubble, bits of purple glass, china and more discarded railroad spikes than your children can carry home. Wherever the asphalt has broken loose you’re likely to see brick paving beneath. Where Commercial Street ends at the river, there is a large remnant of brick street paving. Those heavy, dark-red bricks were made by the Los Angeles Paving Brick Co. around the turn of the century.

Here and there, the tracks cross bits of cobblestone, an unlikely sight in Los Angeles. One nice patch of cobblestone is a short drive away on 3rd Street, in a parking lot, just around the corner from Santa Fe Avenue.

Looking upward, you discover the names of the original occupants of these old buildings--the Aggeler & Musser Seed Co., Blue Diamond Walnuts, Mission Furniture Co., Union Hardware and others.

On East Banning Street, just off Santa Fe, you see a cartoonlike steam whistle that once must have signaled lunch; behind it towers an old and ornate smokestack with WHITE KING written on its side. They are part of a perfectly preserved (on the outside, anyway), late 19th-Century industry, the Los Angeles Soap Co., founded in 1860 and still doing business. One of the buildings dates to 1858. Here the street is choked with industrial tracks and switches. Bricks line the gutters, and the brick buildings are laced together by endless lengths of pipe, conveyors and other Industrial Age trappings. Fading on one wall is a turn-of-the-century billboard advertising Cocoa Naptha soap: EASY WORK, NO BOILING.

What is missing from this urban archeological site are the trains themselves. Some tracks are obviously abandoned, clogged with asphalt or ending abruptly in the middle of a street. Others are still in use, but the trains make only infrequent appearances, with trucks now doing most of the transporting and many of the businesses gone.

If you’re lucky, you might catch a switcher working this industrial trackage (the Coca-Cola bottling plant on 4th Street gets fairly regular deliveries of corn syrup). But for the sight and smell of the living, breathing monster itself, continue north, under the Santa Ana Freeway, to the rail yard between North Broadway and Spring Street. It is almost on the site of River Station, the original Southern Pacific terminus, which “changed forever the ‘pueblo’ character of Los Angeles,” according to the monument that marks the spot. Here the rails first came into Los Angeles in 1876, connecting it to the rest of the country. Right next door to this first busy yard is the last busy yard in downtown Los Angeles--the Southern Pacific’s Bull Ring.

There is no better place to watch trains, for you can walk right over the yard on a vintage pedestrian overpass and stand directly above the working locomotives.

This yard is now bustling with “intermodal” traffic--those containers that go on trucks, boats or trains. Here, they’re loaded on special flatcars by an oversize forkliftlike crane called a “piggy packer” that handles the truck trailers as though they weighed nothing at all. You can view this from the bluff above (on Broadway), where there’s a dirt parking area at the end of Solano Avenue. From there, walk out onto the overpass.

From this rickety wood-and-iron structure that trembles with every passing train, you can watch, and feel, the switchers work the yard, back and forth, spotting cars here and there. Wait patiently and you can position yourself directly above a passing diesel to hear the roar of the exhaust or cooling fans, just inches below your feet. You’re so close now that you can stare directly into the cab or get a face full of exhaust.

Most of the diesels working this yard are SW1500s or their newer brethren, MP15ACs, built by the Electro-Motive Division of General Motors (their tall twin stacks make these switchers immediately identifiable, and you may recognize them as a favorite model for toy trains). Each has a huge V-12 engine under that long hood, producing about 1,500 horsepower. Their thunder underfoot will not soon be forgotten. They weigh about 250,000 pounds, which is why you don’t want to get too close while observing. Up on the pedestrian overpass is just right.

That there’s nothing lightweight about a train or its environment is certainly part of the appeal. The smallest bolt found lying by the tracks is heavy enough to hold a door open. The rails are like anvils that have no ends; the ties that support them are timbers that can hold back hillsides. Everything is not just heavy-duty but the heaviest duty imaginable. It’s fortunate that this is the case, for with this heaviness comes longevity--the reason the rails still wind through Los Angeles.