Piles are growing at the city's old railyard. Inside the long-abandoned Southern Pacific railroad shops, there are piles of metal, wood, debris and contaminated junk. Up on roofs, white-suited, specially trained abatement workers are pulling up roofing material and roofing adhesive containing asbestos. Outside one of the shops lies a makeshift salvage yard. Georgia developer Thomas Enterprises and a contractor, Allied Environmental of Placerville, are three months into a $5 million cleanup o... Suzanne Geoff Samek 2009-11-13T02:50:33Z 2009-11-13T02:50:33Z

It was indeed a 3-story lavatory. There were many toilets laying around near the facility to reaffirm that fact.

Geoff Samek 2009-11-13T02:50:33Z Mark Urquhart-Webb 2009-11-12T18:20:06Z 2009-11-12T18:20:06Z

Great story, great photos. ... what is a craphouse? I thought it was slang for a lavatory, but a three story craphouse?

Mark Urquhart-Webb 2009-11-12T18:20:06Z William Burg 2009-11-12T06:43:34Z 2009-11-12T06:43:34Z

A couple of comments: The first Shops buildings were built in 1863, which was also the same year that Sacramento gained fame as the starting point of the Central Pacific Railroad. The oldest surviving building was built in 1868, but the Shops had been operating for five years by then, operating like mad to design, fabricate and maintain the equipment being used to build the Central Pacific. Traffic slowed in the 1930s, but no part of the railyards were abandoned--they merely found different uses. Traffic went back up and then some during World War II, in fact during the war more people worked at the Shops than any other time. After the war, the Shops still built and rebuilt heavy equipment. The Shops were busy through the 1980s--it was the location of the GRIP Program, a Southern Pacific project to refurbish older diesel locomotives, a project that proved much cheaper than buying new locomotives. This involved stripping diesel locomotives all the way down to the frame and rebuilding them entirely, a project as complex as the earlier fabrication of steam locomotives that had taken place at the Shops during the steam era. Did a Thomas Enterprises representative actually say they were going to give the Boiler Shop and Erecting Shop to the Railroad Museum?

William Burg 2009-11-12T06:43:34Z