Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Side by Side



This undated image of a Main Street map at Disneyland is from 1956. Always fascinating to see early signage at the Park...at least to me.

Zooming in, you can see the double track in front of the Main Street Train Station. At one time, the second track was more than just a parking spot for the Kalamazoo handcar.



As seen here, two trains formerly coexisted on the tracks together.



Another shot of the Disneyland railroad from the same batch. Back in the day, guests truly felt like cattle as they were shuttered inside of these cars:



A closeup of the C.K. Holliday:



More vintage & current Disneyland Railroad images at my main website.

7 comments:

K. Martinez said...

Extra wonderful post today! The era when the SF&DLRR felt like a real railroad and not just a theme park ride. The photo of the You-Are-Here map is a nice touch and I always love to see both the Freight and Passenger trains side by side at the Main Street Station. Even a nice shot of the human cattle being transported around the park. Mooooo! Thanks, Dave.

DrGoat said...

I agree. Wonderful images.

Major Pepperidge said...

Wow, all of these are beauties!

Unknown said...

Great shots today, Dave. I'm right with Ken re seeing the passing siding in use. And the details on the Main Street map are terrific. That arrow to the Northeast marked "Holidayland" makes sense of the site of the future Matterhorn being called Holiday Hill. It's also good to know where Disneyland's drinking fountain was located.

Thanks for the time and effort, as always.

Fifthrider said...

Fortunately people no longer go to Disneyland to be treated like cattle.

(drops mic - walks away)

Matthew said...

Can someone verify or double check me on this...

I know there was also a spur track at the Frontierland station (before the station was moved across the tracks).

It was my understanding the passenger train would not stop at Frontierland and would take a non-stop tour of the Magic Kingdom (Disneyland)

I thought the freight train would stop at both Main Street and Frontierland, but this image indicates that it may have bypassed Main Street to load at Frontierland (great theming if that was the case).

Or, I wonder, was it really just a matter of operations based on "Audience" capacity that day. For example on busier days we would add more Jungle Cruise boats, trains on Big Thunder, or bring out the Sailing Ship Columbia. We literally knew when to add more trains to Big Thunder based on a where the line was located (and we knew when to pull trains back into storage using the same location markers).

Well, I look forward to our answer.

Always your pal,
Amazon Belle

nick said...

Great map and photo of side-by-side trains -- thanks, Dave for keeping us up to date with Disney-past.