Key System
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The Key System (or Key Route) was a privately owned company that provided mass transit in the cities of Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, Piedmont, San Leandro, Richmond, Albany, and El Cerrito in the eastern San Francisco Bay Area from 1903 until 1960 when the system was sold to a newly formed public agency, AC Transit.
The Key System consisted of local streetcar and bus lines operating solely in the East Bay, and a network of commuter rail and bus lines connecting cities and neighborhoods in the East Bay to San Francisco by way of a ferry pier extending out into San Francisco Bay, and later, via the lower deck of the Bay Bridge. At its height during the 1940s, the Key System had over 66 miles of track that connected the communities of Richmond, Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, and San Leandro with each other and to San Francisco.
The local streetcars were discontinued in 1948 and the commuter trains to San Francisco were discontinued in 1958. The Key System's original territory is today served by BART and AC Transit bus service.
Beginnings
The system was a consolidation of several smaller streetcar lines assembled in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Francis "Borax" Smith, an entrepreneur who made a fortune in his namesake mineral and then turned to real estate and electric traction. The Key System began as the "San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose Railway (SFOSJR)", incorporated in 1902. Service began on October 26, 1903, with a 4-car train carrying 250 passengers, departing downtown Berkeley for the ferry pier. Before the end of that same year, the general manager of the SFOSJR came up with the idea of using a stylized map on which the system's routes were laid out on the pattern of an old-fashioned key, with three "handle loops" that covered the East Bay cities of Berkeley, Piedmont (initially, "Claremont" shared the Piedmont loop) and Oakland, and a "shaft" in the form of the Key pier, the "teeth" representing the ferry berths at the end of the pier. The company touted its "key route", which eventually led to the company adopting the name "Key System".
In 1908, the SFOSJR changed its name to the San Francisco, Oakland & San Jose Consolidated Railway. This was again changed to the San Francisco-Oakland Terminal Railway in 1912. This incarnation of the Key system went bankrupt in December of 1923, and was re-organized as the Key System Transit Co., transforming what had begun as a marketing buzzword into the name of the company.
Following the Great Crash of 1929, the name was changed yet again as part of another re-organization. A holding company called the Railway Equipment & Realty Co. was created, with the subsidiary Key System Ltd. running the commuter trains. In 1938, the name became simply, the Key System.
During World War II, the Key System built and operated the Shipyard Railway, a special line running between a transfer station in Emeryville and the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond.
System details
The initial connection across the Bay to San Francisco was by ferryboat via a causeway and pier ("mole"), extending from the end of Yerba Buena Avenue in Oakland, California westward 16,000 feet (4,900 meters) across the Bay to a ferry terminal near Yerba Buena Island. Filling for the nascent causeway had actually been started by a short-lived narrow gauge railroad company in the late 1800s, the California and Nevada Railroad. "Borax" Smith acquired the causeway from the California and Nevada upon its bankruptcy. The Key System operated a fleet of ferries between the Key Route Pier [1] and the San Francisco Ferry Building until 1939 when a new dual track opened on the lower deck of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge bringing Key System trains to the then-new Transbay Terminal in San Francisco's downtown. The bridge railway and Transbay Terminal were shared with the Southern Pacific's Interurban Electric and the Sacramento Northern railroads.
The Key System's first trains were composed of standard wooden railroad passenger cars, complete with clerestory roofs. Atop each of these, a pair of pantographs, designed and constructed by the Key System's own shops, were installed to collect current from overhead wires to power a pair of electric motors on each car, one on each truck (bogie).
The design of the Key's rolling stock changed over the years. Wood gave way to steel, and, instead of doors at each end, center doors were adopted.
The later rolling stock consisted of specially-designed "bridge units" for use on the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, articulated cars sharing a common central truck and including central passenger entries in each car, a forerunner of the design of most light rail vehicles today. Several of these pairs were connected to make up a train. Power pickup was via pantograph from overhead catenary wires, except on the Bay Bridge where a third rail pickup was used. The Key's trains ran on 600 volt direct current, compared to the 1200 volts used by the SP commuter trains. The cars had an enclosed operator's cab in the right front, with passenger seats extending to the very front of the vehicle, a favorite seat for many children, with dramatic views of the tracks ahead.
The exterior color of the cars was orange and cream white with a pale green stripe at the window level. Interior upholstery was woven reed seat covers in one of the articulated sections, and leather in the other, the smoking section. The flooring was linoleum. During World War II, the roofs were painted gray for aerial camouflage. After acquisition by National City Lines, all Key vehicles including the bridge units were re-painted in that company's standard colors, yellow and green.
Dismantlement
See also [ General Motors streetcar conspiracy ] The Key System's famed commuter train system was dismantled in 1958 after many years of declining ridership as well as the effort by National City Lines, a General Motors affiliate which had bought up the system in the late 1940s to petition the public utility board to abandon the last rail lines. In 1949, a Federal Court convicted General Motors, Standard Oil of California, Firestone Tire and others of criminally conspiring to replace electric transportation with gasoline or diesel powered buses, and to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to local transit companies throughout the U.S. They were fined $5,000. State planners anxious to embrace California's postwar love for the automobile also pushed to have the track across the Bay Bridge and street rights of way removed to increase highway and street capacity. Local governments in the East Bay attempted to purchase the Key System, but were unsuccessful. The last run for the Key System's rail system was on April 20, 1958. In 1960, the newly-formed, publicly owned AC Transit took over the Key System's facilities.
Most of the rolling stock was scrapped, and some of the rest sold and shipped off for operation in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A few of the bridge units were salvaged for collections in the United States. Two are at the Western Railway Museum near Rio Vista, California while another is at the Orange Empire Railway Museum in southern California.
Other properties
From the beginning, the Key System had been conceived as a dual real estate and transportation system. "Borax" Smith and his partner Frank C. Havens first established a company called the "Realty Syndicate" which acquired large tracts of undeveloped land throughout the East Bay. The Realty Syndicate also built two large hotels, each served by a San Francisco-bound train, the Claremont and the Key Route Inn, and a popular amusement park in Oakland called Idora Park. Streetcar lines were also routed to serve all these properties, thereby enhancing their value. In its early years, the Key System was actually a subsidiary of the Realty Syndicate.
Legacy
Signs of the system still remain.
- The elevated loop at San Francisco's Transbay Transit Terminal still exists, and with some modifications to the original design, is currently used by AC Transit buses to drop off passengers and return to the East Bay as the Key System once did. This will be further modified when the Transbay Terminal is replaced with a new structure scheduled for completion in 2012.
- The eastern end of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge sits on landfill which was added to the northern edge of the causeway which carried the Key System railbed to "the mole," or ferry piers.
- A stretch of road in Albany that was built with a wide median for a planned extension of the G-Westbrae line (but never constructed) is named Key Route Boulevard.
- The Claremont Hotel, built by a Key System affiliate company, The Realty Syndicate, survives as the Claremont Resort.
- The Key System's administrative headquarters building still exists in downtown Oakland and is a designated national landmark. The building suffered some damage in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and is currently unoccupied.
- A building which today houses a restaurant at 40th Street and Piedmont Avenue in Oakland is the partial remnant of what was formerly a covered stop for trains on the C-line. There are old photos of the Key System on the walls of the restaurant as well as a mural of Key System images on one of its outside walls.
- The bus yards of today's AC Transit in Emeryville and Richmond were originally the bus yards of the Key System.
A Personal Note from Robin
- The Oakland Berkeley & Eastern website focuses on the electric trains in the East Bay that carried passengers from neighborhoods and suburbs to San Francisco.
- A really wonderful interactive map showing the original Shipyard Railway route
- The idea of an underwater electric rail tube was first proposed in the early 1900s by Francis "Borax" Smith. It is no coincidence that much of BART's current coverage area was once served by the electrified streetcar and suburban train network called the Key System. This early twentieth century system once had regular trans-bay traffic across the lower deck of the Bay Bridge. By the 1950s the entire system had been dismantled in favor of automobiles and buses and the explosive growth of highway construction.
See also [[BART]]
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