Folks,

The Western Railway Museum has several cars built by the William L. Holman Car Company of San Francisco. They include 2 Interurbans, a box motor, a freight trailer, a box car a flat car.

Does anybody know where there are published articles of any length about the firm. Apparantly the partnership was at 18th and Indiana until about 1912. The last entry in the SF City Directory calls them Car Builders and Mill Wrights

One brief notation that I have read says that they were nothing more than a wood working shop. And their attempt to get into metal car building put them out of business.

thanks for your attention.

Ted Miles

You have the "Peoples Railway" text, right?

Ted,

I have been wracking my brain the last few days trying to recall what I may have read over the years about Holman. I don't come up with very much.

As I recall the initial car order for the SF Municipal Ry (included car #1) was given to Holman and they did not complete the order.

The 1965 booklet from Trans-Anglo Books entitled Locomotive, Trolley, and Rail Car Builders, by Ian Arnold, has this short (like most of its listings) item on Holman:

You might contact Kyle Wyatt at CSRM to see if he knows anything about the firm. While he is more into mainline builders, etc. it is within the era and technology of his interest.

The San Francisco Bay area had a number of car builders. Early on there was Kimball which was the subject of a John White article in R&LHS Railroad History. Then there came the Carter Bros and then Hammond and Holman. And if you go east to Stockton I think there were one or two 19th century street car builders.

In the early 90s Holman built two bag-coach combines for the Redondo Railroad which were transported by ship to Redondo.

brian,

Yes, I have the Trans=angle list, lots of good items there .

do you know of any surviving cars down your way?

So far I have found them at the State RR Museum, Carter Brothers and one in Petaluma on tires.

Ted Miles

Ted,

I don't know of any Holman cars existing down this way. I think there were more Hammond cars down here in Southern California. The LARy derrick 9225 has a Hammond journal pedestal in one of its trucks.

Some cars originally built by Hammond exist up on the White Pass; these are ex-Pacific Coast.

Another source of information about car builders is E. Harper Charlton's Railway Car Builders of the United States & Canada. This was published as Interurbans Special 24 in 1957. Last evening I remembered it and pulled it down from the shelf. He has three paragraphs about Holman and also three on Hammond.

Seems that the two firms had some affiliation in the early 1880s.

Charlton writes in part about Holman:

There are two Holman cars at Railtown in Jamestown, CA. The two little Sierra Railway coach and combine #’s 5 & 6 that were used on Angels Branch Line were built by the Holman Company. I saw a copy of the sales quote for the cars on the Holman letterhead, which as I remember said something to the effect of “builders of railroad cars, dumb waiters and elevators”. The coaches are still at Railtown an original state and believe still in service.

Larry Ingold
Oakdale, CA

Where was the Redondo Railroad?

There is some mention of the Holman Co. on the Cable Car Home Page.

http://www.cable-car-guy.com/html/ccmain.html#top

Go to the site's search feature and search for "Holman", brings up several hits.
A large and very interesting site, by the way, with lots of interesting reading even though the subject is somewhat outside of most railfans' immediate interest. I especially enjoyed the humerous 1st-person stories by a SF cable car grip-man.

First, I have to make a correction (or two). The combination cars for the Redondo Railway were built by J. Hammond -- not Holman. I was working from memory and since my post of the other evening I have reviewed my notes. The notes were taken from the journal and ledgers now at Stanford University Special Collections.



The Redondo Railway was incorporated in 1889 to built a 3' rail line between Redondo (Beach) and Los Angeles. The principal investors were J. C. Ainsworth and R. R. Thompson (both once involved with Oregon Steam Navigation on the Columbia River) who also had acquired the Redondo town site and developed the Redondo Hotel. The Los Angeles terminal was near Grand and Jefferson where it had a transfer dock with along the SP's San Monica branch; this was also a point to connect with the local horsecar and later streetcar lines. The line generally ran south along Vermont Ave to the Gardena area and then turned toward Redondo.

In 1896 the company renamed itself to Los Angeles & Redondo Railway to better reflect its nature. It also owned the wharfs at Redondo. It was in a freight pool for the lumber traffic coming though the various ports to Los Angeles -- before the development of San Pedro (LA harbor), Redondo was a principal lumber port for LA served by a Santa Fe predecessor and the Redondo.

In 1902 the company decided to convert to a 3'-6" gauge electric line. the gauge was so that it could run its cars into downtown Los Angeles on the local streetcar system. A new line was built through the Inglewood area and the old line converted. In 1905 Henry E. Huntington acquired control of the company. Additional lines were built, some for specific operation by the local Los Angeles Railway (streetcars)

In 1910-11 it was part of the merger and division of electric railways in the LA area that created the "New" Pacific Electric. The PE built a cross country line from Watts to the Standard Oil refinery at El Segundo; the LA&R south of this line became part of the PE and was standard gauged. The the portion north went to the Los Angeles Railway and remained 42" gauge.

For other information see: http://www.erha.org/la&r.htm which takes much of its information from the Ira Swett Interurbans Special No. 20 Los Angeles & Redondo of 1957.

Map from the City of Gardena website.

The historys of the Hammond and Hollman car works were somewhat intertwined. The short versions below are from the soon to be published Carter Catalog and Dictionary of California car building practice....


J. Hammond & Co. the California Car Works, 1883-1910,

John Hammond, was a millwright and practical engineer, operating or working for a variety of wood mills and sash makers in San Francisco until he formed his own business about 1874. In 1882 he produced a quantity of milled wood for the San Joaquin and Sierra Nevada railroad, for their car building efforts. By 1885, he listed his business as the “California Car Works, Manufacturer of every description of Passenger and Freight cars”. In 1886 they built cars for the Colusa and Lake, two of which are now at the Southern Nevada State Railroad Museum. Their early production is dominated with orders for various street railroads, particularly cable car lines. By 1888 William Holman has joined the firm as the Superintendent.

John Hammond is credited with invention of the “California Style” streetcar, a three compartment car, with a center closed section, and open end sections, for which he held a patent. His company built the first car of this design for the California Street Cable Railroad Company in 1888. Hammond’s largest single order we know of came in 1889 when the Omnibus Railroad Company of San Francisco ordered 143 cable cars. By 1892 he was building electric cars for the Consolidated Piedmont Cable Co. of Oakland. In 1893 they built 6 narrow gauge passenger cars for the Pacific Coast Railroad, 4 of which are still in use on the White Pass and Yukon. From the early 1890’s to at least 1908, the company was busy with many mostly small orders for electrics, for a number of West Coast lines including the San Francisco and San Mateo, the Bakersfield and Kern, and the Los Angeles Railway, narrow gauge cars for the Pajaro Valley Consolidated Railroad (over 150 cars) and the Tonapah RR (approximately 100 cars, some later sold to the Lake Tahoe Railroad, and to the Eureka and Palisades) and standard gauge freight cars for the Sierra Nevada Wood & Lumber Co and the Sierra Railroad.

John Hammond’s son Manton E Hammond joined the business as the bookkeeper in 1893, apparently displacing superintendent Holman, who left to form his own car building company. Manton Hammond took over the business in 1901 when his father died. In 1906 the works were located on King Street, just outside the fire area. On April 30, 1906, They advertised that "We have escaped the fire and are ready to operate.” The company continued to build railroad cars and elevators until 1910 when Manton Hammond apparently closed the business to explore other business opportunities.

Hammond built cars and had a reputation for quality. The cable cars he built for the Omnibus Railroad were said to contain more iron that other builders, and were built well enough to allow them to be converted to electric power. He introduced several improvements to California built narrow gauge cars including iron bolsters and roofs.

W. I. Holman, 1894-1913

William Holman had been the foreman and a partner with Hammond. He formed his own company in the early 1890's. His production was similar to his former employer’s, a mix of cable horse and street cars, logging equipment, with an occasional freight or passenger car thrown in. Holman's Fremont Street shop was destroyed days before the earthquake and fire in 1906. He rebuilt, at a new location at 18th & Illinois Street. The company was taken over by his son in law, who tried to make the transition from wood to steel cars in 1912 with an order for the Municipal Railway's type “A” streetcars. He went bankrupt half way through the order and the remaining cars were completed by the Union Iron Works.

Holman’s customers included the Diamond and Caldor Lumber Co., Ocean Shore Railroad, The Oakland and Antioch, later part of the Sacramento Northern, and Hall Scott.

Holman’s cars did not enjoy a reputation for quality. The light weight passenger cars he built for the Ocean Shore Railroad were referred to as “Dog Cars” by a California Railroad Commission inspector. The Oakland and Antioch filed a law suit when the platforms of the interurbans he built sagged prematurely under the weight of the control and brake equipment. It appears that the California Car Builders tradition of light construction was no longer appropriate for the increasingly rough railroad environment.

Ted, I have copies of 6 or so photos of the Holman works on Indiana Street in SF. The building survives as a wholesale grocer (or was the last time I checked.)