The Atchison and Topeka Car Ferry Slip
Between Piers 52 and 50
Mission Bay
Built in 1950, not much remains of the ATSF Car Ferry Slip. What does remain consists of a large, fork-shaped pier covered in wood decking. Near the mid-point of the structure is a large, steel-frame freight tower consisting of a pair of smaller metal truss towers, each capped by a pulley wheel.
The structure served the fleet of tugs and barges that carried freight cars between the railroad’s main railhead in Richmond and San Francisco.
Photo from Wikipedia
Transport to and from the docks was mostly by rail. Rather than make a long trip down the San Francisco Peninsula, railcars were barged around the bay, both by the Santa Fe and by the Southern Pacific railways.
Most traffic would be taken across the bay to Oakland or Richmond for connection with the major transcontinental rail lines, with a small amount of traffic for California’s northern coastal region passed through a slip at Tiburon on Richardson Bay.
The ATSF Car Ferry Slip, closed in 1984, does not have any formal historic status at the national, state, or local level but does appear to be a potential historic resource as a rare physical remnant of the infrastructure built by the ATSF to transport train cars from its main East Bay railheads to San Francisco.
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A loaded train ferry approaching a Car Ferry Slip on Lake Michigan