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Congress Junction deserves a little recognition

By Willys Peck

Congress Junction? Who said Congress Junction? OK, nobody said it. I was just thinking about it. It's the kind of thought that occurs to me when I'm facing a column deadline and groping for a subject. The key word here is "recycling," and Congress Junction has figured in these writings twice in the last decade. However, I don't think I'm out of place in calling attention again to a Saratoga site that is worthy of some kind of historical marking.

As to the word "junction": The applicable dictionary definition is "a place or station where railroad lines meet or cross," but where do we have such in Saratoga? True, we have a railroad line through town going up to the Kaiser Cement Corp. operation in the hills behind Monta Vista, but we don't have any local rail crossings or junctions. There was a time, though, when trolley car tracks of the Peninsular Railway crossed the current railroad tracks at Saratoga Avenue. Today, that's the site of the underpass beneath Highway 85 and the railroad tracks. "Congress" in the above name referred, of course, to Congress Springs, the mineral water site above Saratoga that was served by the Peninsular cars.

My childhood fascination with trains never wore off, as indicated by the miniature railroad that I built circling my garden, and the passenger railroad service we had in Saratoga has always been a topic of special interest to me. That service lasted from 1908 to January 1964.

At that time, the tracks continued northward from Monta Vista along the route of the present Foothill Expressway, and the railroad was credited with bringing about the development of Los Altos. Continuing, the line skirted the edge of the Stanford University campus and continued on to join the main Southern Pacific line at California Avenue in Palo Alto. Saratoga passengers could get on at Congress Junction or at Azule, where the tracks crossed Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road.

The line attracted an appreciable number of commuters to San Francisco. Those boarding at Congress Junction took train No.129, which left at 6:49 a.m., arriving at San Francisco a little over an hour and a half later. The return train left San Francisco at 5:17 p.m. and arrived at Congress Junction an hour and 20 minutes later.

I remember how, in my childhood, we always referred to the "steam train." We could take the steam train to San Francisco and the streetcar to San Jose. And this reminds me of how we distinguished destinations by prepositions. That is, we would go "over" to Los Gatos; "in" to San Jose, a.k.a. "town," and "up" to San Francisco, a.k.a. "the city." Going into the Village was simply "going downtown."

Getting back to Congress Junction, I don't know how the site could be appropriately marked, what with the railroad overpass at Saratoga Avenue, but I think it's significant enough to warrant some visible designation. And I wouldn't pay any mind to the Champagne Fountain designation that replaced the Congress Junction name in its final years. That had to do with the Paul Masson bottling plant and its elaborate outdoor plumbing fixture that was on the site of the present condominiums.

The branch line serving Saratoga was variously known as the Mayfield--that's south Palo Alto--or Vasona cutoff, which left the main line at Vasona. That main line was the one that had originated in Santa Cruz, went through the mountains to Los Gatos and on to San Jose. Service from Santa Cruz ended in March 1940, but commuter trains originating in Los Gatos continued until 1959. After 1959, commuter trains that ran through Congress Junction originated in San Jose and took the branch line at Vasona to continue northward.

Steam power, which gave the railroad a lot of its glamour, ended in January 1957 when diesel locomotives took over. One thing that I especially missed in this transition was the hoarse blast of the steam whistle as the morning train came to Congress Junction. It was a pleasant way to be awakened. I remember how my daughter, not quite 3 at the time, reacted to that first sound of an air horn on the diesel. She climbed out of her crib and up to our bed.

"Mommy," she exclaimed, "I hear a diesel!"

Now there was a kid who could tell when an era was ending.