Butler Road | |
Style: | Southern Pacific Railroad |
Address: | Oyster Point Boulevard (Butler Road) South San Francisco, California |
Coordinates: | 37.6628°N -122.3983°W |
Mapframe: | yes |
Zone: | 1--> |
Line: | PCJPB Peninsula Subdivision |
Closed: | [1] |
Other Services Header: | Former services |
Butler Road station was a train station in South San Francisco, California, in operation until July 1983 on the Peninsula Commute, a commuter rail service run by Southern Pacific between San Francisco and communities on the San Francisco Peninsula. The Butler Road train shelter was built in 1926.[2]
The stop was next to the Shaw-Batcher steel mill, which opened in 1913; the mill was purchased by the Western Pipe and Steel Company in 1917.[3] of land were acquired for a shipyard in August 1917,[4] and Shaw-Batcher was awarded a $30 million contract to build 18 merchant ships during World War I. The worksite population grew from 200 in early 1917 to 4,447 by July 1918, a month after the company's first ship was launched.[5] After the war, Western Pipe moved shipbuilding operations to San Pedro[6] [7] and continued to produce pipe in South San Francisco, which was used in notable dam projects such as Hetch Hetchy, Grand Coulee, Shasta, and Folsom.[8] The shipyard was reactivated in 1939 for World War II,[9] [10] and after the war ended, the site was sold in 1948 to Consolidated Steel (later United States Steel and its divisions),[11] which closed the mill in 1983. Service to the Butler Road stop was also discontinued that year.[12]
The Butler Road stop was relatively little-used for much of its existence. In 1958, for example, only four of the 27 total northbound weekday commuter trains stopped at the station.[13] In 1978, only three of the 22 total northbound weekday trains stopped there.[14]
Butler Road, the roadway itself, has been renamed Oyster Point Boulevard.[15] [16] The Peninsula Commute service was taken over by the State of California and renamed Caltrain in 1985, the name by which it is still known.