| Because the Santa Fe had no direct rail connection to the San Francisco Peninsula, the railroad rostered a fleet of three tugboats to ferry cars on barges across San Francisco Bay. The last of these three, the “Paul P. Hastings,” sits at the China Basin car float on June 24th, 1986. The tugboat was built in 1945 at Point Pleasant, West Virginia by the Marietta Manufacturing Company, and was acquired by the Santa Fe in February 1948 (and named for a Santa Fe Railroad executive, who was the VP of Traffic when he retired in 1941). and was used until the railroad discontinued service to San Francisco in 1984. After the tug sat unused at China Basin for years, it was sold and eventually ended up seeing service again and renamed “Terminator.” On January 27th, 1992, following a collision with a cable-laying ship, the “Terminator” sank off Point Arena (about 100 miles north of San Francisco) in water about a mile deep. |