to the left of the headworks was for storage of the flatcar string. Historical significance of this example This example, located in San Francisco, California, south of China Basin was a principal crew change point for maritime operations of the Santa Fe Railroad. It is no longer in use. It remains intact but there are no longer any connecting rails along the shoreline - once the province of the San Francisco Belt Railroad, operated along The Embarcadero by the state of California in support of maritime traffic. This was used extensively in an era when large cargo ships would contain crates or pallets of stores, moved to and from the ship's cargo holds by crews of stevedores and on the docks by crews of longshoremen, with the ship's own spar cranes and winches used for movement. Transport to and from the docks was mostly by rail. Rather than make a long trip down the San Francisco Peninsula, railcars were barged about the bay, both by the Santa Fe and by the Southern Pacific. Southern Pacific eventually replaced their multiple tug and barge system with a single specialized ferryboat. Two ferry slips were used by Santa Fe in San Francisco, here near China Basin, and at the north edge of town near the Maritime Museum. 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 (the so-called Redwood Empire) passing through a slip at Tiburon on Richardson Bay. San Francisco is no longer a significant port for freight as the mode of transport is now in containers, carried by container ships. The containers are loaded on and off ships at the Port of Oakland across the bay, conveniently close to the land modes of container transport - railroad and specialized trucking. The rise of the Port of Oakland and its dominance over San Francisco as a freight port is an example of the exploitation of a disruptive technology by a competitor with a relatively insignificant investment in the older form of the technology. Facilities very similar to those pictured above were still in commercial operation as of 2007 in the Port of New York and New Jersey, transferring freight cars between Greenville Yard in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Bush Terminal Yard in Brooklyn, New York. They are run by