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Blog postSanta Cruz County is rife with urban legends, as are most places founded during a period of poor records and worse memory. In the case of Santa Cruz's train lines, those urban legends focus primarily on the suspicious reasons why the mountain route closed in 1940 and locomotives that everyone assumes must be lost in the mountains. In both cases, there is a shred of truth buried in a whole lot of fabrication.
The Closure of the Mountain Route
The myths and conspiracies behind t -
Blog postBefore the Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad was even completed in October 1875, the City of Santa Cruz had ruled that locomotives could not travel down Pacific Avenue as originally intended by the railroad. This put the company in a bind since hauling heavily-laden flatcars of lumber and lime individually by horse down the one mile to the Railroad Wharf was simply not feasible in the long term. The solution they chose was to bore a tunnel directly underneath Mission Santa Cruz and the Upper Plaz
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Blog postDowntown Santa Cruz was not always situated on the floodplain to the north of the San Lorenzo River below Mission Hill. In the 1790s, the Franciscan friars found this area to be too prone to flooding and centered their community on the hill, where it was protected. For the next sixty years, Mission Hill was the heart of downtown Santa Cruz, with the secular settlement of Branciforte situated on a similar hill across the river. But after California statehood in 1850, new settlers arrived and
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Blog postBelow Mission Hill at the southern end of the former Mission Orchard, later called Eblis, the Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad ran into a problem: its otherwise straight route between Pogonip to the Santa Cruz Main Beach was blocked by Mission Hill. The solution was simple enough: run the train around Mission Hill and down Pacific Avenue to the beach. This idea was fine in theory, but proved unpopular in practice, namely because lumbering steam trains hauling a dozen over-laden cars down the cen
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Blog postFor four brief years, from 1875 until 1879, railroad traffic between Felton and Santa Cruz called a small area to the north of Mission Hill home. The city of Santa Cruz, appreciative of the new railroad line to Felton, was considerably less enthused about trains running down Pacific Avenue. As a result, a city ordinance was passed banning all steam locomotive activity along Pacific Avenue. This resulted in two significant changes. First, the railroad began construction of a tunnel through Missi
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Blog postDeep beneath the bowels of Holy Cross Catholic Church atop Mission Hill, under the old Spanish cemetery, mostly forgotten, lies a dark, dank tunnel through which the Santa Cruz Big Trees & Pacific Railway passes daily through Hell! Okay, not exactly Hell, but rather through Satan! Or at least a devil. Oh my, this has gone off track entirely. Let us begin again...
Advertising poster for the book release of Zoraida, 1895. [Public Domain]In 1894, William Le Queux published the -
Blog postSanta Cruz County had drifted far from its roots as a ranchero community by the early 1920s, but the county still had plenty of ranches that raised stock cattle, dairy cattle, pigs, and poultry. The same was true for much of the state. As a result, a new cooperative organization was founded in October 1916 at Petaluma under the name Poultry Producers, with one branch representing Central California, based in San Francisco, and another in Southern California, based in Los Angeles. The primary fu
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Blog postYOU CAN HELP!If you have information about or photographs of the former oil storage facilities
north of Santa Cruz, leave a comment below or email author@santacruztrains.com.
The golden age of railroad-delivered oil reached Santa Cruz County in the 1920s and the practice continued well into the 1960s. While the various oil companies chose several different places initially to locate their regional petroleum and oil storage tanks and distribution facilities, all of them even -
Blog postIn the decades immediately after statehood, California focused primarily on lumber, lime, and leather production, but other industries were also afoot. One in particular was garnering a lot of hype in March 1877. Deposits of lime were well-known in the county, and Davis & Cowell were already well on their way to cornering the market in 1877, but a firm felt that there was still space for some healthy competition, especially since it planned to produce an entirely different type of product: h
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Blog postDuring the Spanish and Mexican periods, California was known predominately for its leather industry. Cattle ranches spanned the state, especially along the coast, and with most of these ranches were leather tanneries, which used tanbark oils to turn cattle hides into various leather products including shoes, saddles, furniture, and clothing, among other uses. Santa Cruz County was no exception and several such tanneries were built on the roughly two dozen ranchos that populated the coast from th
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Blog postSanta Cruz has historically been blessed with a larger-than-average supply of drinkable water than other Central Coast counties. One such source that has been used for many years is the San Lorenzo River. In January 1926, the City of Santa Cruz bought a small tract of land at the southern boundary of Rancho Rincon that spanned the river between River Street and Crossing Street. This was intended to be used as a supplemental water source for Santa Cruz. To fuel the station, a 6,300-foot-long pip
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Blog postThe grade between Mission Hill in Santa Cruz and the Hogsback within Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park is relatively steep for a railroad. Designed as it was in 1875 to access the Davis & Cowell property in Rancho Rincon—a requirement if the railroad wished to build through the property—meant that certain benefits of the earlier route surveyed by the San Lorenzo Valley Railroad in the late 1860s had to be sacrificed. Numerous solutions, too, had to be adopted, such as a tunnel through the Hog
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Blog postFred Wilder Swanton was a man with a vision when he decided to add a resort hotel to his Casino and Natatorium at the Santa Cruz Main Beach. The Casa del Rey Hotel opened to great fanfare on May 1, 1911, but no resort is complete without some extra amenities to entice travelers. The hotel included a Spanish garden, lounges, an overbridge to the Casino's grand ballroom, and several other special touches, but Swanton's biggest venture related to the resort was the opening of a golf course two mile
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Blog postWhen people think of Santa Cruz County, explosive power is not something that usually comes to mind. But when the American Civil War was raging in the east, a group of California investors thought it prudent to prepare for the possibility that the war could migrate West and engulf the continent. They also thought the price of explosive powder, which had to be shipped from the East, had become simply unaffordable. As such, the California Powder Works was incorporated in San Francisco in late 186
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Blog postPerhaps the most unchanged and best known feature of the railroad route between Santa Cruz and Felton is the long trestle bridge over Shady Gulch. Erected by the narrow-gauge Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad in early 1875, the bridge originally spanned both a natural, steep gully and the Eben Bennett toll road. From its top, passengers, crews, and brave trackwalkers could look down upon the California Powder Works, which sat at the bottom of the valley along the San Lorenzo River. Excursion trai
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Blog postContrary to popular belief, there were actually two tunnels originally located in San Lorenzo Gorge. The first and better known was the Coon Gulch Tunnel under Inspiration Point. But the oldest railroad tunnel in all of Santa Cruz County was actually located 1.3 miles to the south, located beneath the solid granite promontory known as the Hogsback.
The only known image of Tunnel #7 under the Hogsback from a newspaper lithograph, May 1880.The San Lorenzo River carves a relatively straight s -
Blog postTourism is by far the most popular industry in Santa Cruz County today, and it has been for nearly fifty years. But that was not always the case. From its settlement by Spaniards in the 1790s to the end of the Mexican period, leather production and ranching were important industries, ones that continued until quite recently. Logging was probably the most famous industry, with formal redwood timber operations begun by Isaac Graham in the 1840s and significant cutting happening across the county
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Blog postIn the days when México still controlled California, San Lorenzo Gorge was largely a single land grant that went by the name Rancho la Cañada del Rincon en el Río San Lorenzo de Santa Cruz (Ranch in the Canyon of the Bend in the San Lorenzo River of Santa Cruz). The property was not overly productive nor profitable, but during the 1860s, a small sawmill and accompanying paper mill were established in a flat clearing beside the Eben Bennett Toll Road between Santa Cruz and Fe
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Blog postThe picturesque splendor of San Lorenzo Gorge was not lost on even the earliest Western settlers to pass through its depths. Almost as soon as the Eben Bennett Toll Road was completed in 1867, people began to photograph and seek out beautiful views of the southernmost portion of the San Lorenzo Valley. At a tight curve on the toll road, approximately 2.5 miles south of downtown Felton, the road widened very briefly, allowing for a pull-out and rest stop on the way to Santa Cruz. This place prove
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Blog postAt one time, San Lorenzo Gorge hosted two railroad tunnels. The first was the more southernly tunnel through the Hogsback. But further north, beneath Inspiration Point, a second tunnel was situated at the top of a perilous ledge known as Coon Gulch. When the Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad first constructed its line down the gorge in 1875, it did not have the funds nor engineering prowess to surmount the short rock outcropping at the northern end of the gulch. Instead, the pioneering narrow-gau
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Blog postSanta Cruz County may have been a relatively minor cog in the Southern Pacific Company's massive railroad empire, but its appeal as a tourist destination meant that it had increased visibility among the parts of the machine. In its inaugural May 1898 issue, Sunset magazine featured a seven-page illustrated section promoting Summer Holidays Among the Hills: Santa Cruz Mountains and Shasta Resorts. It was not the last time that the merits of Santa Cruz County would be highlighted.
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Blog postThere are two points that all histories of the Southern Pacific Railroad will make sure to inform anyone interested: first, that there were actually several Southern Pacific Railroads; and second, that legally Southern Pacific took over Union Pacific in 1996. And while both of these facts are technically correct, they do not actually clarify anything. For the Southern Pacific Railroad was not just a company, it was a movement that began in the dark years before the Civil War and continues to to
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Blog postThe Southern Pacific Railroad was not founded by the Big Four, nor was it even envisioned by them initially. But once they purchased a controlling interest in the line from Timothy Phelps in 1868, it became more closely linked to them than their original company, the Central Pacific Railroad. Indeed, the Big Four were neither visionary nor excessively ambitious. They were opportunists who saw the potential in a few failing railroading ventures and decided to become involved.
Idealiz -
Blog postWith the completion of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States in May 1869, railroading schemes within California reached a fever pitch. Everyone with a little spare money was becoming interested in investing in a railroad line, from tiny short-line routes like the eight-mile Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad to grand transcontinental schemes such as the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. The people of Oakland especially were excited since the Central Pacific Railroad decided
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Blog postLike in much of the United States in the 1870s, the Gilded Age hit California hard. Although the Gold Rush had officially ended twenty-five years earlier, the bonanza from the Comstock Lode and inspired entrepreneurs continued to invest in California infrastructure with dreams that far outpaced reality. Several of these investors were involved in the South Pacific Coast Railroad project, including James Graham Fair, James Cair Flood, Alfred Edwin Davis, and Charles G. Silent.
Alfred
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