Santa Cruz Trains

Google Maps satellite view of the entire former freight area.

Watsonville has always been a major agricultural industrial center and the advent of the railroad into the town in 1873 turned it into a major local hub for canneries, fruit dryers, packing plants, and other agriculture-based factories. In the immediate vicinity of Watsonville Depot, along Beach Road, a number of businesses popped up that used or potentially used the railroad to haul its goods.

The first such company founded beside the railroad tracks was the Watsonville Fruit Dryer & Cannery, located on Beach Road (3rd Street) at the modern-day end of Harvest Drive. The Santa Cruz Railroad Tracks were installed about a half-block away from the packing house and, in response, the company placed a warehouse between the two, allowing it to use the tracks. The company was in operation only from circa 1886 to February 1888 when it fell vacant. The Western Beet Sugar Company purchased the vacant structure around the time that it was erecting its Pajaro Valley Railroad in 1890. A siding that ran on the cannery side of the mainline tracks skirted the edge of the structure on its way to the PVRR passenger and freight depot, located just south of the Southern Pacific Railroad crossing. By 1902 the cannery was gone and the side of the Pajaro Valley Consolidated Railroad depot had tripled in size, taking over much of the old packing company's space.

Sanborn Map, 1902, showing the Adamson Fruit Company.
(UCSC Digital Collections)

Just opposite Beach Road from the cannery, Adamson Fruit Company erected a fruit drier factory at some point in the late 1890s, this time with the adjacent railroad tracks clearly a part of their operation. By 1904, a fruit packing warehouse sat beside the tracks further to the south, as well. While little is stated on Sanborn Company Insurance Maps regarding the operation, a notation in 1911 states that the facility was run by Chinese workers. It still existed in 1920 under the management of Chinese, but the name of the company was no longer listed in Sanborn maps suggesting the original owners had left.

The Loma Prieta Lumber Company yard south of the Southern Pacific tracks, 1902
(Sanborn – UCSC Digital Collections)

In the late 1890s, the Loma Prieta Lumber Company – which operated a mill in the Aptos Creek area during this time – opened a new lumber yard and planing mill immediately beside the Adamson Fruit Company, likely using the Pajaro Valley Consolidated Railroad tracks, which ran to the west of their grounds, and the Southern Pacific tracks, which ran to the north, to ship their goods to the Salinas Valley and elsewhere. This locale may have been in response to the Hihn-Hammond Lumber Company yard that was erected on the former Spreckels Beet Sugar Company grounds just to the north along Walker Street. Loma Prieta Lumber Company had previously operated its yard directly in the center of the large Pajaro Station wye. But the relocation may have been to capitalise on the potential of dual shipping routes. The Beach Road ran on either side of the street, with the majority of its facilities located to the west of the Southern Pacific depot. By 1904, the area to the north of the road had been abandoned and only the section beside the PVCRR tracks remained, with limited warehouses beside the track to support export shipping. The lumber yard on Beach Road appears to have been abandoned entirely by 1920, which coincides with the closure of the company in that year.

Watsonville Ice & Cold Storage Company facility, 1914, published by Edward H. Mitchell.

In 1902, a small ice house owned by the Western Ice & Cold Storage Company was built at the end of a short north-bound spur that ran beside the Loma Prieta Lumber Company yard. It remained there in 1904 when the yard was abandoned and then, around 1910, it relocated to the south-eastern corner of the Southern Pacific junction with the PVCRR. This convenient location allowed it to be used by both firms. By 1920, the Southern Pacific had also extended a spur out to this ice house, alongside which it installed a coal shed and a wood shed, presumably to support railroad operations. By 1914, a much larger facility for the Watsonville Ice & Cold Storage Company was erected on the north-west corner of the PVCRR and Southern Pacific junction. This massive and modern facility likely catered to all the local packing houses that required freeze-drying or refrigerating their goods.

Original trackside packing houses, 1902. (Sanborn – UCSC Digital Collections)

Further to the north, the Southern Pacific Railroad erected a grain warehouse and freight house on the southern side of the Santa Cruz Branch tracks by 1886. In the early years, the freight house also housed the ticket office and a small waiting room for passengers. The building was probably built by the Santa Cruz Railroad by 1875, although it is possible it was a newer structure built in the 1880s. The depot was relocated to the other side of the tracks in the late 1890s and the old structures were taken over by four local packing firms: M.N. Lettunich & Company, Porter Brothers Company, George Wilson Rowe, and the Earl Fruit Company. Mato N. Letunić, known locally as Martin Lettunich, was a Croatian settler who moved to the area round 1890 where he founded, with his brothers Petar and Edwin, the packing business. The former mainline track, since downgraded to a freight spur, ran behind these four packing houses while the fronts of the buildings were extended to Beach Road.

Borcovich & Dragovich advertisement, c. 1920s.

By 1904, only Lettunich and Earl Fruit remained and their buildings were both expanded to full street frontage, filling in gaps left between the original two structures. By 1920, Lettunich had cut his operation in half, leasing out half of his building to Borcovich Dragovich & Company. Earl Fruit had been replaced with the primary packing house of the Loma Fruit Company (the other house was on Walker Street). Next door around 1910, the California Fruit Packing Company placed a rather extensive complex of two large fruit packing houses on the old Loma Prieta Lumber yard property that ran almost to the PVCRR tracks. The operation was short-lived, though, and by 1920 the property had been taken over by a whole lineup of small private packing houses, including J.M Luckrich, M.L. Kalich, Scurich & Jerinich, N.M. Borina, L.P. Cikuth, and P.P. Stolich. For whatever reason, the Croatian farmers were drawn to this block of warehouses. All of these people were local farmers who purchased packing houses beside the tracks and Beach Road to make shipment of their goods easier.

Trackside packing houses, 1920. (Sanborn – UCSC Digital Collections)

Sources available to this author are rather sparse for the period between 1920 and 1973, when a yard map is once again available. However, little seems to have changed at the site except for owners. Agricultural packing houses and cold storage facilities were still the common residents. Just beside the depot, on the northern corner of Walker and Beach, California Farm Products maintained its warehouse. Immediately beside it, West Coast Farms took over the properties of Lettunich and the Loma Fruit Company. These two corporations occupied the entirety of the block and both properties are now owned by the Dole Food Company, except for a small portion leased to the Resetar Bros. Farming Company. The Dole corporate office sits directly atop the original site of the Watsonville Fruit Dryer & Cannery from the 1880s. Dole still uses some of the old structures of its predecessors and has taken over the entirety of the former Watsonville Depot yard. The Santa Cruz Branch now only has one operable track beside the station.

It seems very unlikely that Dole ever used the rail services available here since no tracks now pass through their properties (although traces of one remain). What was once a vibrant freight and industrial area at the upper end of Beach Road in Watsonville has now declined to such a point that rail services are not even available for local freight. For this area, at least, the age of rail has ended.

Official Railroad Information:
Freight services are rarely listed in official Southern Pacific Railroad timetables and agency books, but a series of SPINS charts provided by George Pepper shows what was still active in 1973. Unfortunately, this is the only record this author has access to from the SP.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
36.906˚N, 121.766˚W

Most of these properties are now owned by Dole Food Company which occupies the northern part of West Beach Street from Walker Street to the bend in the road just past Harvest Drive. Harvest Drive was once the right-of-way of the Pajaro Valley Consolidated Railroad and can be used as a reference point. The entire property between Walker Road and Pine Street was the site of the Loma Prieta Lumber Company yard, while the office complex on the south-west corner of Beach and Harvest was the site of the Adamson Fruit Company.

Citations & Credits:

Google Maps.
Sanborn Fire Insurance Company maps, 1886 to 1920. UC Santa Cruz Digital Collections.
Southern Pacific Railroad, SPINS: Watsonville 1973. California State Railroad Museum Collection.

When the Santa Cruz Railroad was first constructed through Watsonville in early 1874, it passed over the Pajaro River and then ran directly down the already-established Walker Street, much as it still does today. At the western corner of the junction of Walker and Beach Road, they erected their first freight and passenger depot. The tracks continued a short distance down Walker before turning due west into the Western Beet Sugar Company refinery, owned by Claus Spreckels. For the first two decades, no other railroad patron along Walker Street used the railroad formally for transport and only a single track ran down the road. Around 1890, the Railroad Hotel sprang up directly across Beach Road from the depot. The small hostelry expanded over the years, spreading somewhat down Walker Street alongside the tracks, which skirted the edge of the hotel grounds. A second hotel, the Railroad Exchange Hotel, sprang up around 1900 directly across from the new depot (where the current station sits today), between Beach Road and 4th Street. Like its rival to the south, it catered specifically to railroad passengers arriving at or departing from the Southern Pacific depot.

Railroad Exchange Hotel across from the depot, 1931. (Adi Zehner)

The first freight passengers along Walker Road appeared between 1st (todays Riverside Drive) and 2nd Streets at the end of the 1890s. White & de Hart Company owned a box-making factory that undoubtedly provided storage containers for the surrounding fruit packing plants. Although it seems likely that the factory used the railroad tracks, the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps for this time do not show any facilities alongside the road except a sawdust shed. A feed mill also owned by White & De Hart was located on the corner of Walker and 2nd to the north, also located directly alongside the tracks and also unclear whether the facility used the adjacent route. In 1908, a south-bound spur was constructed that cut slightly into the feed mill before terminating between the box factory and storage shed. It seems likely that this spur existed from an earlier date considering the specific arrangement of the structures. The storage shed was taken over around 1907 by the California Spray Chemical Company, which manufactured pest- and herbicides for use in farming. Two chemical tanks were installed beside the shed with four acid towers nearby. The railroad tracks appear to have been removed by 1911 when the spray chemical company departed, suggesting the company was the reason for the spur to begin with. In the mid-1910s, the entire block was resurrected as a new freight area with two spurs installed to cater primarily to the Pajaro Valley Cold Storage Company. Numerous structures were erected for fruit packing and drying and refrigeration. At the southern end of the block, the California Pine Box Distributors built a small warehouse to store its boxes.

San Monte Fruit Company company photo, c. 1905. (Adi Zehner)

Just to the south opposite 1st Street, in 1903, the San Monte Fruit Company erected a truly massive packing house, vinegar factory, and cannery just south of 1st Street. As with its neighbours, a spur track ran, this time northbound, directly beside all three structures, allowing it to cater to all of the company's products. A continuous platform ran beside the tracks between all three structures. In the 1910s, San Monte downsized and its two southern warehouses were taken over by Jones Bros. Company, which ran a vinegar factory and used the warehouse for filtering and shipping, and the Pajaro Packing Company, which ran a cannery in the warehouse.

Simpson & Hack fruit packing plant with a boxcar parked beside it, c. 1905. (Adi Zehner)

Patrons along Walker Street between Beach Road
and 2nd Street, 1920 (UCSC Digital Collections)

By 1904, the number of fruit packing warehouses along Walker Street exploded. Between 2nd and Beach Road, Charles Ford Company set up a fruit packing plant and warehouse alongside the road with additional facilities that stretched over four parcels and to Locust Street behind it. By 1908, a spur track ran directly beside this warehouse with a platform built to help in loading products. Further south along the road, Simpson & Hack maintained a relatively large fruit packing structure from 1903, although it had no other facilities on the site. In 1908, a long south-bound spur was built to the renamed Frank Simpson Fruit Company fruit packing plant. This was taken over by an unnamed Japanese fruit packing company around 1910. Before 1920, all of the former patrons in this area changed. The Ford company was taken over by Rilovich & Spesovich Company and Resetar Bros., which both operated fruit packing and drying facilities in the former Ford structures. To the south, Copriviza & Gerr built a new fruit packing plant, while north of the Ford property, the Zar Brothers, M.L. Kalich & Company, and Loma Fruit Company all erected warehouses beside two northern-oriented spurs.

Alaga Bros. packing house beside Walker Street, c. 1910s. (Adi Zehner)

Across the street, two businesses popped up in the 1920s along two spurs. South of Beach Road and north of Werner Street (Martin Alley), Alaga Bros. built a large fruit packing facility across three parcels. This structure burned down in 1927. Further south, just north of 2nd Street, the United Apple Growers' cooperative had another warehouse built.

Ortho California Spray Chemical Company plant beside the railroad track, c. 1910. (Adi Zehner)

To the south, on the southern side of 1st Street, G.A. Moorehead built his own fruit-packing plant alongside the same spur. That spur was shortened in the 1910s and a new spur was installed that catered to Moorehead's former structure, owned by Martin Brothers in 1920, as well as another facility which had sprung up around 1910: the Ortho California Spray Chemical Company. This factory was founded by Charles Silliman, and apple grower, in order to create a pesticide to kill the coddling moth. The company was sold in 1931 to the Standard Oil Company. In the late 1910s, the facility had expanded greatly over its parcel with a warehouse installed immediately beside the spur. To the north along yet another spur, the B. Pista Company built its own series of fruit packing houses.

Southern Walker Street just before
the Pajaro River, 1908.
(UCSC Digital Collections

Right at the edge of the Pajaro River, heading south, the first of these Walker Street spurs was installed, around 1903, oriented southbound on the west side of the tracks, to cater to the Big River Company power plant, which was an oil-fueled facility which powered some local businesses. The reason for the spur was probably because a long embankment running from the railroad bridge made use of the main track for freight impossible here. In around 1906, the company became the Big Creek Power Company. Just across the street, the Watsonville Light & Power Company kept a gas plant, which powered the street lamps in the city, among other things. It, too, likely used the tracks for the import of kerosene or whichever gas they stored on site. By 1920, both of these structures were owned by the Coast Counties Light & Power Company. Slightly to the north, on the west side of the tracks, the Quong Sung Lung Company built a fruit evaporator around 1908. An independent spur was erected beside the factory by 1920, although it seems to have lost its name, though the maps do note it was operated by Chinese.

Between 1911 and 1920, a massive extension spur extended down Walker Street, across Kearney, and to places never before reached by the railroad. At the northern terminus of the spur, on the west side of Walker Street, the railroad reached an unnamed fruit packing company owned by Chinese. The property stretched down Ford Street with housing for workers out back. The primary spur, which ran down the eastern side of Walker Street, terminated at the Stolich Bros. fruit packing warehouse. Just south of it, opposite 5th Street, the tracks also ran beside L.F. Lettis's fruit packing house.

SPINS map from 1973 for the Walker Street and Beach Road (Wall Street) spurs. (George Pepper)

Unfortunately, information regarding these spurs and businesses between 1920 and 1973 is not available to this historian, but a Southern Pacific SPINS map from 1973 does give a snapshot of what changed along Walker Street in the intervening years. Firstly, all of the spurs south of 1st Street were spiked by that year, although the tracks remained owned by G.P Martin, J.M. Bulaich, H.J. Heinz, and Speas. Secondly, the triple track that ran down the road in the 1920s appears to have been reduced to a single track at some point. The track that ran on the east side between 1st and 2nd Streets was owned by the Pajaro Valley Cold Storage Company, which had been first opened on the site in the 1910s. Continuing north along the east side, between 2nd and Beach Streets, the Mann-Vallentine Cold Storage company and a Neilson warehouse occupied the block. Opposite these, three separate spurs catered to Gallo Wine, Scurich Cold Storage, and Buchwald Cold Storage. Continuing down Walker Street passed the depot, two very short spurs catered to Lease Plumbing and George Barsi, while the end-of-track terminated at a place where it could cater to Berman Steel, Sambrillo Paper, and Bachan Fruit Company. By 1998, only Americold Corp and New West Foods still had functioning spurs along lower Walker Road, and Berman Steel and Wats Canning Company along the upper portion. Although many of these companies likely never used the spurs that they had access to, one can determine immediately that Walker Street was, or at least had been recently, a major freight shipping center in Santa Cruz County.

Official Railroad Information:
Considering the entire Walker Street track was a private freight area, only Southern Pacific zoning maps such as the SPINS used above from 1973 document official railroad information for the region. Timetables and agency books record nothing of this except for the depot. Another SPINS from 1998, two years after the Union Pacific takeover of the line, helps clarify the situation at the end of the millennium.

Geo Coordinates & Access Rights:
From 36.903˚N, 121.755˚W to 36.911˚N, 121.767˚W

Although all of the properties today remain private businesses, closed to the public, the tracks themselves are quite visible across Walker Street. Virtually all of the spurs present in 1973 remain in place, some paved over but many partially visible. The mainline track still runs directly down the middle of the road and is occasionally used by the Santa Cruz & Monterey Bay Railway. All of the spurs along the street are now spiked and their junctions removed, so there is little chance any will be reactivated again. However, many of the original 1910s warehouses and structures remain in place along the road, giving a further snapshot of what the freight district probably looked like back in the 1920s.

Citations & Credits:

Sanborn Fire Insurance Company maps, 1888 – 1920. UC Santa Cruz Digital Collections.
Southern Pacific Company, SPINS "Watsonville Jct." 1973. George Pepper collection.
Zehner, Adi. "Remembering Watsonville..." Group Facebook photos and commentaries.

As the Western Beet Sugar Refinery north of Watsonville Depot shut its doors in the early 1900s, other businesses began popping up along the spur that once supported the processing plant. Kearney Street itself was extended across Walker Street in the late 1900s, running parallel to the Southern Pacific Railroad's Santa Cruz Branch as it headed west. The Hihn-Hammond Lumber Company was one of the first of these opportunistic operations that settled on the bulk of the site in late 1911. However, at the end of Kearney Ext immediately beside the still-present Pajaro Valley Consolidated Railroad tracks (which marked the original end of the street), a new Chinese-owned apple drier opened up shop. Similarly, two small fruit packing houses opened on the south side the street between the fruit driers and Walker with platforms at the back suggesting an undepicted freight spur that ran off the old Western Beet track to parallel the Santa Cruz Branch.

Carralitos Fruit Growers Inc., warehouse beside the tracks in Watsonville, c. 1916. (fine art america)

Franich Bros advertisement, c. 1920s. (Boston Public Library)

By 1920, the realities of this upstart freight yard were fully known. The Chinese driers were replaced with a large fruit packing plant owned by W.H. Ewell with evidence that it used the Southern Pacific track behind the house. Opposite the Pajaro Valley tracks to the west, the Watsonville Ice & Cold Storage Company maintained its very larger cold storage structure, although it is not clear precisely which street catered to its non-rail needs. On the other side of Ewell's packing house, Corralitos Fruit Growers Inc. erected a massive packing house with a platform at back. And then to the east heading toward Walker Street, four more packing houses were built with rear-railroad access owned by Casserly Fruit Company, P.M. Resetar, Franich Bros., and L.C. Bachan. Across the spur tracks just before Walker Street, Hihn-Hammond kept a small freight storage building connected to its local freight office. Further down the main spur across Kearney Street Ext, Garcia & Maggini Company operated an expansive fruit packing and drying plant, with adjacent storage shed, all of which had rail access via the former Western Beet spur behind them. At the very end of the spur, along Ford Street to the north, Crown Fruit & Extract Company operated a cannery, fruit packing house, and pitting room that straddled the spur track all the way to its terminus.

Bachan Fruit Company advertisement, 1920s. (Smithsonian)

An undated map from the late 1930s or 1940s suggests that the freight yard was not significantly changed from the 1920s. The packing houses, beginning from the western end, included the Dong Packing Company, the California Fruit Evaporation Company, Ivancovich & Lucich Packing Company, and the Lettunich Bros. Packing Company. Thus none of the owners from twenty years earlier appeared on the spur any more. Around the former Beet spur, none of the packing houses were listed but the track still terminated at the renamed Crown Cordial & Extract Company.

Due to the scarcity of records available to this author, the next layout of the track yard is from 1973 and shows a greatly reduced freight presence along Kearney Ext, although the trackage has expanded significantly. Along the street, only two patrons remained: Modesko Cold Storage and John Inglis's cold storage. At the western end of the freight zone, Martinelli's kept a warehouse beside West Coast Farms, although whether either of these were directly accessible from Kearney Ext is not presently known. Across Kearney Ext to the north, only the Watsonville Canning Company remained as a formal freight stop.

M.N. Lettunich & Son packing label, c. 1920s. (ebay)

A massive reduction in trackage around 2003 had little impact on the already much-reduced freight area along Kearney Ext. In 1998, only Watsonville Canning Company still maintained a presence along the spur and it remained a patron even after 2003. Today, Terminal Freezers is the only facility along this still-connected technically functional spur that could use the track. The parallel spur that runs behind Auto Care Towing is largely buried. The spur has also been truncated down so it no longer reaches to the Del Mar Seafoods warehouse, which was once the Crown Cordial factory. The other spur that once paralleled the mainline behind the fruit packing plants on the south side of Kearney Ext. has long been removed and the businesses there no have freight access via platforms out back, as had been the case into the 1950s, if not later. It seems unlikely in the coming years that service will return along the spur even with recent developments.

Official Railroad Information:
All of the details above from after 1920 are from Southern Pacific and Union Pacific Railroad SPINS zoning maps of the Watsonville Jct. freight area. These maps note specifically what freight customers could use which sidings and spurs at the time the maps were made.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
36.908˚N, 121.764˚W

Kearney Street Extension is a public road and can be explored freely. The spur runs along Walker Street from between Watsonville Depot and Kearney Ext, at which point it crosses Kearney and cuts between two large warehouses. This track is on private land and trespassing is not permitted, although one may look down to nearly the end-of-track. All of the businesses on the south side of Kearney Ext were once packing houses and many on the north side were as well, so walking down this street provides an adequate glimpse of what the fruit packing industry looked like around 1920.

Citations & Credits:

Sanborn Insurance Company maps, 1908-1920. UC Santa Cruz Digital Collections.
Southern Pacific Railroad, SPINS. "Watsonville Jct. Zone 4: Sheet I". 1973. California State Railroad Museum.
Union Pacific Railroad, SPINS. 1998, 2003. George Pepper collection.

One could say that the hills were alive with the sounds of miniature railroads, and it would be true. In the hills above Los Gatos between the town and Almaden Valley, Ralph Morrell Heintz built a quite small 15-inch gauge railroad on his private hillside estate.

The property on which the Heintz family built their ranch was originally owned in the early 1900s by James Augustus Bacigalupi, first president of the Bank of Italy and a founder of the Bank of America. Somewhere on the property, a large mansion was built, and for decades the property was simply known to locals as "The Mansion". It burned down and the property was mostly abandoned by the time Ralph and Sophie Heintz purchased it, mostly likely in the 1950s. Ralph was a chemical and physical engineer and inventor, cited as having over 200 patents to his name including four inventions that are currently at the Smithsonian. His wife was a U.S. Marine Corps ham radio operator who ran the radios for the Wilkins Expedition to the North Pole in 1928 and the Byrd Expedition to the South Pole, while also serving in World War II. After moving to Blossom Hill Road, they operated an apricot orchard and Ralph continued to invent in his small workshop. Most of the rest of the property remained undeveloped, a playground for the wealthy but little else. The Heintz family owned the property as a recreational site but spent most of their time in Los Altos.

Ralph M. Heintz holding a radiotron tube, August 1927. (History San José)

At some point, probably in the early 1960s, Ralph got the idea to build a small miniature railroad on the hilltop above his property. He probably operated it as a family project as his son was a member of the Golden Gate Live Steam Club for many years. The site of the railroad was remote, which was a good and bad thing in the end. Ralph was friends with Billy Jones, and this relationship may explain his desire to build his own railroad. The route itself was approximately 0.35 miles long, which included a loop on the east end and a turntable at the west end. An engine and stock barn was kept beside the turntable. More impressively was the short tunnel that Heintz had installed mid-way down the track, the remains of which are still visible today, although one portal has entirely been buried. The surviving tunnel portal is eight feet wide and was probably 6 feet tall, and it extended through the hillside for 150 feet. Heintz personally constructed the locomotive and rolling stock himself, but what any of these items looked like are unknown since the railroad was only ever privately used and photographs of it have not been forthcoming.

The surviving tunnel portal on the Heintz Railroad beside the current shoofly trail. (Bill Dawkins)

The railroad probably only operated for two decades or less. Ralph fell terminally ill in the early 1970s but only passed in 1980. In 1975, his son Ralph Heintz Jr. donated 4,000 feet of track to the Tildon Open Space in Berkeley, which eventually became the Redwood Valley Railroad. There is still a section of track there known as the Heintz Loop. This track was undoubtedly the entirety of the trackage owned by the Heintz family and it seems likely that the entire route was scrapped at this time. Locals who grew up near the property remember that the tunnel remained open for a short time but was eventually filled and buried, as it remains today. Indeed, the entire property was largely abandoned in the 1970s and locals regularly trespassed to use the old mansion swimming pool, walk the trails, ride four-wheelers, and use the tunnel in various ways.

In 1998, Ralph Jr. deeded the property to the University of California's Cecilia Vaughn Memorial Fund for ophthalmic research. It was resold and subdivided to Summerhill Homes which built the Heritage Grove Neighborhood community on the site. The majority of the 91 acres, however, was given to the Town of Los Gatos where it now operates as the Heintz Open Space Preserve. The former railroad right-of-way is a walking trail within this area called the Valley View Trail, although only the portion at the top of the grade is the actual right-of-way. At the base of the hill, the Heintz farmhouse has been restored and is now a home, while his workshop—the so-called Ramohs Laboratory—remains a place of historical interest with appropriate signage.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
37.228˚N, 121.925˚W

The Heintz Open Space is publicly accessible via Regent Drive off of Blossom Hill Road. The Valley View Trail (at left from the trailhead) is relatively steeps but short and at the top of the grade, it is flat for some distance. This flat area is the right-of-way and along it, you will notice the top of the former railroad tunnel which is now collapsed and mostly buried. The Heintz farmhouse is located on Regent Drive at the end of Ramohs Way.

Citations & Credits:

Dawkins, Bill. Personal correspondence.
Handy, Jim. Personal correspondence.
Phelps, Dale B. Personal correspondence.
Pope-Handy, Mary. "The Heritage Grove Neighborhood in Los Gatos and the Heintz Open Space Preserve". The Valley of Hearts Delight. 2011.
"The 1981 Heintz Lecture". The Proctor Bulletin, 3:4 (1981).
Wiley, Neil. "Heintz Open Space". Mountain Network News.

Aerial photograph of the main Watsonville Depot freight area, 1935.
Central Supply at left. (UC Santa Cruz Aerial Photograph Collection)

The 0.8-mile stretch of Southern Pacific mainline track between the final curve out of the Watsonville Depot area and Lee Road, paralleling West Beach Street for the entirety of it, catered to a rather random assortment of industrial businesses over the decades. Indeed, for much of its history, literally nothing was along this stretch except farmsteads. By the 1940s, industrial expansion was finally moving outside of the traditional freight area allocated to Watsonville Depot. Central Supply, an aggregate company, was the first to establish itself at the gentle curve of the track as it redirected toward the beach. A spur was eventually extended to the supplier from the north, probably to allow for the easier importation of aggregates from Davenport and Olympia, where the cement plant and quarries were still active on the rail route. The spur has since been spiked and buried. Slightly further down the track, Phillips Products, an oil supplier, had a short parallel spur set up in the 1960s for shipments. The spur was still listed in 2003 as owned by Phillips Drisco Pipe, but almost all traces of it are gone. A short platform behind Pacific Agricultural Packaging (Pacific Agpak) is all the evidence that remains of this spur, suggesting they removed it when the took over the operation in the 2000s.

Aerial photograph of Bud Antle's operation, 1954.
(UCSC Aerial Photograph Collection)

At modern-day Ohlone Parkway, two spurs broke off. One long spur is the topic of another article (West Beach Street Spurs, Part I) but the other smaller spur appeared in the early 1950s, looping in a gentle arc to terminate at Beach Road. By the 1960s, a parallel spur broke off from this and ran alongside it. These catered to Bud Antle. Antle was a Watsonville native who became one of the largest lettuce producers in the country. He died in 1972 and then his son, Bob, took over, merging the company with Castle & Cooke in 1978 (it later merged into Dole Foods). The spurs were probably removed around this time as, today, only their imprints remain. The original structures that Bud used are now occupied by A.L. Lease Company—Wholesale Plumbing Supplies.

Aerial photograph of the Harris Pine Mills and Bud Antle properties, 1969. (UCSC Aerial Photograph Collection)

The Antle spur also prompted in the 1960s the start of a small runaround track (short siding) that catered to two other businesses: Harris Pine Mills and Big Creek Lumber (also known as Little Lake Industries). For the latter, one may want to read Lock, Stock & Boards: The Harris Pine Mills Story, which tells how Clyde Harris donated his entire operation to the Seventh-day Adventist movement in 1959, the year the company's second mill was built in Watsonville. Aerial photographs from 1969 show that one of the spurs catered directly to a small lumber yard on the north side of the lot while a shorter spur terminated at their planning mill. Harris shut down in 1987 and the spurs are spiked and mostly buried now, although a small bit remains behind Sambrailo. Little Lake Industries (Big Creek) occupied these structures until 1991, at which point Morgan Industries leased them for the manufacture of amusement park rides. All of the structures still remain on site and are today used by Sambrailo and ORDO Equipment Company.

Couch Distributing facility, 2016. Spur at right.
(Google Maps Satellite View)

Next door, Big Creek Lumber, a relatively major operation with its harvesting facilities near Waddell Beach on the San Mateo County line, moved in around 1971. A gently curving spur was installed with a southbound exit. The primary purpose of this spur is to import supplemental woodstuffs from elsewhere, since their local lumber operations are trucked in from Davenport. The spur remains in active use. The end of the runaround track is just before the freeway.

Across the freeway to the south, two final spurs mark the absolutely southern (or northbound) terminus of the Watsonville freight area. Breaking off from the mainline at Lee Road and curving north to parallel State Route 1, the spur was installed after 1973 and caters to Couch Distributing Company, primarily an alcohol distributor. Although the company does not appear to use its spur currently, it remains useable and runs behind the main storage structures alongside a long loading platform.

Del Mar Foods facility, with track running down
middle of photograph. (Google Maps)

The final freight patron along West Beach Street is and has been for over 50 years, Del Mar Foods. Established in 1959, the spur probably dates to around 1967 after the company developed new techniques for quick freezing foods and required larger facilities. It first appeared on SPINS in 1973 off of a southward-sloping spur from Lee Road, with an exit in the southbound direction. Despite the relatively large size of the facility, it only has one single spur that runs directly through the middle of the buildings. The spur remains active and in use by Del Mar.

Official Railroad Information:
Since none of these places were formal Southern Pacific or Union Pacific Railroad stops, the only official information related to them comes from SPINS produced in 1973, 1998, and 2003. Most of the information above comes from these sources.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
From 36.907˚N, 121.768˚W to 36.899˚N, 121.779˚W

This stretch of right-of-way runs from the Granite Construction site across and slightly to the west of Harvest Drive all the way to Lee Road, excluding the long spur that runs across West Beach Road. The entire right-of-way is publicly owned by the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission and is leased to the Santa Cruz & Monterey Bay Railway. In other words, no trespassing is allowed. Parts of the track can be viewed from Ohlone Parkway, State Route 1, and Lee Road. The private spurs in question currently cater to A.L. Lease Company—Wholesale Plumbing Supplies (track is now removed and paved over), Sambrailo (track is spiked and mostly buried), Big Creek Lumber, Couch Distributing (accessible from Lee Road), and Del Mar Food Products Corporation. Access to any of these facilities must be provided by the companies in question.

Citations & Credits:

"MBA History". Monterey Bay Academy Alumni, 2007.
Pepper, George. Personal correspondence.
Southern Pacific Railroad, SPINS "Watsonville", 1973. California State Railroad Museum.
Union Pacific Railroad, SPINS 1998, 2003.

The freight yard that formed just south of the town of Pajaro along the Monterey County side of the Pajaro River became over time a major hub for local freight shippers. The Santa Cruz Railroad built its original narrow-gauged switching yard at this site around 1873, but unfortunately no maps or photographs of the yard exist from this time. Indeed, the first available map of the yard does not appear until 1892 in a Sanborn Fire Insurance map. This is nine after the Santa Cruz Railroad tracks were standard-gauged and eleven since the Southern Pacific took over the fledgling company. In those early years, there was no wye or turntable at the yard, meaning that all rail traffic coming from Santa Cruz County headed toward San Francisco or was switched at the small yard. From the mid-1880s, the Loma Prieta Milling & Lumber Company (later just Loma Prieta Lumber Company) installed a large lumber yard directly in the middle of the yard. Their planning mill sat on the eastern end while the stack of lumber ran along two spurs that headed eastbound, flanking the Santa Cruz Branch mainline. The Loma Prieta yard relocated to Beach Road in Watsonville in the late 1890s and the Southern Pacific completed the wye that had been left undone two decades earlier. No other businesses moved into the centre of the yard again. Over time, the number of sidings and spurs grew drastically, with nine mainline and siding tracks in 1920 reaching a maximum extent of sixteen parallel tracks in 1973. Only one business appears to have operated within these yard limits by 1973: Watkins, which sat on the west side beside Salinas Road near the last site of the Watsonville Junction passenger depot.

Jackson and Besse & Sill grain warehouses between Railroad Ave and the freight yard, 1892. [UCSC Digital Collections]

Further to the east, beyond the merger of the tracks, two patrons known only as Jackson's grain warehouse and Besse & Sill's grain warehouse and potato bin (leased by the Southern Pacific) occupied space beyond the passenger and freight depots in 1892. The track that ran to the northern lumber spur ran directly in front of these structures, while two more tracks, which merged to form the Coast Division mainline, paralleled that spur track. These all occupied what is today the stretch of Railroad Avenue between Kents Court and Waters Lane. By 1902, Henry E. West used both structures as grain warehouses, with the potato bin now a produce bin (still leased from SP). By 1911, both of these would be taken over by Southern Pacific for storage purposes and they were demolished in the mid-1910s when the yard was expanded. This business has since disappeared, although the track remains in place.

SunRidge Farms and Falcon Trading Company complex (formerly Smuckers) beside the freight yard, c. 2011.

In 1902, a new spur appeared on the northern edge of the yard, breaking off from the Santa Cruz Branch. This catered to Unglish Bros. fruit driers which operated its cannery between this track and Railroad Avenue, just west of modern day Kents Court. This cannery was also removed in the mid-1910s when the yard was expanded and it relocated to a location on Main Street in Watsonville away from the tracks. In 1918, Unglish Bros. was labeled as the largest fruit dryer in the world. What occupied the five spurs that were added to this area after 1935 is unknown, but all were vacant by the time the Southern Pacific Railroad produced its 1973 SPINS map of the freight yard. However, a sixth spur which still crosses over Railroad Avenue today near Kents Court was still active by that time. In 1973, it catered to the small California Farm Products warehouse, as well as the much larger J.M. Smucker Company facility. Although the track has been paved over and is currently inoperable, it remains in place running the length of the warehouse which sits on the north side of Railroad Avenue. Smuckers closed in 2004 and now the entire complex is occupied by SunRidge Farms and Falcon Trading Company. SunRidge is an exporter of health foods that has operated since the mid-1970s, while Falcon Trading Co., a subsidiary of SunRidge, was founded in 1977 and specialises in trail mixes.

Western Fruit Evaporating Co. advertisement selling Matiasevich apples.

Aerial photograph of the Watsonville Junction freight yard, 1935.
[UC Santa Cruz Library Aerial Photograph collection]

Pajaro Station became Watsonville Junction in 1913, but the site was still in its infancy. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the local agricultural businesses sprang to life, and by 1973, an entirely new freight area had opened up, cradled between Marinovich Avenue on the east and Salinas (originally Monterey) Road [G12] on the west. As early as 1931, one long spur curved alongside Monterey Road and forked at the end, but over time it developed into around seven separate spurs branching from a root and catering to a number of businesses. Along the eastern side, the railroad catered to, via four spurs, the Marinovich and Matiasevich companies, both derived from local Croatian fruit packing families. Marinovich Cold Storage was founded in 1946 by J. G. Marinovich and continues to exist in the area, although the original owners have since sold it. On the western side, via five spurs, the railroad catered to Atlantic Richfield Oil Company (ARCO) and Smuckers (on the same spur), the Swiss chocolate firm Nestle, and J.J. Crosetti, an Italian lettuce grower who purchased the Levy-Zentner company in 1935 and turned it into a vegetable wholesaler. His son, J.J. Jr., eventually merged his company into California Giant Berry Farms, which he helped found. He died in 2015.

Today, the track still passes through this entire two blocks of packing houses but most of the businesses have changed hands. The owners of the large Marinovich facility cannot be determined but Matiasevich is now owned by Southern California Seafood, although they have paved over most of the track by this point to create Matiasevich Lane. On the west side of the block, SunRidge Farms and Falcon Trading own the former Richfield Oil and Smuckers site; the Monterey County Agricultural Office owns part of the Nestle facility, although it is not clear who owns the other half; the Crosetti lot is now occupied by Dibwani Motors, a new car dealership. Of the spurs in this area, only the former Matiasevich spurs still remain in place, which suggest it was the last firm to cease using the track in the area. Although the main spur through this area remains in place, it does not appear to be used at present.

Official Railroad Information:
Due to their nature as freight yards, only the 1973 SPINS chart shows the detail for this area in any official capacity. Other SPINS exist but are not currently accessible to this historian.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
From 36.899˚N, 121.746˚W to 36.897˚N, 121.741˚W

Railroad Avenue, Lewis Road, and Salinas Road are publicly accessible and views of the entire freight yard can be seen from anywhere along them. Likewise, cars may drive down Marinovich Avenue and Matiasevich Lanes, although access to the properties themselves are only with permission from the owners.

Citations & Credits:

Sanborn Insurance Maps, 1892-1920. University of California, Santa Cruz Digital Map Collections.
Southern Pacific Railroad Company, SPINS, 1973. California State Railroad Museum collection.
University of California, Santa Cruz, Aerial Photograph Collection.

Map of the Pajaro Valley Consolidated Railroad,
c 1900-1910. [George Pepper Collection]

The Pajaro Valley Consolidated Railroad was one of the first private narrow-gauged railroading operations that sprang up in Santa Cruz County after the completion of the major Southern Pacific Railroad lines. It was largely financed by Claus Spreckels with the single-minded goal of connecting his sugar beet refinery outside of downtown Watsonville with his single largest market: the burgeoning town of Salinas.

Speckels had built his Western Beet Sugar Company refinery in 1888 along tracks that serviced the Southern Pacific Railroad. Unfortunately, the difficulty and high cost of growing sugar beets dissuaded many local farmers from growing it. The best soils for beets were along the marshy coastlands, and the Southern Pacific Railroad bypassed this area entirely. In 1889, Spreckels leased the entire Moro Cojo Ranch north of Castroville and planted 1,500 acres of beets. But, although this property was on the railroad line, the Southern Pacific was charging top dollar for Spreckels to shuttle his crop to Watsonville. In response, Spreckels founded on December 30, 1889, the Pajaro Valley Railroad.

While this may have been a bluff initially, the Southern Pacific did not bite, so by May construction was under way. Built using primarily Chinese and Japanese labour, this railroad departed from the Watsonville beet refinery, crossed Beach Road and the Pajaro River, and then passed into Monterey County, where it looped down to the coast and followed the outside edge of many of Spreckels' contract beet farms. A long spur terminated atop Moss Landing wharf, which Spreckels used to export his finished goods on Oceanic Steamship Company and Pacific Coast Steamship Company vessels. The main track ended at Spreckels Moro Cojo farm after crossing over the offending Southern Pacific mainline track. Via this narrow-gauged network, the Pajaro Valley Railroad both imported unprocessed goods in to the refinery and exported them out to market, thereby undermining attempts by the Southern Pacific to price gouge Spreckels. This track was finished in September 1890, just in time for the Autumn beet harvest.

The Spreckels refinery near Salinas around 1910. [Monterey Bay Historical Society]

Claus Spreckels, c. 1890.

By August 1891, Spreckels had extended his track a further nine miles to a point just outside of Salinas, called "Watsonville Junction". His low prices and easier accessibility forced the Southern Pacific to cut its freight costs by 50% just to attract new customers. At the same time, the company opened passenger service, further cutting into Southern Pacific profits. In 1895, Spreckels purchased a large property south of Salinas and built there a much larger beet mill than his Watsonville refinery. As construction was underway, Southern Pacific negotiated with Spreckels and had a three-mile spur extended to the new refinery, named "Spreckels" on timetables, which opened in October 1898. But Claus Spreckels did not allow this new arrangement get in the way of his own railroad. On April 16, 1897, the Pajaro Extension Railway connected the end-of-track at Watsonville Junction to the new mill and also extended a track east of Salinas to a lime quarry in Alisal Canyon. On December 9, 1897, the Extension Railway and Pajaro Valley Railroad were merged to form the Pajaro Valley Consolidated Railroad.

The importance of the Watsonville factory declined rapidly over the next few years. It became a storage facility around 1900 and then was abandoned completely by 1908. Nonetheless, a turntable and engine house at the Watsonville site remained in place until the closure of the line, and the route between Spreckels and Watsonville continued to cater to local sugar beet farmers and was used frequently. Meanwhile, on the south side of the route, Claus Spreckels threatened the Southern Pacific again with a massive extension track up the Salinas Valley, but Southern Pacific lowered its rates once again and Spreckels satisfied himself by extending tracks only five miles up the valley to Buena Vista in December 1901, and this was largely to cater to some private beet farms in the area. At around the same time, a short track was finally extended directly to the Southern Pacific freight yard in downtown Salinas, which greatly expanded the passenger potential of the narrow-gauged line.

The Western Beet Sugar Company mill at Spreckels. [Bancroft Library]

By 1915, the railroad owned and operated 41.5 miles of track largely within Monterey County. It owned nine locomotives, six passenger cars, 260 freight cars, and other rolling stock. Its record year was 1917 when it carried 174,480 tons of freight, and in 1919 it carried 158,871 passengers along some portion of its line.

Bridge over Elkhorn Slough at Moss Landing after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. [Bancroft Library]

Things began to fall apart around 1920. Spreckels' sugar beet company began using trucks and buses beginning in the early 1920s, which cut into freight revenues. At the same time, the Southern Pacific Railroad, which with its standard-gauge trains could haul significantly more freight per car and which had years earlier extended a branch to the Salinas refinery, became an increasingly alluring prospect for exporting finished sugar products. On November 24, 1925, regular passenger service along the Pajaro Valley Consolidated Railroad came to an end. Freight services had been in decline for years, prompting the company to finally petition the Interstate Commerce Commission for abandonment in June 1928. The petition was approved and on April 2, 1929, the railroad closed for good. Approximately 40 miles of track as well as rolling stock and various structures were sold to the Southern Pacific Railroad in a clearance sale for $10.00 cash. Over the next two years, Southern Pacific scrapped the entire line and resold what they could, finally selling the locomotives in 1935. The railroad's presence in Santa Cruz had already been largely a memory. The sugar beet refinery had shut its doors in 1898 and slowly the area became first a lumber yard and then a fruit-packing district. The turntable and engine house remained until 1930, but the locomotives were no longer stored there.

The Route Today:

Bridge abutments at Elkhorn Slough, 2005. (Garrett Keeton Collection)

Large portions of the right-of-way are still easily and legally accessible to the public. Smudowski Beach State Park's main road, accessible from Giberson Road off of Jensen Road is an entire repurposed stretch of this former track. The track passes through marshland for south of here but then parallels State Route 1 beginning at the Jetty Road junction. Former bridge abutments can be seen beside the highway before Jetty Road and as the highway crosses over Elkhorn Slough at the Sea Harvest Fish Market, and the site of the wharf is now Sandholdt Road, where a wye for the railroad was also located at the station once called "Moss". The right-of-way then, after a brief tangent, parallels Molera Road starting at Monterey Dunes Way, and it continues paralleling this road on the south side as it becomes Nashua Road. Unfortunately, beyond this the right-of-way falls out of the spectrum of this website, however Horace Fabing and Rick Hamman's book Steinbeck Country Narrow Gauge (Boulder, CO: Pruett Publishing, 1985) is an excellent complete telling of this tenacious little railroad's history.

Citations & Credits:

Hall, John. "Pajaro Valley Consolidated". PacificNG.org, 2015.
Keeton, Garrett J. "Pajaro Valley Consolidated Railroad (Narrow Gage) – Monterey County, California." HistoryHunters.net, 2005.
"Pajaro Valley Consolidated Railroad". Monterey County Historical Society, 2010.
Robertson, Donald B. Encyclopedia of Western Railroad History. Volume IV: California. Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1998.

In the early 1870s, the city of Monterey lacked railroad service. Although the Southern Pacific Railroad had constructed its route in November 1872 through the town of Salinas on its slow crawl to San Luis Obispo and Southern California, it had bypassed the coastal town that was notoriously off the beaten track. A group known as the Patrons of Husbandry – popularly the Grangers – decided to change the situation when they founded on March 5, 1874, the narrow-gauged Monterey & Salinas Valley Railroad. Like most railroads, this was a joint-stock operation built by a mixed Chinese/European crew, but it was financed by a remarkable selection of 72 people, mostly prominent industrialists and farmers from Salinas and Monterey. Their goal was not simply to transport freight between Monterey and Salinas easier, but to completely undermine the high prices of Southern Pacific by exporting goods via the Monterey Wharf. Their patrons were largely the cattle ranchers, wheat farmers, and fisheries of the lower Salinas River basin and Monterey Bay.

The original Monterey & Salinas Valley Railroad end-of-track at Salinas.
[Mayo Hayes O'Donnell Research Library]

The route was surveyed in 1873, prior to incorporation, and construction began in April with little fanfare. By October 9, the entire route was completed following a mostly direct line between Monterey and Salinas. At this time, it was the first narrow-gauge common carrier in California. The Salinas Depot was located at modern day Pajaro and Willow Streets, while the Monterey Depot was located on the beach at the foot of today's Fishermen's Wharf (roughly where Monterey Station still is today). Only one significant crossing was required for the route, a 300-foot-long bridge over the Salinas River, but this proved to be the little 18.5-mile-long railroad's first perennial problem. Only four months after the route was completed, a storm passed through that devastated much of the area. Among its casualties was the Salinas River bridge. Over the following four years, this bridge was washed out twice more, severely crippling railroading operations in the winter months. To make matters worse, the engine house burned down in September, 1877, damaging both of the railroad's locomotives. All of these problems contributed to a general breakdown of the company's management structure. By 1879, two rivals were suing and countersuing each other in the California Supreme Court for control over the operation.

The Southern Pacific had never really permitted the Monterey & Salinas Valley Railroad to thrive. As soon as their route was completed, its low freight rates were undercut by even lower rates by the Southern Pacific. For five years, they allowed the struggling little narrow-gauge to continue, but then, without warning, the Southern Pacific gobbled up the enfeebled company up on December 22, 1879. The Southern Pacific desired to convert the former right-of-way to standard gauge but decided on an entirely different approach path. On January 24, 1880, they incorporated the subsidiary Monterey Railroad to acknowledge the fact that the railroad had begun grading a new route between Castroville, the nearest Southern Pacific station, and Bardin since October the previous year. Replacement of the Bardin to Monterey narrow-gauge rails began immediately while regular service along the new line commenced on January 1, 1880. A total of 6.44 miles of track between Bardin and Salinas were entirely removed while the remaining 12.12 miles of track were replaced. Thus, the direct route between Salinas and Monterey so championed by the founders of the Monterey & Salinas Valley Railroad was replaced with a more cumbersome route that backtracked through Castroville. Of the rolling stock, most of it was sold to the Nevada Central Railroad. The Monterey Railroad itself was merged into the Southern Pacific Company May 14, 1888, to become the Monterey Branch.

The Route Today:
The route between Monterey Wharf and Bardin is largely the same as the path of the Monterey Bay Coastal Trail and bike path and is open to the public. Where things get tricky is once the original route breaks off from the Monterey Branch at Bardin. This break began roughly where Beach Road and Del Monte Boulevard split in Marina. A 1947 USGS map shows the railroad grade continued passed through what is now a small residential area on the east side of the tracks before heading to the current Monterey Regional Waste Management center at the end of Charlie Benson Lane. There are slight traces of the right-of-way still visible along this stretch – between the two developed areas – the most notable sign being a very perceptible cut through a short bluff midway between these points in the middle of an empty field. This can be best seen from a distance at the top of Sean Court and Michael Drive, although it can also be viewed from Cosky Drive and Del Monte Ave. Nothing is visible from the dump, however.

From here, though, the right-of-way seems entirely lost. Even the sources are not certain as to where it crossed the Salinas River. Robertson says it took almost a direct line between Bardin and Salinas, but that is impossible considering the known grading. The mention that the Salinas Depot was at Pajaro and Willow Streets suggests that the route eventually came to parallel (or was) West Blanco Road, following that route until roughly Iverson Street in Salinas, at which point it would have cut across modern properties to get to its end-of-track. A trace road from a 1910-1913 map of Monterey and Salinas suggests there was a little-used road in this area that may have once served to take the right-of-way to where the Pajaro Valley Consolidated Railroad route later was built, and the comparisons between those two lines from this point to downtown Salinas are extremely similar. But this is pure speculation. More research must be conducted to determine the ultimate route of the Monterey & Salinas Valley Railroad.

Citations & Credits:

Hansen, Norman E. "History of the Real Monterey & Salinas Valley Railroad". Monterey & Salinas Valley Railroad Museum.
"The Monterey & Salinas Valley Railroad". Monterey County Historical Society, 2010.
Robertson, Donald B. Encyclopedia of Western Railroad History: California. Caxton, 1986
Thomas, Tim, and Dennis Copeland. Images of America: Monterey's Waterfront. Arcadia, 2006.

From the time that the Southern Pacific Railroad Company first entered the Pajaro Valley in 1869 until their ultimate merger into the Union Pacific Railroad in 1996, their main method of expanding routes and acquiring properties has been via wholly-owned subsidiary companies and entirely fictitious paper companies. This is a brief chronological history of those corporations.

The Santa Clara & Pajaro Valley Rail Road Company (1868 – 1870)
Acting as one of the first major paper company of the nascent Southern Pacific Railroad, this short-lived corporation was founded on January 2, 1868. Its initial goal was to connect San José to Gilroy via a 30-mile-long track; however, it accomplished this entirely by means of Southern Pacific Railroad machinery, rolling stock, and even property deeds. The precise reason for this company's existence, therefore, is highly questionable. It seems that the main purpose was to lessen fears by local land owners that their land was being purchased by the rapidly-growing Southern Pacific Railroad. If this were the case, they largely failed as local newspapers reported the railroad's construction progress under the name Southern Pacific and it seems unlikely that the plan deceived many. The route was opened to Gilroy on March 13, 1869. Through the completion of this route, railroad traffic could flow fluidly between Gilroy and San Francisco using another subsidiary, the San Francisco & San José Railroad, which ran along the inside south-western edge of the San Francisco Bay (as it still does today). This route also anticipated the railroad's next move into the Pajaro Valley. The railroad was merged into the Southern Pacific Railroad Company in October 1870 and became an essential part of its original trunk line.

Map showing the Southern Pacific Railroad Company holdings
as of 1907. [Wx4 Southern Pacific Pages]

The California Southern Railroad Company (1870)
This paper company which was incorporated in early 1870 appears to have existed for the sole purpose of purchasing land along the future right-of-way between Gilroy and Pajaro, as well as trackage to Hollister and even possibly into the San Joaquin Valley. In reality, this company never appears to have operated any trackage or rolling stock, and its short life suggests the entire idea of this railroad was a mistake or that the railroad had served its purpose in a short manner of time. Nonetheless, it, along with the Santa Clara & Pajaro Valley and the San Francisco & San José railroads were merged into the Southern Pacific Railroad Company in October 1870. Another subsidiary in Southern California would later pick up the name "California Southern" and operate using that throughout the 1880s.

The trackage between Gilroy and Hollister was built next by the Southern Pacific directly in 1870, while a branch line was completed to Pajaro on November 27, 1871. Soon afterwards, plans to continue through Hollister into the San Joaquin Valley were abandoned and the Pajaro route became the new mainline track. The route was extended to Salinas and completed November 1, 1872. All three of these later construction projects were done directly through Southern Pacific rather than through a subsidiary.

Monterey Railroad Company (1880 – 1888)
The somewhat failed experiment that was the Monterey & Salinas Valley Rail Road Company met its end on December 22, 1879, when the Southern Pacific purchased the company at auction. Even before the company was founded, however, Southern Pacific crews were already grading and laying rails between Castroville and Bardin (Marina), where the Monterey & Salinas Valley track turned to Salinas. Once the line was purchased by Southern Pacific, the new Monterey Railroad Company abandoned the 6.4 miles between Bardin and Salinas and replaced them with the new route between Castroville and Bardin. At the same time, they upgraded all of the track to standard-gauge. The original route between Salinas and the Monterey Wharf, therefore, became a new route between Castroville and the wharf. This company was formally merged into the Southern Pacific Railroad on May 14, 1888, and became the Monterey Branch of the Coast Division.

Loma Prieta Railroad Company (1882 – 1884)
The Loma Prieta Railroad was actually the first dedicated standard-gauged railroad constructed in Santa Cruz County. Although technically founded as an independent company, in reality its board of directors were Southern Pacific executives and its operation was built off of the Santa Cruz Railroad track which had been acquired by Southern Pacific in 1881. The construction of the Loma Prieta Railroad route took the better part of two years from its incorporation on July 10, 1882, and much of the route was built dual-gauged with plans to remove the inner track once the mill itself became operational. That railroad's operational life began on November 13, 1883, but the railroad had to wait for its primary patron, the Loma Prieta Lumber Company, to get its act together first. The company formed on November 14—the very next day—but it was not able to begin operations until the following spring. The railroad, sitting largely idle during this time, only came into regular use beginning June 2, 1884, and the next day, the Loma Prieta Railroad Company ceased to exist and became the Loma Prieta Branch of the newly-formed, wholly-owned Southern Pacific subsidiary company, the Pajaro & Santa Cruz Railroad.

Pajaro & Santa Cruz Railroad (1884 – 1888)
Incorporated on June 3, 1884, through the merger of the once-independent Santa Cruz Railroad and the Loma Prieta Railroad, the Pajaro & Santa Cruz Railroad was a convenient shell company of the Southern Pacific Railroad to manage its original Santa Cruz County trackage. In most cases, the two former railroads continued to operate under their former names in this time. Little construction was done on the line during these years, either, except for a two-mile extension of the Loma Prieta Branch which connected the mill to the harvesting area at Monte Vista (#1). This company was formally merged into the Southern Pacific May 14, 1888, after which it operated briefly as the Santa Cruz Division and then as the Santa Cruz Branch and the Loma Prieta Branch. The Santa Cruz Branch remains the operational portion of track in Santa Cruz County between Watsonville Junction and Santa Cruz Station.

A map depicting the combined holdings of the South Pacific
Coast Railway Company as of 1887. [Bruce MacGregor]

South Pacific Coast Railway Company (1887 – 1937)
In 1887, James Fair, the president of the South Pacific Coast Railroad Company, the Felton & Pescadero Railroad Company, the Santa Cruz & Felton Rail Road Company, and a number of other Bay Area operations, decided that he wanted to retire from the railroading business. On May 23, he consolidated all of his various subsidiaries into the unified South Pacific Coast Railway Company and then, on July 1, 1887, sold most of his shares in the organisation to the Southern Pacific Railroad, essentially turning it into a wholly-owned subsidiary of the latter. For two decades, the South Pacific Coast operated virtually autonomous from other Bay Area systems due to the narrow-gauged nature of its tracks. During this time, the route was known alternatively as the South Pacific Coast or the Coast Division—Narrow Gauge, but as the first decade of the 1900s continued, the tracks were slowly converted to standard-gauge and eventually the route lost its separate identity. When it was formally merged into the Southern Pacific Railroad Company on December 2, 1937, few people noticed. Most had assumed the company had been absorbed thirty years earlier. Much of the trackage remains today throughout the Bay Area. In Santa Cruz County, however, only the Roaring Camp Railroads-owned track between Eccles and Santa Cruz Station survive.

Monterey Extension Railroad Company (1888)
An ambitious plan to extend the Monterey Railroad track to Carmel was seized by the Southern Pacific when on January 6, 1888, it incorporated the Monterey Extension Railroad Company. In reality, this appears to have been no more than a paper company intended to purchase the necessary rights-of-way between the Monterey wharf and Carmel, a route planned to pass through Pacific Grove. However, on May 14, 1888, this line, too, was merged into the parent Southern Pacific Railroad, which then became responsible for extending the line. This route was finally begun in late 1888 and completed to Lake Majella in 1889, but no railroad line ever reached Carmel.

Coast Line Railroad (1905 – 1917)
In 1905, competition to create and complete a route connecting Santa Cruz to San Francisco along the coast was heating up. The Ocean Shore Electric Railway (later Ocean Shore Railroad) was founded earlier that year with this goal in mind. The Southern Pacific, which wanted to ensure it had primacy along the coast, especially the clientage of the lucrative cement plant being constructed in Davenport, incorporated their own rival company, the Coast Line Railroad, on April 15, 1905. Although on paper, this new railroad stated its desire to connect to San Francisco and to Pescadero (from where another track was planned to extend to Boulder Creek), in reality Southern Pacific was just playing a game with a rival. The Coast Line and Ocean Shore routes were built side-by-side and in tandem by the same developer to Davenport, with the Coast Line claiming the east side patrons (which included the cement plant). Throughout the 1910s, the Ocean Shore haemorrhaged until it finally closed. The Coast Line, meanwhile, was merged into its parent on October 9, 1917, its purpose fulfilled. The route never extended beyond a wye beside the Davenport cement plant and any plans to extend the track to Pescadero were cancelled after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake forced the Southern Pacific to reallocate resources to more immediate concerns. This route survives today as the former Davenport Branch, or rather the portion of the Santa Cruz Branch between Santa Cruz Station and Davenport.

Santa Clara and santa Cruz Counties map from 1915 showing Southern Pacific trackage. [Wx4 Southern Pacific Pages]

Unbeknownst to any at the time, the Coast Line Railroad ended up being the final Southern Pacific subsidiary line incorporated in Santa Cruz or Monterey counties. After 1937, all railroads in the county were owned directly by the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, a fact that would remain until 1996 when Southern Pacific itself absorbed the Union Pacific Railroad Company and was rebranded as the latter.

Citations & Credits:

Bender, Henry. Personal correspondence.
Daggett, Stuart. Chapters on the History of the Southern Pacific. Berkeley: Library of Alexandria, 1922.
Hamman, Rick. California Central Coast Railways. Santa Cruz, CA: Otter B Books, 2002.
Robertson, Donald B. Encyclopedia of Western Railroad History: California. Caldwell, ID: Caxton Press, 1986.

1887 was not the best year for the San José-based Santa Clara Mill & Lumber Company. In this year their largest redwood logging operation was located far up Zayante Creek, approximately 5.4 miles from Felton Depot. Nearly half the route to the mill was via a precariously-built switchback line that largely follows modern-day Zayante Road from Waner Way to Mountain Charlie Gulch. Just to make matters more annoying for the firm, another 2 miles of cheaply-constructed, rickety track continued out from the mill to reach the timber tracts. Then, in the early summer of 1887, the entire mill burned to the ground. While this was not an unusual occurrence for a lumber mill, it came right when the lumber company was wrapping up operations along Zayante Creek. With few other options, the firm rebuilt their mill and continued to the end of the season, at which point they scrapped their mill and abandoned their short-lived railroad. This 4-mile-long route constituted the first Santa Clara Valley Mill & Lumber Company railroad, but it was not their most famous line.

Yard workers at Boulder Creek along one of the Dougherty tracks, c. 1890s. [San Lorenzo Valley Museum]

Another interesting development occurred in 1887 completely unrelated to the lumber company: the Southern Pacific took control of the South Pacific Coast Railroad, including its 7-mile narrow-gauged line that ran between Felton and Boulder Creek. This short route had been completed in early 1885 to replace the San Lorenzo Valley Flume & Transportation Company lumber flume that meandered up the valley to a point above Boulder Creek. Fortunately for the Santa Clara Valley Mill & Lumber Company, much of the timber tracts north of there were owned by them and remained relatively untouched due to the low efficiency of the flume and the readier access to timber from other sources. But in the autumn of 1887, the company shifted its focus to the upper San Lorenzo Valley and decided that the best way to get their lumber to market was with a railroad. Surveying and grading began soon after.

The tracks at Doughertys Mill, looking north. Note the triple trackage, with the route at left heading remaining on the west bank of the San Lorenzo River where an engine house was kept and the other two tracks crossing the river here to access the main Santa Clara Valley Mill & Lumber Company planing mill, c. 1890s. [Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History]

Popularly known by contemporaries as the Dougherty Extension Railroad, after company majority share-holders William and James Dougherty, this remote one-way, single-track, short-line railroad became a living entity in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Initially only built slightly beyond the new Dougherty lumber mill – modern-day Riverside Grove – roughly 3.5 miles north of Boulder Creek, it soon meandered north until it finally reached its ultimate terminus in 1900 at Tin Can Creek, 7.5 miles from Boulder Creek. In addition, it had sidings and spurs at the Cunningham Mill (Wildwood), Doughertys (Riverside Grove), Sinnot Switch, McGaffigan's Switch, and Waterman Switch, and a long private spur to the Chase Mill on Feeder Creek (additional spurs may have serviced the Harmon Mill, the McAbee Mill, and the Hihn-Hammond Mill on King Creek). This route was always first-and-foremost a freight line. By 1899, it had helped Boulder Creek become the fifth largest lumber exporter in the United States. And cost-cutting measures were found all around to maximize profits. North of the Cunningham Mill, the railroad cross-ties were small and generally made of subpar wood, the rails were second-hand, and the bridges were made of felled redwood trees. Between Boulder Creek and Cunninghams, the mill owners decided to use higher-quality material, partially because winter rains had a habit of washing out weaker bridges and partially because the route had become a popular tourist line in the summers.

A camping trip to Wildwood, c. 1914. Note the truss bridge in the background over the San Lorenzo River.

In 1902, the Santa Clara Valley Mill & Lumber Company closed shop and tore up its mill. Most of the other railroad patrons, except the Hihn-Hammond mill, had already abandoned their own spurs. But the line was not scrapped. Instead, a new conglomerate was founded in April 1903 under the name California Timber Company with the widows of the Dougherty brothers as major share-holders. Within a few months, virtually all of the smaller timber firms in the area were consolidated under this new umbrella company. The California Timber Company sought to harvest the headwaters of Pescadero Creek and they intended to once more put the railroad to use hauling that timber from Waterman Switch to Boulder Creek. Thus, for another decade, the railroad lived on as an intermediary even though all of its other customer base had left. It's name had changed to reflect its new ownership and was usually called either the Middleton Railroad, after investor Henry Middleton, or the Boulder Creek & Pescadero Railroad, after the long-held desire to connect the two titular cities. At the same time, housing subdivisions were parcelled out of the lands of the former Cunningham Mill, creating Wildwood #1 and #2 (across the river from each other). From 1909 to 1915, tourists and potential homeowners would ride a little electric car up to Wildwood. Then, suddenly, they stopped. The logging at Waterman Gap had ceased in 1912 and maintenance of the remaining 2-mile route was becoming costly compared to the low returns for Wildwood property sales. The route was abandoned just like that. In 1917, the tracks were scrapped to be repurposed for use in World War I. The ties were left behind, where in many places they remain today, reminders of the legacy of logging in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Passengers on the electric motor car at Wildwood, c. 1914.

What is perhaps the most surprising feature of the Dougherty Extension Railroad, however, is not what it did, but what it almost did. In 1905, plans were apace to convert the 5-mile track to Sinnott Switch, as well as the 1-mile former right-of-way to the Chase Mill into a Southern Pacific mainline track to Pescadero via a long tunnel to the Pescadero Creek basin. Indeed, two major surveys were conducted by the railroad to complete this route. Only the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake shelved the project when Southern Pacific was forced to reallocate resources elsewhere and the company records regarding the proposed track were burned in the San Francisco fires (records of the proposed route mostly survive from newspaper articles). The year after the earthquake, however, new plans were announced to build two lines, with on going to Pescadero and the other to Saratoga via Congress Springs. A roughly 2.5-mile-long tunnel would be bored beneath modern-day Castle Rock State Park connecting the line to the track at Congress Springs in one of the most ambitious plans yet. Unsurprisingly, this route proved infeasible once the stock market crashed in 1907 and again in 1911. In 1916, plans were once again announced for a line to Pescadero since the Pescadero basin remained the only relatively untapped timber tract in the region, but World War I put a halt to any plans there. Meanwhile, in 1912, plans were apace to built a route up King's Creek (likely following a line already in place to service the Hihn-Hammond Mill on Logan Creek). This route would connect boulder Creek more directly with the Los Gatos Creek valley making the circuitous route through Felton and over the summit unnecessary. But this plan fell through as well. In the end, Southern Pacific Railroad never purchased any of the Dougherty Extension Railroad line and the line disappeared into history.

The Route Today:
A surprisingly large amount of this route still survives intact today, 120 years after it was first installed. From the first bridge over the San Lorenzo River north of Boulder Creek, the railroad right-of-way sits comfortably between State Route 9 and the river, where one may catch glimpses of it at times, although there are many homes now built atop the former track. At Wildwood (Pleasant Way) the route continues along River Road, eventually crossing Camp Campbell and Camp Harmon. From Teilh Drive, it once again sits between Highway 9 and the river until reaching Fern Drive. The route crosses the river at roughly the same spot where Fern Drive bridges the river, and the right-of-way continues north along the west bank from this point onward. At the Saratoga Toll Road, one can actually see the best traces of the right-of-way since many of the original ties remain in place. If one crosses Highway 9 on foot from across the entrance to the Saratoga Toll Road, they will find the right-of-way in a shallow cut. They can continue following this route for roughly 0.5 miles before encountering private property (all of this property is part of Castle Rock State Park). You may also follow the right-of-way to the north, although it becomes increasingly overgrown and difficult to navigate and there is an abundance of poison oak in the area. The route continues north, crossing the river at least five times, before ultimately ending at a large old stump near Tin Can Creek.

A section of surviving right-of-way near the junction Saratoga Toll Road and State Route 9. [Derek Whaley]

Citations & Credits:

Nanney, Duncan. Personal correspondence.
Pepper, George. Personal correspondence.
Santa Cruz Evening News, 1908 – 1917.
Santa Cruz Sentinel, Weekly Sentinel and Evening Sentinel, 1885 – 1917.
Whaley, Derek. Santa Cruz Trains: Railroads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Santa Cruz, 2015.

Two companies specifically spearheaded the earliest attempts to bring railroading into Santa Cruz County. While neither succeeded, these early railroad companies set the precedents that were followed by later lines.

The San Lorenzo Valley Rail Road Company (1861 – 1874)
Santa Cruz County's first railroad company predated the founding of the Union Pacific Railroad by a year. Had it ever been completed, it would have been the first narrow-gauged railroad in California and one of the most ambitious routes ever attempted. Founded on May 20, 1861, the San Lorenzo Valley Rail Road would have been the very definition of a frontier route. The founders, primarily Frederick Augustus Hihn, sought to tame the San Lorenzo Valley gorge between Santa Cruz and the turkey foot, where Boulder Creek, Bear Creek, and the San Lorenzo River intersect – an ambitious 16-mile route that would have potentially eliminated the contemporary problems that stopped the lumber companies from attempting more ambitious mills in the region. Funding for this early railroad was quite forthcoming, but money was not the reason the company went bust. Property ended up being the stumbling block. When California became a state in 1850, it was still divided into hundreds of large ranchos largely held by Californios or the East Coast Americans who married into their families. Furthermore, despite the small size of Santa Cruz County, the very nature of local government was still in flux. Neither Watsonville or Santa Cruz were large enough towns to be considered cities, and the regional population was so dispersed that anything, from lawmaking to gathering funds, took a significant amount of time. Frederick Hihn wanted his railroad and he wanted it now.

The Civil War ended up becoming the biggest stumbling block as it caused too much uncertainty for people to really commit money to a railroad. In 1866, plans finally gained traction again and some were even talking about extending the line to Saratoga. An engineer even surveyed the route and estimated that only a single half-mile tunnel under Castle Rock Ridge would be required to connect the two points. But the money was just not there and other problems were brewing for the ambitious railroad. Construction on the San Lorenzo Valley Railroad finally began in 1868. The plan was to closely follow the course of the river through the San Lorenzo gorge, criss-crossing the river whenever necessary and boring a tunnel through the hogsback rock outcropping just north of the California Powder Works. Initially plans were only to take the right-of-way to Felton, with a later intent to extend it to Boulder. Grading began in multiple locations along the proposed routes, with dynamite crews blasting where necessary and other crews working from both Santa Cruz and Felton. Most of the timber for the crossties and trestles was cut directly along the right-of-way, which was the railroad's undoing. The majority of the route was owned by Isaac Davis and Henry Cowell, who used their land to fuel the fires of their limekilns on the modern-day University of California campus. Hihn and his crew, who wanted to streamline the building process, filed condemnation orders against Davis-Cowell land since it was currently unused. In response, David-Cowell filed an injunction in July 1868, essentially ending the San Lorenzo Valley Rail Road before a single track was placed.

"On the grade of the Felton, Sta Cruz Co, Calif.", circa 1865,
showing San Lorenzo gorge and the original route of Highway 9. [Bancroft]

Although the law was technically on the side of the railroad at the first court hearing in August 1868, matters became serious when Davis and Cowell appealed the case and the issue was resolved in their favor. For the next three years, the railroad would languish, partially completed while the parties built up further legal cases. In March 1871, the railroad reorganised itself and announced plans to extend the line to San José. Furthermore, it decided to appeal the appellate court decision to the state Supreme Court. In a landmark decision (Case No, 1828) in January 1874, the judiciary announced that since the original railroad act of 1863 made no provision for compensation for lands or items used on private property for public purposes, it violated the constitutional right to property and was unconstitutional. Suddenly, the San Lorenzo Valley Rail Road would have to pay for both the property it crossed and anything they used on that property. In other words, the railroad, which always struggled with its finances, was dead. The financiers pulled out, with many of them transitioning to the entire separate Santa Cruz Railroad Company, and the San Lorenzo Valley Rail Road disappeared into the history books.

Rick Hamman, in his 2002 second edition of California Central Coast Railways, states that parts of this right-of-way are still observable low in the San Lorenzo gorge in places, although these spots are not entirely easy to locate. Unlike the later route, which worked with the Davis-Cowell consortium, the earlier route remained very low in the gorge until roughly the modern-day site of the Big Trees truss bridge. Thus, those seeking to find traces of this never-completed route must look hard and long, following bike and pedestrian trails and obscure deer paths.

The California Coast Railroad Company (1867 – 1870)
When the San Francisco & San José Railroad was still an isolated line than ran before its titular cities, the people of the Pajaro Valley were already eager for a connection out of the county. Five years of rail talk in local newspapers and high shipping rates from the port of Santa Cruz likely facilitated this growing tide of interest in a rail link. On June 22, 1867, Frederick A. Hihn, Nathaniel W. Chittenden, and other prominent locals that owned properties between Gilroy and Watsonville incorporated the California Coast Railroad Company. Their intention was to connect with the San Francisco & San José Railroad, which planned to extend their track to Gilroy using a subsidiary, the Santa Clara & Pajaro Valley Railroad. Together, these two routes would constitute a connection between Santa Cruz and San Francisco. Work on the Santa Clara & Pajaro Valley Railroad began in February 1868, prompting the California Coast Railroad owners to begin selling stock and gathering funds. In such a sparsely-populated region, though, this proved quite difficult. Even though steam trains began arriving at Gilroy Depot in 1869, the California Coast Railroad was barely making any progress at all.

Meanwhile, the Santa Clara & Pajaro Valley Railroad had merged with its parent company to become the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, under the leadership of the Big Four, owners of the Central Pacific. Although that railroad's initial plans had been to divert into the San Joaquin Valley via Hollister, surveyors decided that an easier path would pass through the Pajaro Valley and then down the Salinas Valley. They incorporated the paper company, the California Southern Railroad, to accomplish this task. Suddenly, the entire purpose of the nascent California Coast Railroad Company was about to become moot. Although it remained an entity in the books for the following year, the news released by the Southern Pacific killed any lingering plans for the California Coast Railroad. On March 5, 1870, a new railroad bill passed through the California State Assembly and the California Coast Railroad was never mentioned again. The Southern Pacific had done the job for the county and promised to bring rail to the lower Pajaro Valley. Local participation was no longer required.

Citations & Credits:

Hall, John. "Santa Cruz & Felton Railroad". PacificNG.org, 2015.
Hamman, Rick. California Central Coast Railways. Second edition. Santa Cruz, CA: Otter B Books, 2002.
Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel, 1861 – 1870.

In 1937, the last independent railroad operation in Santa Cruz County ended leaving the entire county under the control of the Southern Pacific Railroad. This remained the situation until 1985, when the Santa Cruz Big Trees & Pacific Railway, operated by Roaring Camp, purchased the trackage between Santa Cruz Depot and Olympia. What was left—the track between Pajaro and Davenport along the coast—survived another decade before modernity finally caught up with the bullying tactics of the Southern Pacific, leading to its final demise. In its wake, the railroading history in Santa Cruz County changed drastically and continues to evolve even today.

Union Pacific Railroad (1996 – 2013)
The history of the Union Pacific Railroad is virtually the history of railroading in the United States itself. The enterprise was founded July 1, 1862, via an act of Congress with the goal of connecting to the Central Pacific Railroad thereby creating the first transcontinental connection. This goal was accomplished May 10, 1869, and the two companies largely diverged from there. While the Central Pacific was eventually subsumed into the Southern Pacific Railroad (the final merger was not completed until 1959), the Union Pacific remained the predominant operation between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. For well over a century, it operated in concert with other companies, the Southern Pacific among them, but it never had much real estate in California except for the trackage of the Western Pacific Railroad, which it purchased in December 1982. That being said, from 1901, the Union Pacific actually owned the Southern Pacific, but they ran as separate operations until the Supreme Court broke the trust in 1913.

By 1988, the Southern Pacific Transportation Company was suffering and was abandoning track anywhere it could justify it. Rio Grande Industries purchased the company outright and then expanded the Southern Pacific name to all its franchies (such as the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad). But this still was not enough to keep it alive. In 1996, a second merger of the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific railroads was approved and the former entity ceased to be. Despite Southern Pacific acting as the majority party in the merger, Union Pacific chose to reincorporate under its own name, ending the existence of the Southern Pacific.

In Santa Cruz County, this had little immediate impact. Operations in the county were already irregular except for the Davenport cement plant traffic, and Union Pacific honestly had many other things to worry about elsewhere in the country. Still, between 1998 and 2003, unused sidings and spurs across the county disappeared, as evidenced by before-and-after SPINS maps produced by the railroad. In Watsonville and Watsonville Junction, around half of the sidings were removed or truncated to service the businesses that still utilised them. At Santa Cruz, all of the excess sidings and spurs were removed except for a single maintenance spur and the wye. Just outside the county, Union Pacific made a more drastic move by completely abandoning the remaining track between Castroville and Seaside, near Monterey, in 1999. Union Pacific chose to leave the track behind and simply remove the switch and junction track at Castroville, thereby disconnecting the Monterey Branch.

With the final closure of the Cement Plant in 2010, the Union Pacific was more keen to abandon the Santa Cruz Branch as it had the Monterey Branch a decade before. The remaining industries using the line – mostly ProBuild and Big Creek Lumber – were just as capable of using trucks, so Union Pacific threw in the towel. They sold the route to Santa Cruz County October 12, 2012. Union Pacific retrains ownership of half-a-dozen spurs at the Davenport cement plant, but otherwise all trackage in the county is now owned either by the county itself or Roaring Camp Railroads.

For more on the Union Pacific, see their website: http://www.up.com.

Sierra Northern Railroad (2010 – 2011)
Sierra Northern Railroad acted as the common carrier along the Santa Cruz Branch in 2010 and 2011, although the tracks remained Union Pacific Railroad property the entire time. Sierra Northern was formed out of a merger of multiple lines, including the Eccles & Eastern Railroad, incorporated by Karl and Burneda Koenig and Rick and Carol Hamman in 1988. This company had sought the common carrier license from Southern Pacific for the county, but was denied, severely limiting the railroad's potential. In 1995, it reincorporated as the Sierra Pacific Coast Railway and left the county. An entirely different entity, the Sierra Railroad, had been established in 1897 to connect the Central Valley to the Gold Country. In 1980, Sierra Railroad was sold to Silverfoot Inc., which in turn sold the railroad to the Sierra Pacific Coast in 1995. The combined Sierra Railroad and Sierra Pacific Coast purchased the Yolo Shortline Railway in 2003 and from this merger emerged the Sierra Northern Railway, a common carrier line that operates freight and passenger services on roughly 100 miles of California right-of-way.

A Sierra Northern train passing in front of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk's Casino Arcade, 2009. [Wikipedia]

Knowing that the cement plant would be closing, Union Pacific was eager to give common carrier privileges to Sierra Northern, which ended up being responsible for transporting the moveable machinery out of Davenport. But the venture proved unprofitable to Sierra Northern, which had to travel outside of its usual zone to reach Santa Cruz. The group reneged on its contract in December 2011, a year after county voters approved the purchase of the Santa Cruz Branch from the Union Pacific. After spending over a million dollars in repairs, they left, forcing the county to look to new common carriers to continue rail operations on the line.

For more on Sierra Northern, see their website: http://www.sierranorthern.com.

Santa Cruz & Monterey Bay Railway (2012 – Present)
Since around 2000, the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission had sought a referendum on the purchase of the former Southern Pacific Santa Cruz Branch so that the line could be controlled more directly by county voters. Finally, on May 6, 2010, the people voted to purchase the line for $14.2 million. Funding was secured by January 2011 and the final purchase was finished October 12, 2012. However, since the Sierra Northern had departed the county, the commission was left with the difficult task of finding a new common carrier, and one that they felt they could control more directly. On May 17, 2012, after five months of no railroad service or licensed common carriers on the line, the commission approved a contract for Iowa Pacific Holdings to become the new common carrier in Santa Cruz County, operating through the newly-incorporated subsidiary "Santa Cruz & Monterey Bay Railway Company".

The Train to Christmas Town, 2012, in front of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk's Casino Arcade [Lance Nix]

Iowa Pacific was incorporated as an international railroad company in 2001 based out of Chicago. It owns numerous subsidiaries in over a dozen states, as well as two railways in the United Kingdom which operate as the British American Railway Services. The carrier is licensed in the county to operate both freight and passenger services, although it is taking considerable time to ensure the quality of the right-of-ways for the latter. Currently, other than occasional freight service, the railroad has operated the Train to Christmas Town seasonal event, which in 2012 ran between the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and Wilder Ranch, but in later years has operated outside Watsonville. There is hope – hinted at in the title of the railway – that through rail service to Monterey can once again be opened, but significant obstacles remain in the way before such a goal can be accomplished. For the moment, the Santa Cruz & Monterey Bay Railway operates whenever it is able and is working daily to improve the quality, security, and longevity of the Santa Cruz Branch line, in cooperation with the Regional Transportation Committee.

For more on Iowa Pacific, see their website: http://www.iowapacific.com.

Citations & Credits:

Hambleton, Dave. Public comments on this article.
Hoppin, Jason. "With the rail deal apparently done, a final twist; Sierra Northern notifies RTC it wants out of deal", Santa Cruz Sentinel, 12/16/2011.
Sloan, Steve. "Last UP Santa Cruz Local", Steve Sloan Train Photos, 2009.
Union Pacific Railroad, Roseville Service Unit – Salinas Subdivision SPINS, 1998, 2003.
Whaley, Derek. Santa Cruz Trains: Railroads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Santa Cruz, 2015

William “Billy” Jones was a San Lorenzo Valley native who began his career working for the Southern Pacific Railroad at the age of 13 in 1897. For the next 54 years, he became a mainstay of the local railroad industry, running engines all along the California coast. It was late in his career, in 1939, when he found a one-third scale, 18- inch-gauged steam locomotive in a shipping warehouse.1 It had been originally built for the Venice Miniature Railway by the Johnson Machine Works of Los Angeles in 1905, but had been abandoned with the closure of the miniature railroad in February 1925. Its history for the next fourteen years is mostly unknown, with it eventually falling into the hands of a local machinist who purchased and relocated the locomotive from Los Angeles to San Francisco.2 Jones bought the small locomotive and brought it to his Los Gatos prune ranch on Daves Avenue where he spent the next four years restoring the engine.3 His intention was to rebuild the locomotive with the help of his two sons as a family project, but both sons tragically died while fighting in World War II. Jones decided to continue the restoration as a memorial for his sons. Over the years, he partnered with Louis MacDermot to build miniature passenger cars to support the burgeoning railroad.

BJW #2 on the track at the Jones Ranch, 2 May 1951 [Charles Givens]

In 1943, Jones opened up the Wildcat Railroad on his property, free of charge to the public. The trains could hold up to 90 passengers at a time.4 Jones retired from the Southern Pacific in 1949, after which he devoted himself full-time to his miniature railroad. Walt Disney, another miniature railroad fan, became an acquaintance of Jones around 1948 and Jones visited Disneyland frequently, even running the Santa Fe & Disneyland Railroad during its first week of operations in 1955. Jones's railroad was immensely popular with the Los Gatos community, and Jones himself was a well-known philanthropist, donating money to children’s hospitals and local non-profits.5 Jones eventually died of leukemia on January 10, 1968.6

Opening day of the Billy Jones Wildcat Railroad at Oak Meadow Park, 1970. [Robert Turner]

Fortunately, Jones’s family and a lot of locals wished to preserve the miniature railroad for future generations of Los Gatans. They founded Billy Jones Wildcat Railroad, Inc., a non-profit charity focused on family entertainment and education. The train and facilities were moved from Jones’s ranch to Oak Meadow Park beside Vasona Park where an engine house and passenger depot were built for the train. Over a mile of track would be built in the following years to support the train, including two bridges over Los Gatos Creek, one of which was constructed from a disused Southern Pacific flatcar.7 Most of the trackage is within the adjacent Vasona Park, though the depot and maintenance facilities are in Oak Meadow Park. The railroad began operations at its new location on July 26, 1970.8 The attraction is now one of the most popular tourist features in Los Gatos, bringing in over 100,000 riders each year.

BJW #2 at the depot fuelling up for a day around the track at Oak Meadow Park. [Ed Kelley]

The original railroad was expanded in 1993 by the addition of a miniature diesel locomotive numbered 2502. It was built by Custom Locomotive Works of Chicago and donated to the railroad by Al Smith, founder of Orchard Supply Hardware and operator of the miniature Swanton Pacific Railroad north of Davenport.9 It now acts as the pinch hitter for the original steam locomotive, numbered 2. Another diesel, #3502, joined the Billy Jones fleet in 2005, while a custom-built electric engine went into service at around the same time to assist with track maintenance. Finally, a fifth engine and second steam engine joined in April 2013.10

BJW Diesel #2502 running along the track in Vasona Park. [Marcel Marchon]

Bill Mason Carousel at Oak Meadow Park. [TripAdvisor]

For additional entertainment, the Town of Los Gatos added a carousel to Oak Meadow Park in 1991 following a decade of restoration work. The carousel dated to 1915 and was built for the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. The restoration work became a community affair with dozens of local artists assisting in painting the wooden horses and the decorations on and around the carousel. A Wurlitzer band organ was installed, as well, to provide music for the ride.11 The carousel was dedicated to the memory of William E. Mason, a civic-minded man who ran the non-profit Wildcat Railroad for many years after Jones’s death.12

The Railroad Today:

BJW Diesel #3502 in Vasona Park. [John L. @ Yelp]

The Billy Jones Wildcat Railroad runs year-round with weekly service in the summer and on weekends during the remainder of the year. The surrounding Oak Meadow Park was established by the Town of Los Gatos in 1958 to replace Memorial Park which was
demolished to create State Route 17.13 When it first opened, the park sat on the eastern edge of the Southern Pacific Railroad right-of-way which became soon after University Avenue. The Southern Pacific Railroad tracks were removed in 1959, but the railroad’s legacy lives on today through Billy Jones and the miniature railroad that he built.

Citations & Credits:

“Billy Jones Wildcat Railroad and W.E. ‘Bill’ Mason Carousel,” Billy Jones Wildcat Railroad.
Panacy, Peter, “Venice Miniature Railway: A Brief History and Its Influence on the Billy JonesWildcat Railroad,” 10.
“Billy Jones."
Bruntz, George G., The History of Los Gatos: Gem of the Foothills (Fresno, CA: Valley Publishers, 1971), 149.
“Billy Jones."
Kelley, Edward and Peggy Conaway, Images of Rail: Railroads of Los Gatos (Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia, 2006), 68.
“Billy Jones."
Kelley & Conaway, 110.
“Billy Jones”; Kelley & Conaway, 123.
"Billy Jones."
“Billy Jones."
Bergtold, Peggy Conaway, and Stephanie Ross Mathews, Legendary Locals of Los Gatos (Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia, 2014), 74.
“Oak Meadow Park," Town of Los Gatos, California.

San Juan Pacific Railway corporate advertising logo.

In the aftermath of the San Francisco Earthquake in April 1906, demand for building materials exponentially increased across the West Coast. Many railroad sprang up in the aftermath, including the San Juan Pacific Railway operating out of Chittenden Station in Santa Cruz County. The primary and initial purpose of this railroad was to connect the San Juan Portal Cement Company plant at the mouth of the San Juan Valley to the Southern Pacific Railroad's Coast Division track eight miles to the north. In addition, the company planned to operate a clay quarry directly out of Chittenden using the reserves found in the hills above the Pajaro River. In the grander scheme of things, this new railway was to serve as an essential component of the larger Ocean Shore Railroad project, acting as a connector between the Ocean Shore & Eastern Railroad, which was anticipated to run between Santa Cruz and Chittenden, and the San Joaquin Valley Western Railroad, which was anticipated to connect Fresno and Hollister. Thus, it is unsurprising to find among the financiers and major employees of this short-line many of the same people who were behind the Ocean Shore project. Indeed, most of the railroad's rolling stock would be Ocean Shore equipment.

Original 500 stock certificate for the San Juan
Pacific Railway Company, 1908.

The San Juan & Chittenden Railway was incorporated by local businesspeople on May 4, 1907. Construction on the route began almost immediately with the only significant bridge being located immediately south of Chittenden over the Pajaro River. The vast majority of this route was in San Benito County but the line proved to be entirely dependent on its connection to the trackage in Santa Cruz. By the end of August, a standard-gauge track had been built to San Juan Bautista and to the site of the cement plant, and soon after the route was completed, materials were shipped over the line to begin the erection of the plant. Not long after the plant was complete, the railroad rebranded itself as the San Juan Pacific Railway and corporate leadership formally shifted to the San Juan Portland Cement Company, the Palmer Oil Company, and the San Joaquin Valley Western Railroad, although all three had doubtlessly played a role in the company's initial incorporation. The initial rolling stock of the railroad was composed of a single retired Southern Pacific locomotive, 17 boxcars, 8 flatcars, and a single passenger-baggage car. The railroad formally opened to the public on September 1, 1907, less than four months after it had been founded.

Unsurprisingly, one immediate problem that the railroad encountered was a negative relationship with the Southern Pacific at Chittenden. Although there were plans to connect the Ocean Shore track at Santa Cruz with the San Juan Pacific track at Chittenden, the Southern Pacific had made this virtually impossible and a junction at Chittenden was required, for which the San Juan Pacific paid dearly. Two transfer tracks installed to the south of the Southern Pacific tracks acted as their holding yard, but the original plan to run the track over or under the Southern Pacific line never came to fruition owing to the failure of the Ocean Shore to connect its lines. Another problem proved to be customers. Much like the Pajaro Valley Consolidated Railroad, the San Juan Pacific was dependent partially on local farmers along the route, but the railroad was completed at the tail-end of the growing season forcing the railroad to wait a year before those profits would be realised. Meanwhile, the cement plant was still being constructed and was not expected to open until early 1908.

Thus, passenger service ended up being the railroad's first venture, despite only having a single locomotive and passenger car. In mid-October, the company hired a local coach-driver as the conductor and branded the track "The Old Mission Route" in the hopes that Spanish revivalism and romanticism would draw customers to the isolated and decaying mission. Generally low maintenance costs and public interest in the line kept it alive that first winter. Unfortunately, a financial panic in November 1907 stalled all work on the connecting lines and also stopped construction on the cement plant. Everything hung in the balance.

Meanwhile, another project was underway at the end of the San Juan Pacific route. On August 3, 1907, the narrow-gauged San Juan Southern Railway was incorporated to connect the cement plant to the limestone sources in San Juan Canyon. The overenthusiastic goals of the project visualised a six-mile track to a site called Flintsville, i.e. Thomas Flint's ranch. Furthermore, plans were put in place to extend this track another six miles to the Underwood Ranch. Ultimately, three miles was built by the time the November panic forced construction to halt. Whether the track was ever used is another question. There are no records attesting to narrow-gauged rolling stock owned by the company and the track, even if it were used. Company timetables in February 1908, however, suggest, probably inaccurately, that the track was not only used, but did in fact extend up to Underwood. But Interstate Commerce Commission records report in June 1909 that only three miles were built and it was no longer in use. Regardless, any evidence of this route has been removed by later roads that have since been built on the company's right-of-way.

Things went badly for the San Juan Pacific after 1907. Revenue was severely down because of the panic and the cement plant was hardly functioning. Passenger serves ended in May, 1908, freight was infrequent. A harsh winter in early 1910 washed out track near the Pajaro River and it took months to repair them, and then in March 1911, the bridge over the river collapsed in a storm. It was not repaired until July, but by then it was too late. The company ceased all operations in November and was put up for sale in January 1912.

For six months, the San Juan Pacific was a dead entity. Then, on May 12, 1912, a new organisation called the California Central Railroad was founded to attempt to rehabilitate the former right-of-way and put it to use. The purchaser was the Old Mission Cement Company, a new corporation that purchased the abandoned San Juan Portland Cement plant and all of its stocks, including those in the San Juan Pacific. This new railroad would not have the grandiose plans of its predecessor (although it would advertise them from time-to-time) and its corporate management would be entirely linked to the fate of the cement company. Only eight miles of track were maintained, that between Chittenden and the cement plant near San Juan Junction. From 1912 to 1916, the railroad was mostly a conveyor of equipment to the plant, which reopened in 1916.

Old Mission Cement Company plant near San Juan, with tracks visible in the background and at left, c. 1915.
Photo by S.D. Leman. [QuarriesandBeyond.org]

From 1916 to 1929, the railroad operated daily, carrying cement, gypsum, oil, sugar beets, and general agricultural goods between the cement plant and the Southern Pacific mainline tracks. This new route leased a Southern Pacific locomotive in 1919 which completely replaced the old engine in 1923. In 1927, an old Ocean Shore locomotive, long since disused, was transferred to the line and replaced the leased Southern Pacific locomotive. The old rolling stock was eventually phased out for borrowed and leased Southern Pacific stock, and it is unclear if the railroad even had a passenger car after the old one was retired in 1919.

Map of the California Central Railroad route, c. 1915. Drawn by C.A. Logan. [QuarriesandBeyond.org]

The Old Mission Cement Plant continued to operate until 1927 when it was taken over the the Portland Cement Company. The Great Depression forced the closure of that latter in late 1929 and the railroad ceased all service December 15, 1930. For the next seven years, the tracks rotted along their route, too expensive and unprofitable to remove but also too expensive to maintain. In December 1937, the old Ocean Shore locomotive ran one last time along the route, where at Chittenden it drove to Gerlach, Nevada, to start a new life. The tracks were illegally removed soon afterwards. The Interstate Commerce Commission officially granted the company the right to abandon the line on December 31, 1943. The cement plant reopened in 1941, but without using the tracks. It continued to operate into the mid-1970s.

The Route Today:

The tracks still in place near San Juan Junction. [GeologyCafe.com]

Very little survives of the Old Mission Route. No trace of the bridge over the Pajaro River appears to still exist, owing undoubtedly to the violent nature of the river during storms. The route followed State Route 129 to the south through River Oaks before crossing near the confluence of Pescadero Creek. From there it stuck closely to the north side of CA129, diverging with it at the California 101 intersection. From here, the route crosses through fields and the Anzar High School campus before merging with San Juan Road, diverging with that near the Prescott Road intersection. The route continues in a straight path until gently turning due-south around the eastern side of San Juan Bautista. The San Juan Station was located between CA156 and Nyland Drive. The route continued due south from here to the cement plant, ruins of which still survive off of San Juan Canyon Road just before entering the canyon. Unremoved tracks can only be seen in the road at the intersection of The Alameda and Mission Vineyard Road. Indeed, an unnamed road and San Juan Canyon Road (G1) briefly flank the former right-of-way south of this intersection. The route of the narrow-gauged San Juan Southern is easier to follow as it sticks to the corse of the western road that runs through San Juan Canyon. How long this route ultimately went is not entirely certain, although three miles of it were definitely attested to by multiple primary sources. Except for the extant roads built atop the right-of-way and the one instance of surviving track, nothing else appears to remain of this railroad.

A plaque commemorating the railroad was erected by E Clampus Vitus and can be found on Mission Vineyard Road beside the San Juan Inn.

Citations & Credits:

Clough, Charles W. and Bobbye Sisk Temple. San Juan Bautista: The Town, the Mission & the Park. Quill Driver Books, 1996.
Hamman, Rick. California Central Coast Railways. Santa Cruz, CA: Otter B Books, 2002.
Nanney, Duncan. Personal correspondence.
Pepper, George. Personal correspondence.
Robertson, Donald B. Encyclopedia of Western Railroad History: Vol 4: California. Caxton Press, 1986.

In the remote fringe of Santa Cruz County, buttressed between high mountains and closer geographically to Santa Clara and San Benito counties as it is to Watsonville, the small community of Chittenden sits beside Soda Lake. Of all the railroad stops in the Santa Cruz County, this was the most isolated for it is the only stop of the mainline Coast Division of the Southern Pacific Railroad in Santa Cruz County. It also was the first stop in the county.

Map of Rancho Salsipuedes, 1853. (UCSC Special Collections)

Nathaniel W. Chittenden unintentionally leant his name to the station when he settled in what became known as Chittenden Pass around 1870. He had been until that time a lawyer from San Francisco. When he moved to Santa Cruz County, he purchased the eastern corner of Rancho Salsipuedes. The rancho had a long and disputed history, with its origins in a possible land grant to Mariano Castro in 1807, making it one of the few Spanish, rather than Mexican, land grants in the county. It was the second largest rancho in the county, as well, measuring 25,800 acres. Because of its large size and its disputed status, it was one of the first ranchos that was divided up following the American annexation of California. Its last Mexican owner was Manuel Jimeno Casarín. The soil of the rancho as a whole, but especially within the pass between the mountains, is highly fertile and the alkaline Soda Lake, the only such lake in the county, was a source for mineral collection. The road that passed through the pass became a county road in 1894 and it remains one of the primary means of passing between Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties even today. Chittenden died in Watsonville in 1885, after which his lands were divided between his relatives. Idea H., Clara, and Talman Chittenden were his chief beneficiaries.

The Chittenden community center, showing a small general store, c. 1900. (Santa Cruz Public Libraries)

El Pajaro Springs postcard, c. 1910. (CardCow.com)

Chittenden as a settlement was never impressive—numbering fewer than 80 residents in 1893. The small community that lived in the gap still managed to establish a post office in April 1893 and kept it running for many years. The railroad station was probably established around the same time under the name "Chittenden's", later dropping the "s". In those early years, one of the primary draws of the region was Chittenden Springs, which was established beside a sulphur hot spring located in the gap. In 1906, the Chittendens sold the spring to A.F. Martel who renamed it El Pajaro Springs, a reference to the Pajaro River that still passes through the pass. In 1918, it was sold again to the St. Francis Hospital of San Francisco and it became St. Francis Springs. The resort was beside Soda Lake.

1906 San Francisco Earthquake damage at Chittenden.
(Granite Rock Company)

The railroad stop at Chittenden was primarily used for freight. Passengers could use the facility as a flag-stop, but no agency office was available there to purchase tickets. No passenger shelter appears to have been built initially. A siding (or pair of sidings) at Chittenden ran along the north side of the tracks, between where the tracks are today and State Route 129, branching off near the first major driveway over the tracks and merging just before where the highway crosses under the tracks. A spur may have run to Soda Lake as there is some topographical evidence of such. If so, this route would be identical to the dirt road that now leads to the lake. Mining operations in the hills continued into at least the 1910s and used the sidings to store waiting cars. In addition, there were vast clay deposits along the banks of the Pajaro River and along Pescadero Creek above Chittenden, which were mined as well. By the early 1900s, Granite Rock Company also used the sidings to store firewood-filled boxcars that were used in their kilns at Logan.

Chittenden's small post office building with a man posing out front, 1900. (Santa Cruz Public Libraries)

Boxcars damaged by the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, at Chittenden.
(Granite Rock Company)

Around the time that Chittenden as a community was fading, the railroad operations out of the station received an unexpected boost. The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 certainly helped in that it increased demand for all building supplies, such as the mineral, clay, and limestone deposits in and around the San Benito and San Juan valleys. For at least a year already, the Ocean Shore Electric Railroad was intending to pass through Chittenden Gap to connect to a proposed mainline route in the San Joaquin Valley. But a group of trigger-happy investors decided that a route to San Juan Bautista would help progress things a bit faster. When negotiations with the Southern Pacific Railroad failed, the group relocated their planned northern terminus from Betabel to Chittenden. The San Juan Pacific Railway was incorporated on May 4, 1907, and construction began almost at once out of Chittenden with the route completed August 30.

Initial plans were to build the railroad's right of way directly under the Southern Pacific tracks with a yard and station built on their northern side. But this goal was for another day. Initially, they crammed in a two-track yard on the south side, between the Southern Pacific tracks and the Pajaro River embankment. A small freight platform and passenger shelter were erected beside the tracks. The tracks were connected to a Southern Pacific siding on either side allowing entry and exit in either direction along the line. Curiously, the railroad had no wye at either end, suggesting there was possibly a turntable somewhere along the line (and potentially at both ends). No evidence for a turnable, however, has been found. The northern water towers were kept at Chittenden just before the Pajaro River bridge crossing to the east.

San Juan Pacific passenger shelter and freight platform at Chittenden, 1908. (Santa Cruz Public Libraries)

For the remainder of its life, Chittenden Station was more a transfer point between the San Juan Pacific (later California Central) and the Southern Pacific. Until early 1909, passengers transferred here for rides down to San Juan Bautista on the "Old Mission Route" and there was occasional bustle at the stop, but that all collapsed pretty quickly when financial difficulties ended passenger service permanently along the line. When the California Central took over in 1912, it did not resume passenger service. From 1916 to 1929, cars from the Old Mission Cement Company plant south of San Juan Bautista would transfer to passing Southern Pacific trains for delivery to various customers. Meanwhile, empties cars or cars with cement supplies would return to the sidings awaiting shuttling back to the plant. This was what kept Chittenden alive for so long. The town's post office had closed June 15, 1923, and the town had disappeared in the meantime. All that was left was a tiny freight transfer yard.

In 1930, the cement plants switched to using trucks exclusively for transport and the California Central essentially ceased to exist. The route rusted and Chittenden became a silent unused flag stop. In 1937, the last train passed up the Old Mission Route, depositing its remaining rolling stock on the Southern Pacific line for sale out of county. The route was dismantled and Chittenden's purpose to the railroad was officially ended. During World War II, Southern Pacific quietly closed Chittenden station on April 7, 1942, and it ceased to be a flag stop. It remained as a potential freight stop into the mid-1950s but was likely never used during this time. El Pajaro Springs is surprisingly still listed on Google Maps as a site to the west of Soda Lake, but no structures appear in the area. The area is classified as unincorporated Santa Cruz County land and, with the exception of a florist, there are no commercial structures remaining in Chittenden today.

Official Railroad Information:
On the Southern Pacific Coast Division, Chittenden Station was 91.9 miles from San Francisco via the mainline track through San José, and it was 28.6 miles from Santa Cruz. It included 123 car lengths of siding and spur space, which may or may not have included a special track to Soda Lake, where a mining firm was always attending to the lake's minerals.

For the San Juan Pacific, Chittenden was mile marker 10.0 along their lines, which set 0.0 miles at San Juan Junction. In the first year of operation, passenger service ran both directions three times per day, but that ended in early 1909. Fewer records are available for the California Central Railroad since it operated freight exclusively along roughly 8 miles of track. Chittenden's mile marker or its trackage capacity are unknown.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
36.900˚N, 121.601˚W

1917 USGS Map showing Chittenden area with original trackage.

The site of Chittenden Station is accessible from Old Chittenden Road via State Route 129. The station site itself is unmarked but is near the Happy Boy Farms property on the eastern end of the road. The freight yard outline is discernible by the large loop that the road makes away from the tracks before paralleling them. The original site of the San Juan Pacific depot is not known with certainty but at the top of the embankment above the Pajaro River in what is undoubtedly today private land. Trespassing is not advised. Except for the one remaining active Union Pacific track in the area, nothing else remains of Chittenden Station or the historic town except for a few Victorian-era scattered homes.

Citations:

Clark, Donald. Santa Cruz County Place Names: A Geographical Dictionary. Scotts Valley, CA: Kestrel Press, 2003.
Hamman, Rick. California Central Coast Railways. Santa Cruz, CA: Otter B Books, 2002.

Location of Canfield (bottom-right corner) in relation to Chittenden, 1891.
Survey map conducted by Vic. T. & Harry W. McCray.
[UCSC Digital Collections]

The San Juan Pacific Railway had few patrons along its eight-mile route. The purpose of the railroad was always first-and-foremost to cater to the San Juan Portland Cement Company, so all other customers were secondary to that goal. Nonetheless, the property of the Canfield family, located south of the bend of the route as it turned toward San Juan Bautista, was the railroad's first customer.

In February 1887, Samuel Russel and William Walton Canfield purchased from J.B. Doane a quarter section of ranch land in the Gabilan foothills region near the confluence of the San Benito River into the Pajaro River. Samuel and William were brothers, two sons of Robert Finley Canfield and Ruth Halsey Walton. William moved to California in 1849, presumably during the Gold Rush, and became a farmer. His brother joined him at some unknown later date. Very little is known about their cattle ranch or its success over the years. Both Canfields were active with the Central Coast Counties Improvement Association between 1903 and 1906, with Samuel serving as president in the first two years and William serving as vice president in the subsequent years. The organisation was one of a number that supported the expansion of railroading into the peripheries of the Central Coast, to places such as Davenport and San Juan. As such, it is unsurprising to discover in 1907 the route of the San Juan Pacific Railway skirting the north-east edge of the Canfield property as it worked its way south.

Canfield – the name appropriately given to the stop located on the Canfields' ranch – became the site of the first siding build along the San Juan Pacific line. The railroad built a 600-foot track there so the local ranchers and farmers could load hay and stock, and unload general merchandise for their small, rural businesses. Additionally, for the first year or so, Canfield served as an official stop for passenger trains, allowing an easy means for locals to travel to Santa Cruz, San José, or San Francisco for business or vacation. In that first years the stop was catered to three times a day in either direction. It is unknown how frequently the stop was used by passengers or freight customers.

The financial collapse in late 1907 spelled the eventual end of all services along the San Juan Pacific line, while damage from winter storms crippled it. When the route reopened in 1916 as the California Central Railroad, Canfield was not included on the roster. Although the tracks continued past the property until the final dismantling of the route in early 1938, the Canfields could no longer call on passing trains and, presumably, their siding was removed or left to decay.

The fate of the Canfield family is also not entirely known. Samuel married Alice Marion Butler in June 1903. Samuel and Alice moved to San Francisco later in life where he predeceased her. Alice lived until October 1972, dying at the age of 97. William Canfield remained active in San Benito County to 1919, at least. He was responsible for a short-lived campground installed at Pinnacles National Monument. Nothing is known about his spouse or his date of death, but he did have at least one son who died in 1964. The Canfield brothers have no known relationship with the Canfields of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

Official Railroad Information:
Canfield only appeared on official timetables in 1907 and 1908. On these tables, it was noted as 5.5 miles from San Juan Junction, the official end-of-track, which made it 4.5 miles from Chittenden. However, these very clean measurements were entirely off. In reality, Chittenden was only 2.3 miles away along the right-of-way, confirming that the length of the line was 8.0 miles, not the 10.0 the railroad advertised it as.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
36.875˚N, 121.554˚W

The site of Canfield can be found along the San Juan Highway directly across from its intersection with San Justo Road. The site itself is unmarked but the stop would have been located near the intersection of Anzar Road and San Justo Road. Indeed, everything along San Juan Highway on the west, from the south side of Anzar Road to the southern end of the Berkley Operations and Earthbound Farm complex (on the east side of the road) constituted the Canfield property. Their western boundary was the hillsides. Nothing remains of their ranch now except agricultural fields.

Citations & Credits:

Daily Independent Journal (San Rafael), 10/05/1972.
Hamman, Rick. California Central Coast Railways. Santa Cruz, CA: Otter B Books, 2002.
Hollister Free Lance, 02/18/1887.
Robertson, Donald B. Encyclopedia of Western Railroad History: Vol 4: California. Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1998.
Santa Cruz Sentinel & Evening Sentinel, 1903 – 1913.

When the California Central Railroad took over operations of the bankrupt San Juan Pacific Railway in 1912, they did so with the common understanding that the entire line would become freight-only. Still, the Old Mission Cement plant at the end of the line was not the only company to utilise the railroad. When the route went back into regular use in 1916, a new stop appeared just to the south of the former Canfield siding. Named by the railroad "Anderson Packing", the freight stop catered exclusively to George Howard Anderson's pear orchards and packing house which was conveniently positioned between the San Juan Highway and the railroad right-of-way.

Advertisement for Anderson pears, c. 1923.

The Anderson family traced its roots back to 1863 and John Zuiglius Anderson, an early American fruit grower in Santa Clara County. John had been the first to discover a method of transporting fruit between California and the East Coast without it spoiling. His eldest son, George, after operating a pear orchard in the Santa Clara Valley for many years, relocated the business to the San Benito Valley in 1907 while maintaining at least three other homes in San José, Seabright, and on Mission Street in Santa Cruz, as well as a hunting lodge near the Klamath River. Another brother, Alden, moved to the Sacramento area. He and his first wife, Susan M. Brown, had four children including George Howard Jr., Howard S., John Zuiglius Jr. (the future congressman for California's 8th District, 1939-1953), and Elizabeth. Elizabeth married Edward F. Pearce, the son of Judge E.A. Pearce, in 1942. The family was well-regarded and was influential enough to have many of its movements in Santa Cruz County tracked by the Santa Cruz Sentinel and the Evening News. For example, their purchase of an automobile in 1910 was a notable moment, suggesting they were one of the first in the county to own such a vehicle. Susan died in 1913 at her Seabright home and George appears to have remarried to Clara, the daughter of James F. Simpson. Their family remained prominent in the newspapers throughout the 1910s and early 1920s. After 1913, George lived largely at their San Juan home. He died of a massive heart attack in September 1925 at San Juan after years of ill health. During the final years of his life, George had served on the California Fish & Game Commission as the representative for the San Francisco Division.

Anderson Packing Company advertisement for pears, c. 1920s.

The history of the Anderson pear orchard and packing house near San Juan Bautista is less known. It was certainly operating by 1910 and was thriving throughout the 1920s as evidenced by the large number of advertisements circulating from the time. When the railroad ceased operations in 1930, the business continued, at least until 1939 when Jack was elected to the House of Representatives. Very little is known about their railroad stop except that there appears to have been some form of packing house there and that the site likely had a siding. The pear shipments out of the orchard and the import of hay and fertiliser supplemented the income of the California Central in the spring and fall months and appear to have done so with an average of 42 carloads shipped out annually from the small pear operation. It is very likely that a platform and siding were installed at Anderson Packing, but these cannot be proven currently.

Official Railroad Information:
The California Central published few public documents that have survived and none are presently available that reference the Anderson Packing stop. This stop is attested to only in Hamman and Clough.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
Approx. 36.873˚N, 121.553˚W

The location of the Anderson Packing stop is not known with certainty, but Anderson Road between San Justo Road and San Juan Highway runs directly through the former property. The railroad paralleled San Justo Road throughout this area and it can be assumed that the packing plant more or less sat on the site of the current Earthbound Farm complex. Trespassing onto the Earthbound Farm complex is not advised. There appears to be no trace left of the original Anderson Packing Company complex surviving at the site today.

Citations & Credits:

Clough, Charles W., and Bobbye Sisk Temple. San Juan Bautista: The Town, the Mission & the Park. Sanger, CA: Word Dancer Press, 1996.
Hamman, Rick. California Central Coast Railways. Santa Cruz, CA: Otter B Books, 2002.
Pierce, Marjorie. East of the Gabilans: The Ranches, the Towns, the People—Yesterday and Today. Santa Cruz, CA: Valley Publishers, 1976.
Santa Cruz Evening News, 1913 – 1942.
Santa Cruz Sentinel, 1902 – 1942.

The location of the Prescott family property along the right-of-way,
San Benito County map, 1891 [UC Santa Cruz Digital Collections]

Not long after California became a state, the Prescott family moved into the San Benito Valley on a small ranch within the former San Juan Bautista Mission rancho. William Sims Prescott Sr. was an English-born settler who journeyed to California to work in the lumber industry of the Santa Cruz Mountains and, later, in the New Idria Mines. Once in the state, he met Catherine Hobson, a Canadian woman, and the two of them settled down in the San Juan Valley, becoming locally famous for constructing the first artesian well in the region as well as the first orchards. They raised a son and a daughter, William Sims Jr. and Emma, on their ranch along the San Benito River in the late 1850s. Emma eventually married John C. Skinner and moved to San Francisco, where she died in 1922. William, meanwhile, became the family patriarch when his father died in 1878. William married Elizabeth Maria Prather of Tennessee in 1885 and together they raised four children on the ranch.

William quickly rose in prominence in the local community, especially once he was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1902 for District 2 (San Juan Region). He kept this position into the 1930s. It was during the mid-1900s that plans were put in place to run the San Juan Pacific Railway between Chittenden and San Juan, a project that required Prescott's permission in order to begin. Unsurprisingly, when the San Juan Pacific began operations in 1907, a stop named "Prescott" appeared on public timetables at a location near the Prescott family property.

In reality, the location probably only ever served as a freight stop for the Prescott family and their neighbors. The farms in the region largely grew sugar beets for Claus Spreckels and other various vegetable products, which collectively justified a small freight stop in the area. As visible on the 1891 map above, a small T road intersection at the southwest corner of the Prescott property later coincided with the location of the railroad stop, meaning that local farms could use established roads to get their goods to market without having to drive into San Juan or up to Canfield or Chittenden. The railroad installed a 700-foot-long siding at the stop to park wagons for loading of sugar beets. Farmers, seeing the potential of the site, added a large beet-dumping platform there as well to expedite the process.

Although passenger service ceased in 1908, freight traffic continued intermittently all the way to 1930 when the California Central unofficially ceased operations. During the California Central period, Prescott was renamed "Beet Dump" but the purpose of the stop remained the same – local farmers could deliver their goods to the site for loading on passing freight trains. The name implied that sugar beets were the primary product with their destination doubtlessly the large beet refinery in Salinas. The tracks remained on the property until they were finally scrapped in early 1938.

Photograph of prominent San Juan citizens including, from left-to-right, William Prescott, Edward A. Pearce,
Luis Raggio, Ernest CC Zanetta, and George Abbe, c. late 1930s. [Marjorie Pierce]

William and Elizabeth Prescott lingered longer. William suffered a heart attack in 1943 just before his 58th wedding anniversary, but he survived two more years before passing away June 15, 1945. Elizabeth survived him by eight years, dying January 31, 1953. Both are buried at the San Juan Bautista Cemetery near the burial places of their mothers. Their property is entirely farmland today.

Official Railroad Information:
San Juan Pacific Railway timetables noted that Prescot was 2.3 miles from San Juan Junction and 1.0 miles from San Juan [Bautista]. This placed it 5.7 miles from Chittenden and the Southern Pacific mainline track. Few records exist from the California Central period but what does seem clear is the stop lost its name and simply became known as "Beet Dump", a reference to the old beet-loading platform constructed there around 1908.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
36.860˚N, 121.542˚W

The site of Prescott is one of the few locations along the San Juan Pacific right-of-way that can be guessed with almost complete certainty. The right-of-way crossed modern-day Prescott Road at the entrance to today's True Leaf Farms – Church Brothers Produce facility. This facility without doubt sits on the site of the original "Beet Dump", which was itself the successor to Prescott. In fact, a tiny grass-covered and undeveloped stretch of right-of-way still sits across the road from this facility and the driveway of the facility was once the right-of-way. Access to True Leaf Farms – Church Brothers Produce is restricted to employees. Nothing visible remains of the railroad in this area and trespassing should not be attempted.

Citations & Credits:

The Hollister Free Lance, 03/1902.
Hamman, Rick. California Central Coast Railways. Santa Cruz, CA: Otter B Books, 2002.
Mylar, Isaac L. Early Days at the Mission San Juan Bautista: A narrative of incidents connected with the days when California was young. Watsonville, CA: Evening Pajaronian, 1929.
Pierce, Marjorie. East of the Gabilans: The Ranches, the Towns, the People – Yesterday and Today. Santa Cruz, CA: Valley Publishers, 1992.
Santa Cruz Sentinel, 1904-1943.

Three decades after the Spanish friars of the Franciscan Order had founded their first mission in the Alta California region of Nuevo España, they decided that a small outpost tucked away in a sparsely-inhabited tributary valley of the Pajaro River would serve as an excellent waypoint for pilgrims, soldiers, and missionaries traveling up and down the King's Highway – El Camino Real. In November 1795, a small group of explorers and friars spiked a cross on a site at the mouth of a deep valley and proclaimed the place San Juan Bautista after Saint John the Baptist. It took two years for a physical church to be completed at the site, with it officially dedicated on 24 June 1797. In 1803, construction began on the current adobé and redwood structure, and it was completed in 1812 becoming the largest of all twenty-one missions in the Spanish system. The mission largely prospered on its bluff that overlooked the floodplains of the San Juan Valley. Many supporting structures were built around the core mission complex, while farmers and ranchers from various backgrounds settled in the surrounding region to work for the Franciscans. Although the mission suffered during the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath, the church continued to operate without a break.

Drawing of Mission San Juan Bautista, c. 1830. [California Missions Resource Center]

The secularization of Catholic Church lands in 1834 greatly reduced the scope of the mission, but locals continued to patronize the church each week and it never closed as so many other missions did. When the United States took control of California and gold was discovered soon after in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, the tiny hamlet of San Juan Bautista quickly grew. Prospectors travelling between Monterey and the interior passed through the town, with many settling after striking rich and others never leaving, opening businesses to sell wares to the passersby. The village became a mid-sized town with multi-story buildings in the main plaza, general stores, hotels, restaurants, and feed stores. A fire destroyed much of the town not long afterwards, depriving it of some of its glory, but it was the railroad that really turned the tide against San Juan.

The Plaza Hotel across from the mission, 1893. [fine art america]

In 1870, the Southern Pacific Railroad reached Hollister, a town just a few hours' wagon ride away from San Juan Bautista. With the end of prospectors, the relatively recent fire, and a lack of available land in the valley, many shifted their attention away to this new site, hoping to capitalize on the railroad which still intended at this time to continue south into the San Joaquin Valley. The town never died, but it barely grew after this point and in many ways never recovered from the fire and loss of the railroad.

1915 USGS map showing the town of San Juan Bautista, although notably
no railroad station appears at the junction of the road to Hollister (bottom).

In 1907, the town's prospects rose again. The Southern Pacific Railroad had been considering a route between their station at Betabel and San Juan Canyon for nearly thirty years as a short-cut to the San Joaquin Valley. Other rivals had also partially surveyed routes in the area in half-hearted attempt to defeat the Southern Pacific transcontinental monopoly. The plans of the San Juan Pacific Railway were no different: they wished to connect to the Ocean Shore Railroad and other proposed lines in a trans-California route that would one day span the nation. But in the meantime, the San Juan Portland Cement Company wished to open a refinery in the hills just outside of town. They fronted the cash to form the railroad in order to expedite the construction and shipment of goods. The new route would loop around the eastern side of the town with a station established along the main road to Hollister just below the mission. Around August 1st, the track to San Juan Bautista was completed and a long siding was installed to cater to local businesses such as the Loma Prieta Lumber Company, which intended to build a yard beside the tracks and harvest nearby forests. The route formally opened on October 1, 1907, and San Juan Bautista had its very own railroad at last.

Mission San Juan Bautista at the time the San Juan Pacific Railway first came to town.

Presumably, a railroad structure was built to cater to passengers awaiting the three passenger trains that ran daily in either direction between San Juan and Chittenden. However, the financial difficulties that quickly consumed both the cement plant and the railroad may have halted any permanent structure since no known photograph exists of such a depot or shelter. By May 1909, San Juan Station was a lost dream. The railroad went bust. When the California Central began running regular freight runs along the Old Mission Route in 1916, service to the Loma Prieta yard continued, but for how long is unknown. Most trains headed without stopping for the cement plant and any passengers would have to find other means of getting to the nearest Southern Pacific station. It is unknown how long trains serviced the Loma Prieta yard, but general freight service past San Juan continued through 1930, after which the tracks lay dormant until they were pulled in early 1938. The mission continues to look out over the San Juan River floodplain, but nothing remains of the station, tracks, or right-of-way that sat so briefly in its shadow.

Official Railroad Information:
San Juan appeared on the first public timetables for the San Juan Pacific from mid-1907 through May 1909 as 1.3 miles from San Juan Junction and 8.7 miles from Chittenden (although, in reality, it was closer to 6.4 miles from the latter). It was listed as having three passenger trains in each direction daily. Records for the California Central Railroad are more difficult to find but there was no known service to the former stop after 1909.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
36.841˚N, 121.532˚W

The precise site of San Juan Station is not entirely certain but it was most likely on either side of modern-day State Route 156 near Nyland Drive or Groscup Way. If it was on the north side, it occupied the same location of today's San Juan School. If the south side, it sat in the open lot between Groscup and the highway. The Loma Prieta Lumber Company lot was most likely the large grass field on the south side of the road east of Groscup. Most of this area can be explored to a degree without breaking any trespass laws, but nothing of the station or right-of-way survives in this immediate area.

Citations & Credits:

Clough, Charles W. San Juan Bautista: The Town, The Mission & The Park. Sanger, CA: Word Dancer Press, 1996.
Hamman, Rick. California Central Coast Railways. Santa Cruz, CA: Otter B Books, 2002.
McMahon, Joseph, Carla Hendershot, and the Plaza History Association. Images of America: San Juan Bautista. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2007.

The end of the line for both the San Juan Pacific Railway and the California Central Railroad was at San Juan Junction, 7.8 miles south of the Southern Pacific Railroad track at Chittenden. San Juan Junction was a rather fanciful name that referred to the junction with the narrow-gauged San Juan Southern Railway, which was supposed to travel an additional thirteen miles down San Juan Canyon but, due to economic problems, only ran three miles and never was used. The California Central kept the name, however, because they did succeed in building and using four miles of that line narrow-gauged line, continuing construction of it all the way to 1929, the last full year the railroad operated. But there was no transfer yard at San Juan Junction. Instead, there was a moderately-sized Portland cement plant installed at the site.

Unassembled parts stored at the San Juan Portland Cement site awaiting construction, 1908.

Construction on the San Juan Portland Cement Company refinery and kilns began in August 1907, immediately after the San Juan Pacific was opened for through traffic. Within days of completion of the railroad, carloads of machinery for the refinery were brought in and dumped beside the tracks at San Juan Junction. The track was extended an additional 0.3 miles to a gravel site south of the Junction and the material there was used for ballast along the line. At the Junction, a parallel spur was installed opposite the cement plant so that, when the plant was built, it would be straddled by tracks on either side for maximum efficiency. By September, all the machinery was in place, but nothing had been installed yet. Work had already begun on the San Juan Southern Railway right-of-way, with three miles of track placed by October. And then panic struck the stock market and all work on the cement plant and the railroad was halted. Unfortunately, most of the company's stock value plummeted since it was bound to the Ocean Shore Railroad scheme and the San Juan Pacific began its free-fall. The San Juan Portland Cement Company went bust before it had even warmed up the kilns.

Old Mission Portland Cement Company corporate logo.

In January 1912, the Old Mission Portland Cement Company took over operations of both the refinery and the railroad, the latter being rebranded the California Central. For five years, the Old Mission Route was rebuilt with higher-quality materials. Meanwhile, loads of new construction equipment was shipped to San Juan Junction so that the new company could build the long-awaited refinery. San Juan Junction became a true junction at this point. The single standard-gauge locomotive shared space with the company's narrow-gauged unit in the engine house, and the same crews operated and maintained both locomotives on the site. The cement plant thrived for much of the period from 1918 to 1929. In 1927, the organization was merged with the Pacific Portland Cement Company. But the Great Depression made quick work of the entire operation. Broke and without customers, the cement plant and the railroad closed shop. The refinery was gated and abandoned, its pair of locomotives – one narrow-gauged, one standard – left to rot in the engine house. In 1937, the standard-gauged engine had one last run on the old, weed-infested line, but that was simply to ship it out of the county where it operated in Gerlach, Nevada, for its owner, the Pacific Portland Cement Company. The tracks were pulled in early 1938 and San Juan Junction became little more than a dream of a bygone era.

Add caption

The cement plant had a second life, however. Reopened in 1941 due to war demands, the renewed cement plant continued to operate using trucks into the 1970s. It finally closed because the owners were unable to meet new California state air pollution control requirements. The site was eventually stripped of all of its machinery and has since returned to its original owners who use it as a cattle pasture.

Official Railroad Information:
San Juan Junction was at mile marker 0.0 on the San Juan Pacific Railway line. As with the rest of the route, passenger service was offered at the station three times daily for the first year that it operated, after which all passenger service ceased. All service stopped by June 1909.

Limited freight service for the purpose of building the refinery resumed to San Juan Junction around 1914, and then formally reopened in 1916. From this point, irregular freight service from San Juan Junction continued until the refinery closed in 1930. The engine house (and presumably a turntable) was maintained at San Juan Junction until the tracks were pulled in early 1938.

Geo-Coordinates & Access Rights:
36.831˚N, 121.531˚W

Last remaining tracks of the California Central, embedded
into San Juan Canyon Road at The Alameda.
[GeologyCafe.com]

The site of San Juan Junction and the cement plant are unfortunately not accessible to the public. Heading southbound on The Alameda out of San Juan Bautista, continue on San Juan Canyon Road (G1). At that intersection, tracks are still imbedded in the center of the road, the last vestige of the original San Juan Pacific and California Central tracks, which was not removed for convenience's sake. For the next 0.4 miles, the old right-of-way is on the west side of the road in what is now reclaimed pastureland. As the road turns slightly to the east, the road to the cement plant and San Juan Junction appears. The site of the old depot is now a paddock of some kind immediately beside the road, leaving little evidence of the original structure behind. The cement plant itself is barricaded and the land is used for grazing cattle. Google Maps shows that the site of the cement plant remains visible, albeit heavily overgrown. The old narrow-gauge right-of-way continues to the south out of the facility.

Citations & Credits:

Clough, Charles W., and Bobbye Sisk Temple. San Juan Bautista: The Town, the Mission & the Park. Quill Driver Books, 1996.
Hamman, Rick. California Central Coast Railways. Santa Cruz, CA: Otter B Books, 2002.
Perazzo, Peggy B. "Stone Quarries and Beyond". Pre-captioned images above.
Robertson, Donald B. Encyclopedia of Western Railroad History, vol. 4: California. Caxton Press, 1986

Upper Beach Road Railroad Patrons

Walker Street Patrons

Kearney Street Extension Spurs

R.M. Heintz Miniature Railroad

West Beach Street Spurs, Part II

Watsonville Junction Spurs

Pajaro Valley Consolidated Railroad

Monterey & Salinas Valley Railroad

Southern Pacific Railroad Subsidiaries

Dougherty Extension Railroad

The Origins of Santa Cruz County Railroading

Santa Cruz County Railroading since 1996

Billy Jones Wildcat Railroad

San Juan Pacific Railway & California Central Railroad

Chittenden

Canfield

Anderson Packing

Prescott & Beet Dump

San Juan

San Juan Junction