History Pages: 30 - How the trains came to Santa Cruz (part 3)

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Railroad service to locations outside the county was the main goal of the local railroad companies of the 1870s, but F. A. Hihn and other rail investors also saw the newly installed rails as a different sort of opportunity – one with more local benefits. The Santa Cruz streets of 1875 were unpaved, and the fastest modes of local travel and freight movement still involved horses. Carriages and wagons had become common on the county’s roads but, in the winter rainy season, movement ground to a halt in the mud of deeply rutted local roads. Street paving was still years away, but rail systems, if properly designed and installed, offered a solution. The same rails that supported the chuffing steam locomotives could also support a more modest all-weather transportation alternative – horsecars.

By mid-1875, two rail lines were complete within the town of Santa Cruz. The Santa Cruz & Felton (SC&F) Railroad had laid track down Pacific Avenue (as seen in the ~1880 photo at right) to its new railroad wharf, while the Santa Cruz Railroad (SCR) installed track from the west bank of the San Lorenzo River along the beachfront, curving around to follow today’s Chestnut Street to a terminus below Mission Hill (prior to completion of the tunnel). It was more than a year later, however, before the San Lorenzo trestle was completed, which allowed the steam-powered trains to cross the river and use those tracks.

The SC&F line to Felton opened sooner, but the steam locomotives were not allowed to use the Pacific Avenue tracks, and then the Mission Hill tunnel allowed the SC&F to stop using Pacific Avenue at all. Those empty tracks created a window of opportunity for the startup of a privately-owned, rail-based local transit system. Hihn’s Pacific Avenue Street Rail Road Company was the first horsecar service. In addition to the tracks laid by the two railroads, rails were extended up the hill on Mission Street and out past the Pope House hotel.

Another early streetcar investor was downtown pioneer Elihu Anthony. Anthony had prospered since the days of manufacturing and selling iron picks to gold miners, and had built a nice house on the bluff (at the end of School Street) overlooking his enterprises below. Anthony’s other properties were, however, mostly located on Front Street. He joined Hihn and a group of other investors to plan a horsecar line (sources don’t agree on whether the line was built at that time - it existed by the 1890s as an electric streetcar line) from the lower plaza down Front Street, along the river (today’s Laurel Street extension) and around the east end of Beach Hill to the Leibbrandt brothers’ bathhouse on the strand. It's unclear whether this line ever connected with the beachfront tracks.

Little physical evidence remains to document the streetcar era in Santa Cruz. One reminder is an informational sign and set of wheels (photo at left) placed beside Woodrow Avenue where it ends at West Cliff Drive. The longest streetcar line serving the Westside neighborhood ended here, overlooking the sea at the "Veue de l'Eau".

The rail-based transport system continued to grow and expand for the rest of the century, into the Westside and east all the way to Capitola. The first streetcar companies were followed by many others – with varying degrees of success. One problem they all shared was meeting the town’s expectation of year-round, all-weather service. The original contracts called for the companies to provide paving and/or planking between and adjacent to the rails. The paving served two purposes: to provide secure footing for the horses and to allow passengers to get on and off without getting muddy. Because of the cost, however, the streetcar companies dragged their feet on those improvements, preferring instead to simply suspend service when the weather was too wet or the mud too deep. During the 1880s, this problem was mitigated downtown as the main streets were paved, but continued outside of the downtown area.

Early horsecars were succeeded by electric trolleys beginning in the 1890s and service reached its greatest extent during those years. After the turn of the century, rail-based transit gradually lost passengers to the newfangled automobiles. In 1924, gasoline-powered buses replaced the last rail-based electric trolleys. These days, the conversation has come nearly full-circle, as the debate about the future of public transportation once again considers rail-based options.

The Leibbrandt brothers' Dolphin Bathhouse was one of the first year-round tourist-oriented businesses on the beach, a predecessor of today’s Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. There's disagreement among sources about when the structure shown in the photo at right was built, but my guess is that it was soon after the SCR rails were laid (it was right next to the tracks). There was at least one previous Leibbrandt bathhouse, as early as 1865. There used to be a short Dolphin Street connecting Beach and 2nd Streets, about where the Boardwalk parking lot entrance is now. The brothers (and the route of the streetcar line) are remembered in the area by today’s Leibrandt Street which, in another of those curious local spelling mishaps, dropped one “b”. In the 1890s, an electric streetcar line ran from downtown to the beachfront area, via today's Laurel Street Extension and Leibrandt Street (McCaleb's map on p.34 shows the line on "Riverside" rather than Leibrandt, but that's not today's Riverside Avenue).

Next: History Pages: 30 – How the Town Became a City

Notes

• Rick Hamman. California Central Coast Railways (1980 book).
• Rick Hamman. "140 Years of Railroading in Santa Cruz County", online at SCPL.
• Charles S. McCaleb. Surf, Sand & Streetcars (1977 book), 1995 edition.