The Pacific Coast Railway was a narrow gauge railway on the

Central Coast of California The Central Coast is an area of California, roughly spanning the coastal region between Point Mugu and Monterey Bay. It lies northwest of Los Angeles County and south of San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, and includes the rugged, undevelope ...

. The original 10-mile (16 km) link from

San Luis Obispo San Luis Obispo (; Spanish for " St. Louis the Bishop", ; Chumash: ''tiłhini'') is a city and county seat of San Luis Obispo County, in the U.S. state of California. Located on the Central Coast of California, San Luis Obispo is roughly hal ...

Avila Beach Avila Beach (Spanish: ''Ávila'') is an unincorporated community in San Luis Obispo County, California, United States, located on San Luis Obispo Bay about 160 miles (257 km) northwest of Los Angeles, and about south of San Francisco. The ...

and Port Harford was later built southward to Santa Maria and Los Olivos, with

branches A branch, sometimes called a ramus in botany, is a woody structural member connected to the central trunk of a tree (or sometimes a shrub). Large branches are known as boughs and small branches are known as twigs. The term ''twig'' usually r ...

to Sisquoc and Guadalupe.

Origins

The Santa Maria Valley of the central California coast was isolated by the

Santa Lucia Range The Santa Lucia Mountains (sæntə luˈsiːə) or Santa Lucia Range is a rugged mountain range in coastal central California, running from Carmel southeast for to the Cuyama River in San Luis Obispo County. The range is never more than from ...

to the north and the Santa Inez Range to the south. '' El Camino Real'' traversed the difficult

Cuesta Pass Cuesta Pass or La Cuesta Pass (Spanish for "the slope") is a low mountain pass in San Luis Obispo County on California's Central Coast. It crosses the southern Santa Lucia Range at an altitude of , and connects San Luis Obispo, roughly to the s ...

to reach

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

via the

Salinas Valley The Salinas Valley is one of the major valleys and most productive agricultural regions in California. It is located west of the San Joaquin Valley and south of San Francisco Bay and the Santa Clara Valley. The Salinas River, which geologically ...

San Marcos Pass San Marcos Pass (Chumash: ''Mistaxiwax'') is a mountain pass in the Santa Ynez Mountains in southern California. It is traversed by State Route 154. The pass crosses the Santa Ynez through a southwestern portion of Los Padres National Forest, ...

to reach

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, largest city in the U.S. state, state of California and the List of United States cities by population, sec ...

via Santa Barbara. The People's Wharf was built at Port Harford in 1869 to transfer freight and passengers from Pacific Coast Steamships ''Mohongo'', ''Orizaba'' and ''Gypsy'' operating between San Francisco and

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United State ...

. Goodall, Nelson and Perkins steamships ''Ventura'' and ''Constantine'' began weekly service to Port Harford in 1873; and

Ah Louis On Wong (; 1840 – December 16, 1936), more commonly known as Ah Louis, was a Chinese American banker, labor contractor, farmer, and shopkeeper in San Luis Obispo, California, during the late 19th and early 20th century. His Ah Louis Store build ...

built a horse-powered, narrow gauge tramway in 1873 to transport passengers and freight between Port Harford and a wagon road at Avila Beach. In 1875, Pacific Coast Steamship Company replaced the tram with the narrow gauge steam-powered San Luis Obispo & Santa Maria Valley Railroad to San Luis Obispo. Operations began with ten

boxcar A boxcar is the North American ( AAR) term for a railroad car that is enclosed and generally used to carry freight. The boxcar, while not the simplest freight car design, is considered one of the most versatile since it can carry most ...

s and one coach pulled by a called the "Avila" and a called the "John Harford" built by Baldwin Locomotive Works. San Luis Obispo rail yard warehouses became a commercial center for inbound merchandise and outgoing shipments of hay, grain, dairy products, sheep and cattle. The rail line was extended from San Luis Obispo to Arroyo Grande in 1881 and to Santa Maria in 1882.

Grant Locomotive Works Grant Locomotive Works was a manufacturer of steam railway locomotives from 1867 to 1895, first in Paterson, New Jersey, and then in Chicago. The company built about 1,888 locomotives. Predecessors In 1842, Samuel Smith, Abram Collier, and Geor ...

built another and two locomotives to pull a fleet of 120 new

flatcar A flatcar (US) (also flat car, or flatbed) is a piece of rolling stock that consists of an open, flat deck mounted on a pair of trucks (US) or bogies (UK), one at each end containing four or six wheels. Occasionally, flat cars designed to carry ...

s. A new wharf at Port Harford was wide with tracks extending the full length.

Reorganization

Oregon Improvement Company obtained controlling interest in the Pacific Coast Steamship Company in late 1882, reorganized the railroad as the Pacific Coast Railway, and extended the line to Los Alamos. The next project was to replace the heavy grade of the original tramway alignment with a deep rock cut and long fill. The line was then extended to Los Olivos in 1887. A fire in 1892 destroyed the San Luis Obispo car shops, grain warehouse, loaded freight cars, half of the railroad's passenger cars and all the cabooses while heavily damaging the station and freight warehouse. Operations were profitable enough to promptly repair the damage. Passenger traffic though Port Harford declined when

Southern Pacific The Southern Pacific (or Espee from the railroad initials- SP) was an American Class I railroad network that existed from 1865 to 1996 and operated largely in the Western United States. The system was operated by various companies under the ...

reached San Luis Obispo from San Francisco in 1894. Southern Pacific freight rates were high enough to keep most Santa Maria Valley freight on the steamboats; but the loss of passenger traffic put the Oregon Improvement Company into receivership. The reorganized railroad built a branch line in 1899 from Santa Maria to a new Union Sugar Company beet refinery in Betteravia.

Boom years

The increased agricultural business was shortly overshadowed by discovery of oil in the Santa Maria Valley. By 1902 the railroad had converted its engines to burn oil and was strapping

tanks A tank is an armoured fighting vehicle intended as a primary offensive weapon in front-line ground combat. Tank designs are a balance of heavy firepower, strong armour, and good battlefield mobility provided by tracks and a powerful engi ...

from standard gauge cars onto their flatcars at the rate of ten per month. The railway's three 2-6-0 locomotives were inadequate to move all the oil to storage tanks near San Luis Bay. Five new Baldwin 2-8-0s were delivered by 1906 as the freight car fleet expanded to two hundred cars. The Betteravia branch was

electrified Electrification is the process of powering by electricity and, in many contexts, the introduction of such power by changing over from an earlier power source. The broad meaning of the term, such as in the history of technology, economic history ...

in 1906 and extended to Guadalupe in 1909. Another electrified branch was built in 1910 to serve an oil refinery near Sisquoc. Three center-cab electric locomotives worked the branches with a center-door interurban car built by

Cincinnati Car Company The Cincinnati Car Company or ''Cincinnati Car Corporation'' was a subsidiary of the Ohio Traction Company. It designed and constructed interurban cars, streetcars (trams) and (in smaller scale) buses. It was founded in 1902 in Cincinnati, Ohio. ...

in 1912.

Decline

The Santa Maria Valley Railroad was built parallel to the electrified branch of the narrow gauge. Santa Maria Valley agriculture slowly shifted from sugar beets to produce which could be loaded directly onto Southern Pacific

refrigerator car A refrigerator car (or "reefer") is a refrigerated boxcar (U.S.), a piece of railroad rolling stock designed to carry perishable freight at specific temperatures. Refrigerator cars differ from simple insulated boxcars and ventilated boxcars (co ...

s. The sugar beet factory closed in 1927, and

electric Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described by ...

operations ended in 1928, although steam locomotives still worked the branches occasionally. Profits peaked in 1921 and declined as automobiles became more common, but the railroad saw a brief increase in business hauling gravel for construction of U.S. Route 101 in 1928 and '29. The gravel business required purchase of two 2-8-0s from the recently standard-gauged Nevada–California–Oregon Railway to replace Pacific Coast 2-8-0s dismantled for parts to keep the other engines running. Service to Los Olivos was reduced to a twice-weekly

mixed train A mixed train or mixed consist is a train that contains both passenger and freight cars or wagons. Although common in the early days of railways, by the 20th century they were largely confined to branch lines with little traffic. Typically, service ...

by 1930 and ended in 1933. A used

Plymouth Locomotive Works Plymouth Locomotive Works was a US builder of small railroad locomotives. All Plymouth locomotives were built in a plant in Plymouth, Ohio until 1997 when the company was purchased by Ohio Locomotive Crane and production moved to Bucyrus, Ohio ...

gasoline switcher was purchased in 1936. The line beyond Los Alamos was dismantled in 1936, and the branch lines were dismantled in 1937. In 1938 locomotive number 106 was destroyed in a grade crossing collision with a gasoline truck, and the last three coaches and a baggage car were sold to the

White Pass and Yukon Route The White Pass and Yukon Route (WP&Y, WP&YR) is a Canadian and U.S. Class III narrow-gauge railroad linking the port of Skagway, Alaska, with Whitehorse, the capital of Yukon. An isolated system, it has no direct connection to any other rai ...

. A single

combine car A combine car in North American parlance, most often referred to simply as a combine, is a type of railroad car which combines sections for both passengers and freight. Most often, it was used on short lines to carry passengers and their lugga ...

numbered 106 was the last piece of passenger equipment. The

United States Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage ...

bought the boxcars for use at Naval Station Pearl Harbor when operations ended in 1941; and locomotive number 111 went to the

Oahu Railway and Land Company The Oahu Railway and Land Company, or OR&L, was a narrow gauge common carrier railway that served much of the Hawaiian island of Oahu, and was the largest narrow gauge class one common carrier in the U.S, until its dissolution in 1947. Origin T ...

. Bell Oil Company briefly used the railway north of Santa Maria until the line was dismantled in 1942. Most of the remaining equipment was cut up for scrap by 1948, but caboose number 2 has been preserved at the California State Railroad Museum. The remaining Right of Way in Santa Maria was taken over by SMV and converted to standard Gauge.

Locomotives

Steam Locomotives

Electric Locomotives

Gasoline Locomotives

References

External links

* http://www.slorrm.com - San Luis Obispo Railroad Museum * http://www.csrmf.org - California State Railroad Museum, which has restored PCRy caboose No. 2. {{DEFAULTSORT:Pacific Coast Railway Arroyo Grande, California History of San Luis Obispo County, California History of Santa Barbara County, California Defunct California railroads Interurban railways in California Narrow gauge railroads in California 3 ft gauge railways in the United States 1882 establishments in California 1941 disestablishments in California