Railroads liberated the Monterey Bay region from the slow, expensive, difficult necessity of freight transportation by sea. In 1870 schooner and stagecoach were the only transportation options. Less than twenty years later the entire region had been railroaded‹in every sense of the word. Farmers and whole towns found themselves hostage to the Southern Pacific. Freight rates were whatever the station agent read off the rate sheet. In the few cases where serious competition was mounted, the SP dropped rates until the competition went broke--then bought their track at the bankruptcy auction.
Railroads enabled the logging industry to accelerate its output, and its deforestation of the region’s redwood-covered hills. Prior to the arrival of railroads, logs were hauled out of the hills in trains of redwood trunks, chained end to end, pulled by teams of oxen. Loggers built roads of skids to reduce friction. As the log trains moved toward the mill, one man had to grease the skids th logs slid upon.
Narrow gauge railroads, like the one in this photograph, in combination with the steam-powered winch, changed all that. Narrow gauge railroads are able to negotiate sharper turns and steeper grades than the wider, standard gauge, and so are better suited to hauling loads down mountain canyons. The last of the areas forests to be invaded by rail was Aptos canyon, the contemporary Forest of Nisene Marks State Park. Here, the SP went into the logging business. Incredibly they ran standard gauge rail line up the canyon. Since the larger trains couldn’t follow the land’s contours, they had the Chinese rail workers cut new ones. Those cuts, and some remaining railroad ties, can still be seen along some of the hiking trails in the park.
By the early twentieth century virtually every tree that could be cut and sawn profitably had been removed. Only a few groves including those Big Basin and Henry Cowell Redwoods State Parks were preserved. The only operating narrow gauge railroad in the region, the Roaring Camp & Big Trees Narrow Gauge Railroad in Felton, runs on land once owned by the region’s first major logger, Isaac Graham. Ironically, that land, where Graham located his notorious Roaring Camp, was never logged either.
The region’s first passenger lines were also narrow gauge, as the lines were faster and cheaper to construct. When enough track was laid that one could buy a ticket from Santa Cruz to San Francisco (and bought up by SP) a round trip was reduced from five days by stage to just one.
Photo No. 027L09 ©1992 Marc Shargel
Photographed at Roaring Camp, Felton, CA
