Ocean Shore Railroad Car Restoration Project

Download a pdf of The Western Railroader booklet: " Ocean Shore: It Reaches the Beaches",  by Rudolph Brandt. The booklet was published in 1965, special  edition (Vol. 15 #7, issue 151) on the Ocean Shore Railroad.   The 37-page booklet has maps, photos and roster information about the  line. It's a good capsule history of the Ocean Shore Railroad.  The author's father was an investor (stockholder) in the Ocean Shore Railroad.  Brandt told historian June Morrall about it in 1980:  “He,  like a number of other people in the days when the stock was being  offered to the public market, thought it was a good thing, and it apparently was.“ There are a number of banks and prominent people-quite a  number of people, well-heeled financially, that invested money in it. In  those days, a million was not considered pennies .“When they got this  thing started - it was just before the earthquake - 190 railroads were  springing up all over the place, up and down the state—from one end to the other they were starting to build…so, why not a line down the coast  to Santa Cruz? “One of the reasons was that they figured if they built  the line through to Santa Cruz, they could take a lot of the business  away from the SP [Southern Pacific], which had the monopoly up ‘til then  by going the other way. Look like a good proposition. No one else was  in there. They started work from both ends with one crew working from  San Francisco south, another crew starting from Santa Cruz, working  north. Got along fine until a certain day in April 1906 when they had an  earthquake. One of the things they didn’t’ anticipate was a good deal of  construction equipment, particularly in the area around Mussel Rock, which tumbled off the right-of-way and down into the ocean. It was a  considerable financial loss. And part of the right-of-way, likewise,  followed the equipment into the ocean—more financial loss—and additional  expenditures the promoters hadn’t figured on. They recovered from that somehow, and they pared down the project a bit as a result of that. One  of the shortcomings of the original promoters was that they were a  little too grandiose in their ideas. They started out—it was planned as a  double-track electric, actually, to run from San Francisco to Santa  Cruz, via Half Moon Bay. Better off if they’d started out with a  single-track steam line. Then as business justified it, extending  to double-track, and they might have succeeded. When you grade for a  double-track along the line it actually costs you more than if you grade  for a single track, so it means more money out. Since they never used  the double track, well, it was just money wasted…” 

 (We want to thank Debra Etienne for her generous donation of this booklet).