THE TRACKS HEAD SOUTH

The PC's management decided to take the plunge. They quickly consolidated the region's few shortlines and laid track as far south as Los Alamos. A few years later, they extended the line about thirty miles farther south to Los Olivos. It remained the southern terminus.

Land auction posters from 1888 show speculation was rampant. The area was, and still is, ideal for cattle and sheep ranching, dairy farms, and for growing a wide variety of crops. Investors saw opportunity. What they had no way of foreseeing was the biggest money maker of all: Oil.

At the time, investors perceived the railroad as the only reasonable means of connecting central with southern California. Their intent was to cross the coastal range beyond Los Olivos and run track south to Santa Barbara. From there it could interchange with the Southern Pacific.

AN IMAGINARY TRIP NORTH

The best way to visualize the Pacific Coast Railway at the turn of the century might be to take an imaginary run from Los Olivos to San Luis Obispo.

Most passengers probably would have ridden the stagecoach north from Santa Barbara the day before. It was a rough trip through a rugged mountain range. The stage line terminated at Mattei's Tavern in Los Olivos. Mattei's sat between the Pacific Coast's turntable and the station on Railroad Avenue. It still exists and serves as fine a steak dinner today as it did in 1894.

In the morning, passengers boarded the combination car on a mixed train. It usually tailed behind the last freight car. A common freight consist would have included a boxcar or two, a low side gondola, a flatcar and, during the harvest, one or two early narrow gauge versions of California's famous "sugar beet" side dumping gons. A new Baldwin Mogul, Number 101, might have headed the train. But we passengers would have no coal smoke to deal with; even then the PC used oil burners.

At 8 o'clock in the morning, the train pulled out of the station at a heady 11 miles per hour. The tracks wind up through Zaca Pass and into Zaca Station. We pick up some freight and one passenger, then proceed up to Los Alamos.

Los Alamos is a bustling agricultural center serving hundreds of small farms. One lineside building, a large warehouse, remains to this day. So does an abandoned Florence & Cripple Creek "Gold Belt" boxcar the PC acquired third-hand in the late 1920s.

We leave Los Alamos and head up the valley toward Sisquoc and Betteravia junctions and make a few stops at the towns of Careaga, Harris, Bicknell, Divide, Graciosa, Orcutt, and Suey. At Sisquoc, we drop off an empty gondola and pick up three others full of high grade construction gravel from the gravel pits at the end of a ten mile spur. Sisquoc is at the junction of the branch to the busy small city of Santa Maria.

Betteravia is still mostly a dairy and produce farming community but, in a few years, oil wells will dot the area between it and Orcutt and the PC will need a large fleet of tank cars to serve them. Today, though, we just pick up peaches, apricots, and grapes.

We pull into Santa Maria and wait for Electric Motor E-1 and Combine Number 300 to arrive from Guadalupe, ten miles to the west. Then we climb the grade to Nipomo Mesa, drop off some express freight, pick up three passengers at the town of Nipomo, and head onto a long plain where our train is able to speed along at 29 miles per hour.

But soon we slow down, clatter along Railroad Avenue, and stop at the Arroyo Grande depot. The engine switches some freight cars and couples back up to the train. A few miles out of town, as we struggle up a steep grade, we feel a jolt. Thomas Brothers 2-6-0 Number 102 has coupled to the rear of the combine and helps us toward the crest of the ridge. Before us lies a beautiful long valley with a string of conical extinct volcanoes up the middle. We drop to the valley floor and accelerate to 33 miles per hour before finally rumbling into metropolitan San Luis Obispo.

Had we made the run thirty years later, the revenue would have shifted from agricultural and passenger transportation to oil. But the Southern Pacific had completed its north-south coastal route and automotive traffic was threatening the railroads. Within another fifteen years, even as healthy a narrow gauge line as the Pacific Coast no longer would be able to pay its way.

When the oil fields began pumping through pipelines, the end was imminent. By the late 1930s, the Pacific Coast Railway filed for abandonment and, a few years later, was gone.