History
The California Southern was organized on July 10, 1880, as a means to connect San Diego to a connection with the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad at an as-yet undetermined point. Among the organizers were Frank Kimball, a prominent landowner and rancher from San Diego who also represented the Chamber of Commerce and the Board of City Trustees of San Diego, Kidder, Peabody & Co., one of the main financial investment companies involved in the Santa Fe, B.P. Cheney, L.G. Pratt, George B. Wilbur and Thomas Nickerson who was president of the Santa Fe. The organizers set a deadline of January 1, 1884, to complete the connection, a deadline that was later adjusted due to problems in the construction of the Atlantic and Pacific that forced it to stop at Needles, California.
The California Southern built its track northward from a point in National City, south of San Diego. The route, portions of which are still in use, connected the present day cities of National City, San Diego, Fallbrook, Temecula, Lake Elsinore, Perris, Riverside, San Bernardino, Colton, Cajon (not to be confused with El Cajon), Victorville and Barstow.
In Barstow, then known as Waterman, the California Southern would connect to another Santa Fe subsidiary, the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. The Atlantic and Pacific was chartered in 1866 to build a railroad connection westward from Springfield, Missouri, connecting Albuquerque, New Mexico, then along the 35th parallel to the Colorado River. From there, the railroad was to continue to the Pacific Ocean following whatever proved to be the best route. The route was scheduled to be completed by July 4, 1878. However, the Southern Pacific was able to get a clause favorable to their own interests inserted into the charter:
- "... the Southern Pacific Railroad ... is hereby authorized to connect with the said Atlantic and Pacific railroad formed under this act, at such point, near the boundary line of the State of California, as they shall deem most suitable for a railroad line to San Francisco."
Southern Pacific had already established a connection to Mojave, so their crews built eastward from there through Barstow (then called Waterman) to Needles, California, completing the connection across the Colorado River on August 3, 1883. The California segment was leased to the Santa Fe in August 1884, and fully acquired by the Santa Fe under foreclosure in 1897.
Read more about this topic: California Southern Railroad
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It gives me the greatest pleasure to say, as I do from the bottom of my heart, that never in the history of the country, in any crisis and under any conditions, have our Jewish fellow citizens failed to live up to the highest standards of citizenship and patriotism.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)