San Anselmo is an incorporated town in Marin County, California, United States. San Anselmo is located 1.5 miles (2.4 km) west of San Rafael, at an elevation of 46 feet (14 m). It is located about 20 miles (32 km) north of San Francisco. The town is bordered by San Rafael to the east, Fairfax to the west, and Ross to the south. Mount Tamalpais dominates the view to the south. The population was 12,830 at the 2020 census.
The Pacific Electric Railway Company, nicknamed the Red Cars, was a privately owned mass transit system in Southern California consisting of electrically powered streetcars, interurban cars, and buses and was the largest electric railway system in the world in the 1920s. Organized around the city centers of Los Angeles and San Bernardino, it connected cities in Los Angeles County, Orange County, San Bernardino County and Riverside County.
Sonoma–Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) is a rail line and bicycle-pedestrian pathway project in Sonoma and Marin counties of the U.S. state of California. When completed, the entire system will serve a 70-mile (110 km) corridor between Cloverdale in northern Sonoma County and Larkspur Landing in Marin County. In 2023, the system had a ridership of 749,700, or about 2,600 per weekday as of the first quarter of 2024.
The Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad, also known as the North Shore Line, was an interurban railroad that operated passenger and freight service over an 88.9-mile (143.1 km) route between the Chicago Loop and downtown Milwaukee, as well as an 8.6-mile (13.8 km) branch line between the villages of Lake Bluff and Mundelein, Illinois. The North Shore Line also provided streetcar, city bus and motor coach services along its interurban route.
The Northwestern Pacific Railroad is a 271-mile (436 km) mainline railroad from the former ferry connections in Sausalito, California north to Eureka, with a connection to the national railroad system at Schellville. The railroad has gone through a complex history of different ownership and operators but has maintained a generic name of reference as The Northwestern Pacific Railroad, despite no longer being officially named that.
Steeplecab is railroad terminology for a style or design of electric locomotive; the term is rarely if ever used for other forms of power. The name originated in North America and has been used in Britain as well.
The East Bay Electric Lines were a unit of the Southern Pacific Railroad that operated electric interurban-type trains in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area. Beginning in 1862, the SP and its predecessors operated local steam-drawn ferry-train passenger service in the East Bay on an expanding system of lines, but in 1902 the Key System started a competing system of electric lines and ferries. The SP then drew up plans to expand and electrify its system of lines and this new service began in 1911. The trains served the cities of Berkeley, Albany, Emeryville, Oakland, Alameda, and San Leandro transporting commuters to and from the large Oakland Pier and SP Alameda Pier. A fleet of ferry boats ran between these piers and the docks of the Ferry Building on the San Francisco Embarcadero.
The Sacramento Northern Railway was a 183-mile (295 km) electric interurban railway that connected Chico in northern California with Oakland via the state capital, Sacramento. In its operation it ran directly on the streets of Oakland, Sacramento, Yuba City, Chico, and Woodland. This involved multiple car trains making sharp turns at street corners and obeying traffic signals. Once in open country, SN's passenger trains ran at fairly fast speeds. With its shorter route and lower fares, the SN provided strong competition to the Southern Pacific and Western Pacific Railroad for passenger business and freight business between those two cities. North of Sacramento, both passenger and freight business was less due to the small town agricultural nature of the region and due to competition from the paralleling Southern Pacific Railroad.
The North Pacific Coast Railroad (NPC) was a common carrier 3 ft (914 mm) narrow-gauge steam railroad begun in 1874 and sold in 1902 to new owners who renamed it the North Shore Railroad (California) (NSR) and rebuilt the southern section into a standard-gauge electric railway.
San Francisco Bay in California has been served by ferries of all types for over 150 years. John Reed established a sailboat ferry service in 1826. Although the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge led to the decline in the importance of most ferries, some are still in use today for both commuters and tourists.
California Park is an unincorporated community in Marin County, California, United States, and a suburb of San Rafael. It lies north of San Quentin State Prison. Marin Sanitary Service is the largest tenant in the area.
Petaluma and Santa Rosa Railroad was a 600 volt DC electric interurban railway in Sonoma County, California, United States. It operated between the cities of Petaluma, Sebastopol, Forestville, and Santa Rosa. Company-owned steamboats provided service between Petaluma and San Francisco.
The San Rafael Transportation Center is an intermodal transportation center located in downtown San Rafael, California. It is a primary transfer point for several local and regional bus operators, and a commuter rail station on the Sonoma–Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) system.
The Escalle region of Larkspur, California takes its name from Jean Escalle, a 19th-century French immigrant and vintner whose name was given to many things in the area before it was incorporated into Larkspur, including the local railway station, and a vineyard, quarry, resort, and brickworks that he owned. The site of the buildings that remain from the original estate at 771 Magnolia Avenue is a class H historic zone.
The Northbrae Tunnel, also referred to as the Solano Avenue Tunnel, was built as a commuter electric railroad tunnel in the northern part of Berkeley, California, and was later converted to street use.
The Southern Pacific Red Electric Lines, also known simply as the Red Electric, was a network of interurban passenger train services operated by the Southern Pacific Railroad in the Willamette Valley of the U.S. state of Oregon from 1914 to 1929. The service got its name from the bright red color of its cars. Despite its short history, among West Coast interurbans it was unique, and it was considered the finest such system in the Pacific Northwest. It was the only major electric interurban railroad converted from steam to electric passenger use. It was also one of few systems using all-steel equipment, and one of the largest 1500-volt systems in the country.
Larkspur station is a Sonoma–Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) station in Larkspur, California. The terminal station opened to revenue service on December 14, 2019. It is located 1⁄3 mile (0.5 km) from the Larkspur Landing ferry terminal, across Sir Francis Drake Boulevard.
The history of the Southern Pacific ("SP") stretched from 1865 to 1998.
