Santa Cruz is the largest city and the county seat of Santa Cruz County, in Northern California. As of the 2020 census, the city population was 62,956. Situated on the northern edge of Monterey Bay, Santa Cruz is a popular tourist destination, owing to its beaches, surf culture, and historic landmarks.
Aptos is an unincorporated town in Santa Cruz County, California. The town is made up of several small villages, which together form Aptos: Aptos Hills-Larkin Valley, Aptos Village, Cabrillo, Seacliff, Rio del Mar, and Seascape. Together, they have a combined population of 24,402.
The Union Pacific Northwest Line (UP-NW) is a commuter rail line provided by Metra and operated by the Union Pacific Railroad in Chicago, Illinois and its surrounding suburbs. While Metra does not refer to any of its lines by colors, the timetable accents for the Union Pacific Northwest Line are bright "Viking Yellow," honoring the Chicago & North Western Railway's Viking passenger train.
The Santa Cruz, Big Trees and Pacific Railway is operated as a seasonal tourist attraction in Northern California, also referred to as the "Beach Train". Its partner line, the Roaring Camp & Big Trees Narrow Gauge Railroad, is a heritage railroad.
Progressive Rail Inc. is a shortline railroad and owner of several other shortlines. PGR is directly operating several separate branches in Minnesota including the Airlake Terminal Railway. Progressive Rail also acquired the Wisconsin Northern Division in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin and operates as a separately-named division. They also own the Chicago Junction Railroad, Clackamas Valley Railway, the Iowa Traction Railway and Iowa Southern Railway in Iowa, the Piedmont & Northern Railroad, the Crab Orchard and Egyptian Railroad in Illinois, the St. Paul & Pacific Northwest Railroad, and the Wisconsin Northern Railroad.
The Coast Line is a railroad line between Burbank, California and the San Francisco Bay Area, roughly along the Pacific Coast. It is the shortest rail route between Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Though not as busy as the Surf Line, the continuation of the Coast Line southbound to San Diego, it still sees lots of passenger trains, especially because of that of the Pacific Surfliner, which runs from the San Diego Santa Fe Depot to San Luis Obispo via Union Station in Los Angeles, is the third busiest Amtrak route outside of the Northeast Corridor between Washington D.C. and Boston, which in turn hosts two of Amtrak's busiest routes being the Acela and the Northeast Regional.
An excursion train is a chartered train run for a special event or purpose. Examples are trains to major sporting event, trains run for railfans or tourists, and special trains operated by the railway company for employees and prominent customers.
Area code 831 is a telephone area code in the North American Numbering Plan for a small region of the U.S. state of California. The numbering plan area (NPA) comprises Monterey County, San Benito County, and Santa Cruz County. The area code was created in 1998 in an area code split of area code 408.
The South Pacific Coast Railroad (SPC) was a 3 ft narrow gauge steam railroad running between Santa Cruz, California and Alameda, with a ferry connection in Alameda to San Francisco. The railroad was created as the Santa Clara Valley Railroad, founded by local strawberry growers as a way to get their crops to market in San Francisco and provide an alternative to the Southern Pacific Railroad. In 1876, James Graham Fair, a Comstock Lode silver baron, bought the line and extended it into the Santa Cruz Mountains to capture the significant lumber traffic coming out of the redwood forests. The narrow-gauge line was originally laid with 52-pound-per-yard (26 kg/m) rail on 8-foot (2.44 m) redwood ties; and was later acquired by the Southern Pacific and converted to 4 ft 8+1⁄2 instandard gauge.
The Ocean Shore Railroad was a railroad built between San Francisco and Tunitas Glen, and Swanton and Santa Cruz that operated along the Pacific coastline from 1905 until 1921. The route was originally conceived to be a continuous line between San Francisco and Santa Cruz, but the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, financial difficulties, and the advent of the automobile caused the line to never reach its goals, and remain with a Northern and Southern division.
Crystal Lake is one of two stations on Metra's Union Pacific Northwest Line located in Crystal Lake, Illinois. The station is two stops away from the line's terminus at Harvard, and most of the trains on the Northwest Line only run as far as Crystal Lake. A large coach yard is adjacent to the station and has additional storage tracks to store Metra trains overnight, and on holidays and weekends. A Union Pacific maintenance facility and office, some storage tracks for local freight trains and maintenance of way equipment as well as a junction are also located just southeast of here. The branch line to McHenry splits off at this junction. The station is 43.3 miles (69.7 km) away from Ogilvie Transportation Center. Parking is available at the station. As of 2018, Crystal Lake is the 36th busiest of the 236 non-downtown stations in the Metra system, with an average of 1,138 weekday boardings.
Iowa Pacific Holdings was a holding company that owned railroad properties across North America and the United Kingdom, as well as providing services such as railcar repairs, leasing, management and consulting services to other operators. The company was founded in 2001 with headquarters in Chicago, Illinois.
Redondo Junction, California is the site of an Amtrak maintenance facility. It is located 3.5 miles (5.6 km) south of Los Angeles Union Station, southwest of Boyle Heights near Washington Boulevard and the Los Angeles River.
The Santa Cruz Railroad was a narrow gauge railroad that ran 21 miles from Santa Cruz to Pajaro, California. It started operation in 1874, running from the east bank of the San Lorenzo River to Soquel, California. With completion of a bridge over the San Lorenzo, it began operation over its full length in 1876 and was sold in foreclosure in 1881.
The Santa Rosa and Carquinez Railroad was completed in 1888 from a terminal rail yard in Santa Rosa, California, through the Valley of the Moon to Sonoma, and then south through Schellville and east across the northern San Francisco Bay wetlands to a connection with the national rail network at Napa Junction north of Vallejo. The line was part of the Southern Pacific subsidiary Northern Railway until formally merged into the Southern Pacific in 1898. It was operationally known as Southern Pacific's Santa Rosa Branch or Sonoma Valley Branch. The railroad avoided the ferries of San Francisco Bay providing direct transportation to eastern markets for agricultural products of the Sonoma County wine region; and dimension stone from the basalt quarries in what is now Annadel State Park became a major source of freight revenue. The Santa Rosa terminal rail yard was on the north side of College Avenue approximately one mile northeast of the earlier Santa Rosa Downtown station now served by SMART.
The Suntan Special was a summer excursion train service operated by the Southern Pacific Railroad between San Francisco and Santa Cruz, California, from 1927 to 1959.
Pajaro/Watsonville is a proposed train station on Caltrain and Amtrak California's Capitol Corridor trains to serve both Pajaro and Watsonville, California. The station is expected to open after track improvements in the area and service commences to Salinas as part of the Monterey County Rail Extension. It will be located in Watsonville Junction near the corner of Salinas Road and Lewis Road, adjacent to the former Southern Pacific Railroad depot and current Union Pacific Railroad office.
Casa del Rey Hotel was a resort hotel in Santa Cruz, California. During World War II the hotel was converted to the Naval Convalescent Hospital, Santa Cruz. The hotel was built in 1911 by Fred Swanton on Beach Street as a Santa Cruz Boardwalk development plan. The Resort Hotel had: a pool; gardens; and a grand pedestrian bridge to cross the street to visit the beach. The hotel was at about 500 Beach Street and Cliff Street. In addition to the hotel, there were built Cottage apartments. Later after the war the hotel became a senior citizen housing. In the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake there was serious damage to the hotel and was taken down. The site now is the parking lot across the street from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk amusement park.
The Monterey County Rail Extension is a planned commuter rail extension that would bring Caltrain passenger service south of its existing Gilroy, California terminus to Salinas in Monterey County, using the existing Coast Line owned by Union Pacific (UPRR). Implementation of the rail extension will occur over three phases, starting from Salinas and moving north. When construction is complete, there will be four trains operated over the extended line per weekday: two northbound trains that depart from Salinas and travel to San Francisco in the morning, and two southbound trains that return to Salinas in the afternoon.
The Wrights Tunnel is a railroad tunnel located in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz Counties, California. Opened in 1880 after almost two years of construction involving numerous fatalities, the tunnel was at one point the longest tunnel in California and one the longest tunnels in the United States. It carried the tracks of the narrow gauge South Pacific Coast Railroad, which ran trains from San Francisco to Santa Cruz until the railroad was acquired by Southern Pacific Railroad, which upgraded the tracks to standard gauge and continued operating trains through the line and its tunnel until a major storm in 1940 washed out certain sections of the track in the Santa Cruz Mountains. After two years of no rail traffic on the line, Southern Pacific abandoned the line. Subsequently, the United States Army Corps of Engineers collapsed both portals with explosives, destroying the northern portal in the process. The interior of the tunnel remains intact along with the south portal, but the conditions of the interior are unknown, particularly since the tunnel crosses the San Andreas Fault and no person has entered the tunnel in the aftermath of the Loma Prieta earthquake.
