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Re: LA Harbor Department RR On Catalina? I had no idea about choo-choo's, but there's a lot of choo-choo POLA/POLB history...
Author: BOB2
Date: 03-14-2020 - 18:01
Phineas Banning owned the island before his heirs sold it to Wrigley, and the story I got from great-great-grandson-Phin, which I think came from his aunt, who's with the museum, and who I've known for a number of years, was that when they built the first small breakwater and extended the RR down the channel to San Pedro, they quarried the rock around where the casino is today, and put it on barges over to Pedro.
I confess I knew nothing of any RR history on Catalina however. But, that's not unusual, as industrial and mining RR's are poorly documented, as they came and went, as needed.
Later, I heard that SP ran rock trains from Chatsworth and Duarte/Azusa, which I've never confirmed, to build the "Roosevelt" breakwaters (Teddy chose LA-LB as the port over Santa Monica in the 1900's, and based the Pacific Fleet in Long Beach, where it stayed until 1941, when it moved to Pearl Harbor....). There are numerous photos of trains dumping rock on the breakwater at the San Pedro end of the land connected breakwater. The center and further breakwater were added in stages, from barges.
The port of LA-LB is another of these uniquely American/California "inventions", an almost entirely man made improvement, where there really isn't a good natural harbor.
This is because when Banning came to LA in the early 1850's, he met Captain Beale, who had just completed Jefferson Davis's survey of the "southern" Pacific railroad route. And, knew of the "40th" meridian route, via the "needles" crossing, along the "national road" (aka "mother road", aka Route 66, the first federally funded "highway" in the US, built to connect Santa Fe to California with an "army road")since he himself was building a wagon road via present day "Banning", and the "great pass", and Coachella Valley, to where Parker is today.
Banning, who was a "sailor/entrepreneur" turned western "teamster/entrepreneur", originally from "Wilmington", Delaware, realized from Beale, that LA via the "great circle, was closer to China, and had much lower grades and a snow free RR routes overland, to and from the east, than the CP/UP via Donner and the Wasatch. He built the San Pedro and Los Angeles RR, still mostly there today, known as the Alameda Corridor, and the rest is the history of what has eventually become the largest port in the US.
I confess I knew nothing of any RR history on Catalina however. But, that's not unusual, as industrial and mining RR's are poorly documented, as they came and went, as needed.
Later, I heard that SP ran rock trains from Chatsworth and Duarte/Azusa, which I've never confirmed, to build the "Roosevelt" breakwaters (Teddy chose LA-LB as the port over Santa Monica in the 1900's, and based the Pacific Fleet in Long Beach, where it stayed until 1941, when it moved to Pearl Harbor....). There are numerous photos of trains dumping rock on the breakwater at the San Pedro end of the land connected breakwater. The center and further breakwater were added in stages, from barges.
The port of LA-LB is another of these uniquely American/California "inventions", an almost entirely man made improvement, where there really isn't a good natural harbor.
This is because when Banning came to LA in the early 1850's, he met Captain Beale, who had just completed Jefferson Davis's survey of the "southern" Pacific railroad route. And, knew of the "40th" meridian route, via the "needles" crossing, along the "national road" (aka "mother road", aka Route 66, the first federally funded "highway" in the US, built to connect Santa Fe to California with an "army road")since he himself was building a wagon road via present day "Banning", and the "great pass", and Coachella Valley, to where Parker is today.
Banning, who was a "sailor/entrepreneur" turned western "teamster/entrepreneur", originally from "Wilmington", Delaware, realized from Beale, that LA via the "great circle, was closer to China, and had much lower grades and a snow free RR routes overland, to and from the east, than the CP/UP via Donner and the Wasatch. He built the San Pedro and Los Angeles RR, still mostly there today, known as the Alameda Corridor, and the rest is the history of what has eventually become the largest port in the US.
