Remembering When
by
Jerry Person
Huntington Beach City Historian
Dedicated to the people of Huntington Beach
The Red Car's forgotten lines in Huntington Beach
Last week we remembered when the Newport-Balboa line of the old Pacific Electric's "Red Car" came into town, but did you know that our city had two other Red Car lines running in Huntington Beach besides its famous coastal route.
Unfortunately, these two lines didn't last as long as the Newport-Balboa line and there was third one that was never completed.
The first of these three lines was the Santa Ana-Huntington Beach line that was built by the Pacific Electric Land Company, a land division of the Pacific Electric in May 1907. This line was meant to attract visitors from the "big city" of Santa Ana to Huntington Beach for inlanders to be able to spend a beautiful seaside day at the beach.
Henry Huntington's plan was to lure these beachgoers to the beach and then sell them land that Huntington owned here.
In 1911 the Pacific Electric Land Co. turned over all of its properties to its parent company, the Pacific Electric which was now owned by the Southern Pacific Railroad that Henry's father Collis Huntington owned along with partners Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins.
This line traveled the Southern Pacific tracks along Lake Street. These tracks were used by both conventional trains and with the addition of overhead wires, the Pacific Electric red car for passengers.
From Lake Street the tracks curved over to Bushard and through Fountain Valley to a town called New Delhi and into Santa Ana. The line operated until a flood in 1922 washed out a bridge over the Santa Ana River.
Huntington Beach's second line was a short 2.84 miles long and known as the La Bolsa line. This line extended from downtown Huntington Beach to a site the railway called Wiebling nearly 3 miles inland.
This line served to transport passengers and employees of the Holly Sugar factory to and from work. It also hauled in the sugar beets and shipped the refined sugar out at the La Bolsa site 1.7 miles from Huntington Beach. This short line began operation on February of 1911 and continued carrying people until passenger service was discontinued on November 9, 1928, although regular freight would continue to use the line.
Before he died, Huntington Beach resident Gordie Higgins told me that a third line was proposed to link downtown Huntington Beach with Huntington Beach Blvd. (Beach Blvd.) and this line was to run down the middle of Main Street. Tracks were to be laid for a streetcar line from Beach Blvd into town, but like some good ideas it never got completed, only the wide center strip along the middle of Main Street remains of that plan.
So if you go by Huntington Beach High School, you can still see what Higgins meant by a wide meridian and who knows, maybe someday a high-tech, state-of-the-art streetcar may travel over that same ground the old "Red Car" used so long ago.