THE ALTADENA RAILROAD: A Transit Mixed Bag

by Mike Manning

Call it what you may, The Los Angeles Terminal Railway; The Altadena Railway; The Pasadena Railway; The San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Utah Railway, the little steam engine line that serviced Altadena in the late 1880's was a product of a boom period and almost as quickly a victim of the bust.

The reasons for establishing the railroad may be argued by historians. It looks apparent that there was a need to provide passenger service between Pasadena and Altadena. Some say that it was merely the opulent whimsy of two particular Altadenans to provide themselves with the refined means of a daily train ride to get themselves from home to office to home.

The service was originally organized as the Pasadena Railway Company in 1887 by investors John Woodbury, James Swartout, and opulent Altadenans Andrew McNally and Col. G. G. Green, both friends from Chicago. McNally and Green were heavily invested in the line, and even had a siding for their private car to be pulled up along side their properties which stood adjacent to each other at Santa Rosa Avenue. Swartout had a large piece of property between New York Dr. and Boston St. near Maiden Lane, and himself owned the horse drawn Highland Railroad Company which accessed his lands.

The line originated at a terminus near the Raymond Station by the Raymond Hotel (seen in the background of the photo above) which was the premier house in Pasadena. It roughly paralleled Fair Oaks Avenue, then crossed Lincoln to the east then again to the west and headed out toward the Arroyo Seco. It turned northward to an area called Las Casitas (the little houses) then swung wide to the east to an alignment with today's Harriet Street and ran parallel between Mendocino and Calaveras to a terminus on Lake Avenue which should align with the present-day Post Office building. This right-of-way agrees with that originally on Woodbury's 1887 plan and lends support to the idea that this railroad had greater purpose than that of appeasing a couple of millionaires, even if they were often the only riders.

If you lived on the other end of the Pasadena Railroad, you may have been inclined to call it the Altadena Railroad. The terminus there when adjoined by Professor Lowe's Mount Lowe Railway was then named "Altadena Junction." By 1890 the Pasadena/Altadena Railway was sucked up with a couple of other failing lines that connected it with Los Angeles. It became an immediate success. In July of 1891 it was joined again with a line that connected it to San Pedro. The line was renamed the Los Angeles Terminal Railway, and subsequently so was its terminus at Rattlesnake Island, now Terminal Island.

The original plan to have a line run from an Altadena railroad yard to Salt Lake City, Utah was still in the offing, but the land bust dashed all those plans, yet not before the railroad was renamed the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad Company in 1901. By now a spur track had been laid into the Arroyo near Devil's Gate for the purpose of quarrying rock for the construction of the Los Angeles Harbor breakwater. By 1903 the cross-town service was abandoned and the rails were pulled up. It took decades for the bordering properties to assume the abandoned right of way, and to this day slight traces of where the rail line passed through can be sleuthed out.

By 1916 the quarrying had been abandoned since the Arroyo rock proved to be too unstable for its intended purposes, and by 1921 the Arroyo-Windsor lines were taken up. Only a cabled-up right of way can been seen passing between the buildings and houses between Windsor and El Sol Avenues. A small cabled-up section can also be seen by the northbound Lincoln Avenue off ramp of the 210 Freeway where the train was headed out to the Las Casitas flats.