Chartered 1880, first through train November 1885, headquarters gone by 1886. All records sourced and cited.
The first transcontinental train on the Santa Fe route did not leave from downtown San Diego. It left from a two story wood building on what is now West 23rd Street in National City, and that building is still standing.
The Historic American Buildings Survey, which is the federal record of the country's architecture, puts it this way: the California Southern Transcontinental Railroad Terminus "is the last original transcontinental terminus depot in the United States."
Not the last one in California. The last one anywhere.
Three things are worth knowing before the story runs. The Southern Pacific sent a deputy to National City to seize a piece of track, and the men building the railroad waited for him to go to bed. Most of the work was done by Chinese laborers whose contractor kept a diary in English, and that diary survives. And the whole thing lasted about nine years.
Frank A. Kimball was a builder and contractor from New Hampshire. He moved west in 1861 and did well in business in San Francisco, and then his health gave out and he was told to find a warmer place.
He came to San Diego in 1868, looked at Rancho de la Nación on the bay, and decided it should be a city. On June 15, 1868 he met the owner, Francois Pioche, and bought the land. He paid thirty thousand dollars for the rancho and six miles of waterfront, and renamed it the National Ranch.
He and his brothers laid out National City on it that same year.
Then they waited for a railroad, because a port with no rail connection is just a nice view.
There was a false start in the 1870s, when the Texas and Pacific announced it would put its terminus there. Some grading was done. Then the Southern Pacific's directors, Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins, killed it, and a national depression finished the job.
Those four had said in public that they would never allow a competing railroad into California, and for years they made it stick.
Kimball started writing letters to railroad officials in 1869. He worked out that his best chance was the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, which wanted the Pacific and had not yet picked a spot. He had been corresponding with Tom Nickerson, the Santa Fe's president, since March 1879, and it took another full year of negotiation after that.
The California Southern Railroad was chartered on October 12, 1880 by the stockholders of the Santa Fe. Its board of directors was identical to the Santa Fe's board, with one exception. Frank Kimball sat on the California Southern's board and not on the Santa Fe's.
He paid for that seat. The Kimball brothers handed the Santa Fe twenty five thousand four hundred and ten dollars in cash, seventeen thousand three hundred and fifty six acres of land, and four hundred and eighty six lots in National City. The land included three miles of bayfront, which was the part the Santa Fe actually wanted.
Grading began on December 20, 1880. The first rail was laid at National City in June 1881, and the first locomotive came off a ship at the National City wharf on July 13, 1881, because the Southern Pacific controlled the land routes and the Santa Fe brought its engines in by sea.
The line had to cross the Southern Pacific's track at Colton, and the Southern Pacific would not allow it.
A crossing frog, the piece of rail hardware that lets one track cross another, was built at the National City terminal grounds. The Southern Pacific got a court order to stop it from being installed and sent a deputy down to National City to confiscate it.
The federal record describes what happened next in one sentence. "When he retired to a hotel room for the night, the California Southern loaded the crossing frog onto a flat bed and transported the crossing to Colton."
The Southern Pacific then ran three engines back and forth over the spot continuously to keep anyone from using it. The Santa Fe won in court anyway. The station at National City was finished in October 1882, and service to Colton had started that August.
The route ran north along the coast and then turned inland through Temecula Valley. The San Diego Union described the hard part, Temecula Canyon, as "seven miles of solid rock."
By May 1881 there were between fifteen hundred and two thousand men on the line at a dollar seventy five a day. The route required two hundred forty one wooden bridges totaling twenty three thousand seven hundred fifteen feet.
A large share of that labor was Chinese, and one of the men who recruited and supplied it was Ah Quin.
Ah Quin came from Canton in 1868 at twenty years old. He had been taught to read and write both Chinese and English by missionaries, which turned out to be the most valuable thing he owned. He cooked and kept house in California, learned merchandising from an uncle in Santa Barbara, and spent more than a year cooking for a mining company off the coast of Alaska. In 1878 he met George Marston and the Reverend G.W. Camp in San Diego, and in 1880 they wrote and told him to come down, because a railroad was about to be built.
He arrived on October 25, 1880, thirteen days after the charter.
He hired hundreds of men, ran supplies out to the camps by rail from a store he opened in San Diego's Chinatown, and made much of his money selling them provisions. The camps ate rice, potatoes and fish. In the canyon, rockslides came down on the crews, and the crews complained.
In the spring of 1883 the line was all but finished, and the San Diego Union noted that "Ah Quin, the popular Chinese merchant on Fifth Street will leave tomorrow on a pleasure trip on the excursion train for San Bernardino."
Then it rained.
The engineers had laid the route across the Santa Margarita River repeatedly without accounting for what that river does in a wet year. In February 1884 it came down. More than thirty miles of track washed away, and wreckage from the track and bridges was seen floating out at sea. One train sat stranded for days until its passengers walked to San Diego for help.
Ah Quin was in Riverside recruiting when it hit, and could not get home. He went to Los Angeles and took a steamship.
His diary that month is three lines long and it says everything.
February 2: "rain, cannot have train home because Temecula Valley is brook."
February 18: "Felt very sad, not knowed anything."
February 20: "Cal not knowed anything of San Diego because the California Southern Railroad is destroyed."
The railroad stopped hauling freight, laid off nearly all of its employees on March 19, and defaulted on its bond interest in July. San Diego had no interior rail connection for eleven months.
J.N. Victor, the superintendent, started pushing the contractors to put it back.
Ah Quin's diary for the rest of 1884 is a record of a man chasing labor up and down the state. February 12, at National City: "Mr. Victor want me to get some men very bad." He went to Riverside, Pomona, Los Angeles, San Francisco. On April 10 he wrote "50 workmen I took in steamer," and three days later marched them out to the nineteen mile mark. On August 4: "Order from Mr. Victor of C.S.R.R., want me to get 60 our people again." On August 27 he expected eighty men and a letter came saying twenty six.
The crews rebuilt the track above Oceanside and through Temecula Valley, and the connection came back.
The first through transcontinental train left the National City station on November 14, 1885. The first train from the east arrived on November 16.
National City had what Frank Kimball had spent seventeen years chasing. It held it for about six months.
In May 1886 the Santa Fe announced it was moving the division headquarters, the car shops and the roundhouses to San Bernardino, which sat in the middle of the system instead of at the end of it. By April 1889 the machinery was being pulled out, and the National City machine shop payroll went from twenty thousand dollars a month to four thousand.
Storms tore up the Temecula Canyon line again in the early 1890s and it was abandoned for the coastal route, which is the route the trains still use.
The depot. It went from passenger and freight service to freight only, and in that reduced job it survived into the 1960s. In the 1970s somebody ran a restaurant in it and parked a 1950s boxcar against the west wall for restrooms. The City of National City owns it.
Inside, on the first floor, the railroad's original safe is still there. The brick walls of the vault were laid in 1882. The federal surveyors who documented the building photographed the safe door, and the name painted across the top of it is the California Southern Railroad Company.
The street grid, the rail corridor and the industrial bayfront in National City are not accidents of later planning. They are the shape of a deal signed in 1880, in which a man traded three miles of waterfront for a railroad and got it, briefly.
The active freight line through the city is the same alignment. That is worth understanding before you buy near it, in both directions, because proximity to working rail is a permanent condition and not a market cycle.
Current numbers are in the National City market report, and the wider area is in South Bay.
The depot claim is the federal record's, not ours. The sentence calling it the last original transcontinental terminus depot in the United States is quoted from the HABS documentation. This piece attributes it rather than asserting it.
The acreage does not agree with itself. The same HABS report gives the National Ranch as 23,623 acres on one page and 26,632 acres on the next. Rather than pick one, this piece gives the purchase price and the waterfront mileage, which the report states consistently, and leaves the acreage out.
The date of the first through train. HABS says the first through transcontinental train left National City on November 14, 1885 and the first train from the east arrived November 16. Lowell dates the last spike joining the California Southern to the Atlantic and Pacific at Barstow to November 17. Those cannot all describe the same event. This piece gives the HABS dates for the National City trains and does not use a last spike date.
When the canyon route was abandoned. Lowell dates the final storm damage and abandonment to 1892. HABS treats 1882 through 1891 as the period in which the railroad mattered. This piece says the early 1890s and names no year.
More San Diego history: stories from around the county, one place at a time.