Miniature in motion:
Hidden in the Santa Cruz mountains is the Swanton Pacific, one-third the size of a conventional railroad.
Up on a back road in the beautiful Santa Cruz Mountains is one of the most unusual small railroads anywhere. Not only is the Swanton Pacific historic, but it is a railway in miniature, built to one-third the size of a conventional railroad.
There are more stories on the Swanton Pacific than there are cross ties on the railroad. And most of them are true.
Here’s one: Most of its equipment, including four steam locomotives, first ran 100 years ago as an attraction at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. They are among the rare surviving artifacts of that vanished fair.
Here’s another: The Swanton Pacific and the big ranch where it operates are owned by Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, which makes it possibly the only miniature railroad in the world owned by a public university.
The little railroad is one of the biggest things in Swanton, a tiny Santa Cruz County community on the back of Scott Creek, 64 miles south of San Francisco and 15 miles north of Santa Cruz.
Swanton once was semi-important, a farming town, a lumber town, a railroad town. For 15 years or so it was the last stop on the southern end of the Ocean Shore
Railroad, which was supposed to run from San Francisco to Santa Cruz. It never made it all the way and was abandoned in 1920. Swanton started a slow decline. Its post office closed in 1930 and its only school held its last class in 1960.
But the Swanton Pacific Ranch and the Swanton Pacific Railroad are very much alive. The 3,200acre property is maintained as a working ranch and a research station by Cal Poly. The railroad is a separate story. It is a serious small operation — “serious fun,” its staff says — and is open to the public twice a year and on special occasions.
The main attraction of the railroad is a mile of track, four steam locomotives and one diesel engine, eight passenger cars, a couple of freight cars, and shops to keep them all going. The railroad is a unique 19-inch gauge — the distance between the rails. Standard gauge on a full-sized railroad is 4 feet, 8½ inches.
The pride of the line is engine No. 1914, built a century ago in Oakland and maintained in spitshine splendor by the volunteer labor of the Swanton Pacific.
There are two more big locomotives on the Swanton Pacific and one smaller steam switch engine. They are undergoing restoration, but No. 1914 is going strong. There is also a diesel locomotive.
“There’s a lot of remarkable things about these locomotives,’’ said Randy Jones, who is a volunteer on the railroad, “but the biggest is that they survived at all.’’
Jones, whose official title is vice president in charge of rolling stock, likes to talk about the lore of the little line. He took a reporter and a photographer for a ride on the railroad as he talked.
The trip began at the five-stall roundhouse, a place of oil and steel and the smell of steam engines. A little station — more a gazebo than a railroad depot — is where excursions begin.
The line runs through the winter woods, over a handsome trestle that crosses Scott Creek, past a small redwood grove, a Christmas tree farm and a meadow, and into a flat place called Hog Wallow, which is the end of the track.
There are lots of names on the Swanton Pacific and each comes with a story, but the main story began about 1913 when Louis Mac Dermot, an Oakland millionaire, decided that what the planned 1915 PanamaPacific Exposition needed was an on-site railroad to carry visitors around the fairgrounds. He hired top machinists to build the equipment and engineered the route himself.
He called it the Overfair Railway, and the last spike was driven on Oct. 16, 1914. It operated the whole run of the fair, from February to Decem- ber 1914. Though the fair was a huge success — it attracted close to 19 million visitors — the Overfair Railway was not much of a hit.
When the fair ended, Mac Dermot stored the locomotives and cars in a square block he owned in West Oakland. He became “an eccentric recluse,’’ according to historian Walter Rice. Eventually he lost the place, and his fortune as well. He died broke in 1948.
The five Overfair engines and some of the passenger cars have been on an odyssey ever since, from a tiny railroad at the Oakland Zoo, to storage, to becoming two miniature railroads in Los Gatos — called the Billy Jones Wildcat Railroad — and the Calistoga Steam Railroad in the Napa Valley.
Then came Albert (Al) Smith, a onetime railroader and high school teacher who inherited the Orchard Supply Hardware store in San Jose from his father and turned it into a successful operation.
Smith admired railroads, despite losing a leg in a railroad accident in 1944. He used the settlement he got from the accident to buy ranch property near Swanton, and in 1979 bought Maxfield’s steam locomotives. He moved them to Swanton and, with a lot of volunteer help, built the Swanton Pacific. He acquired the rest of the steam engines later.
Smith was a graduate of Cal Poly, and when he died childless in 1993, he left the ranch and the railroad to Cal Poly. The university owns the land, but the nonprofit Swanton Pacific Railroad Society operates and maintains the railroad.
“This is a group endeavor,’’ Jones said.
The railroad is open three or four times a year. At Christmas, people from around Swanton ride the train to cut a tree from the Christmas tree farm. And on Al Smith Day, in April, and on Cal Poly Day in the fall, the public is invited to a barbecue and as many rides on the railroad as they wish, in memory of a long-vanished world’s fair and of Al Smith, who loved trains and education in equal measure.