Old Wheels in Santa Cruz ~ Saturday, August 07, 2021

This last Thursday we were back in Santa Cruz to join a group paddling around the harbor, which was a lot of fun (we saw a lot of otters--and met a stand-up paddler who was struggling to gently persuade an otter to stop hitching a ride on his board!).

On the way into town, we drove along West Cliff and inspected this old set of trolley (?) wheels (not randomly, I'd read about this online; here's an article).

The history of streetcars in Santa Cruz is complicated--there were horsecars, narrow gauge streetcars, and eventually standard gauge ones. I was curious which system these might have come from, so we measured the gauge.

I was a little surprised at 36", since narrow gauge streetcars were typically 42" (for example, the LA "Yellow Car" system was that gauge, and this is still the gauge of the surviving SF cable cars). But some research revealed that the early horsecar lines were true narrow gauge. The picture below mentions 3'2.5" gauge, but there were about 4 different horsecar companies and nobody ever claimed they were compatible. The spoked wheels look about right.

Here is a picture of a narrow gauge Santa Cruz trolley.

So, were these horsecar wheels? Or did the narrow gauge trolleys stick to the 3' guage? Or are these wheels from some some other line entirely? The area was once crawling with 3' gauge steam railroads, both mainline and logging lines. We'll probably never know for sure. But one thing to notice is that the axles don't have gears for connecting to electric motors. For that reason and because they're built fairly light I'm leaning towards the horsecar theory.

Woordrow Ave once had a streetcar line, and it still has a wide median down the middle that used to have tracks on it.

The end of the line was right at this corner with West Cliff Dr, and long ago there was a kind of mini-resort called Vue de l'Eau with this Victorian building complete with a turrent for enjoying the view.