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For more than 30 years, the famous Red Cars connected Newport Beach to the rest of Southern California, long before getting stuck on the freeway became part of the daily grind.
“If we had it today, it would be marvelous,” Newport Beach Historical Society president Bill Grundy said. “As a kid, I grew up here my whole life and I’d see the Red Car roaring down Balboa,” Grundy added. The Red Cars, created as an inter-urban transit line by Henry Huntington’s Pacific Electric railroad company, started rolling around the turn of the century. At their height, the Red Cars were part of a transportation network that ran across Southern California from Los Angeles to Orange County to the Inland Empire. The first Red Car reached Newport Beach in 1905. The next year, the line extended to Balboa. The arrival of the Red Cars came shortly after industrialist James McFadden sold his wharf, railroad and real estate interests in the Balboa Peninsula. In the history anthology “Newport Beach: The First Century, 1888-1988,” Grundy wrote that McFadden sold his peninsula land to a businessman named William S. Collins and a partner, A.C. Hanson. Collins eventually severed ties with Hanson and Huntington joined Collins’ Newport Beach Co. with a pledge to bring the Red Cars into town. Huntington and Collins were both major players in Newport’s evolution. Collins is perhaps best known as the founder of Balboa Island. Huntington was the nephew of railroad baron Collis Huntington. After Collis Huntington’s death, Henry Huntington wed his uncle’s widow, Arabella. In “Henry Huntington & the Pacific Electric: A Pictorial Album,” author Spencer Crump noted that Arabella was 32 years younger than Collis, but only three years younger than Henry. McFadden envisioned Newport Beach as a future nexus for commercial shipping but Huntington’s Red Cars helped put the city on a different path. In the same book that contains Grundy’s account of McFadden’s deal with Collins, former Daily Pilot editor Tom Murphine points out that the Pacific Electric served to promote Balboa as a vacation and leisure destination. Red Cars stopped coming to Newport Beach in June of 1940, 21 years before they went extinct. The demise of the Red Car was fictionalized in the movie “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” The film, better known for its mix of human performers and animation, portrayed the Red Cars’ end as part of a nefarious scheme to replace rails with freeways. In the real world, some blame the demise of Southern California rail transportation on conspiring business interests who allegedly sought to dismantle rail lines. In his book, Crump writes that Pacific Electric itself began shedding lines in the 1930s. The rising tide of car ownership meant increasingly clogged streets criss-crossed rail lines, making it necessary for trains to slow down. Crump also argued the Red Car system would not be sufficient for modern needs. Still, he viewed the old network as a system planners could have used to build a modern transportation system. “Southern Californians bemoan automobile traffic and cry for a rapid transit system,” he wrote. “Historians of the future may ponder the question of why they didn’t keep the one they had. |
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