Map of Wrights

It's still amazing to me how much cool data can be found out on the internet. This weekend, someone on the South Pacific Coast mailing list on Yahoo (spcrr@yahoogroups.com) noted that the September 1895 issue of the Journal of the Association of Engineering Societies had a long article on the repair of the summit tunnel portal at Wrights. It seems that during the winter of 1892-1893, the hillside slid down across the tunnel.

(Wow, sliding hillsides in the Santa Cruz Mountains, who would have thought!)

The article describes not only the civil engineering necessary to keep the hill from sliding again, but a very nice map of the area around Wrights, along with the locations of the Sunset Park spur and the existence of a rooming house on the east side of the creek at the future site of the station (post-earthquake). It also mentions that the sand and gravel for the new tunnel came from the gravel pit in Campbell.

Amusingly, academic papers in those days included not only the actual article, but also the question and answer session from what I assume was the conference where the paper was initially presented.

The map also seems to show that the road over to the future station site went under the trestle, so it looks like I modeled that correctly!