Trains and Canneries

The Southern Pacific Railroad, built in 1880, became a major landmark in the history of the Monterey Peninsula. Intended to bring tourism to this scenic area, it also brought an influx of new immigrants and provided a way to ship the fishing industry’s products to the outside world. World War I transformed Monterey’s archaic fish-canning operations, and by 1918 fewer than a dozen canneries could produce 1,400,000 cases of sardines per year. Fish catches were still off-loaded by hand, using cable and buckets from barges towed by Monterey clippers, until full mechanization came a decade later, when purse seiners and their huge nets off-loaded to turbine pumps in the canneries that sucked the fish ashore. The canneries typically stood as far out over the rocky shoreline as possible and were connected to their warehouses by conveyors and pipelines inside crossovers that ran overhead across Ocean View Avenue. Railroad freight cars at the rear of the warehouses delivered cans and supplies and departed with cases of sardines, fishmeal, and sardine oil. Today the old Southern Pacific rail line is the site of the Cannery Row Recreational Trail, and San Carlos Beach is one of the county’s premier shore-dive scuba sites.

Monterey, California · United States