SPCRR Home

The Society for the Preservation of Carter Railroad Resources (SPCRR) is a non-profit devoted to the railroad artifacts of the Carter Brothers of California. Thomas and Martin Carter, Irish immigrants, began making railroad equipment in 1874, chiefly wooden cars for the South Pacific Coast Railroad — the original SPCRR — and before the firm wound down in 1902 they had turned out more than 5,000 cars, mostly for narrow gauge lines, along with cable cars and, in later years, standard gauge equipment; Carter rolling stock saw use on railroads across the western United States, Hawaii, and Latin and South America. The modern society operates The Railroad Museum at Ardenwood, a heritage railroad inside Ardenwood Historic Farm Regional Park in Fremont, where 1.5 miles of three-foot narrow gauge track runs along three sides of the park and the Carter collection is housed in the three-bay Wissel Car Barn in the Trudy Frank Railyard. Each Memorial Day weekend the society stages its annual Rail Fair, with visiting steam locomotives trucked in for the occasion, all within a 210-acre East Bay Regional Park District farm whose historic core is still worked with the methods of the 1880s to 1920s, centered on the Pattersons' restored Queen Anne house.