California Fast Freight Line
The California Fast Freight Line was a Fast Freight partnership that advertised direct freight service from Chicago to the California Coast.
There were two California Fast Freight Lines which muddies the knowledge of this system. The first was organized in 1870 by the Chicago & North Western Railroad to facilitate through interchange with the Union Pacific and Central Pacific from railroads originating in New York. The second was organized by Union Pacific in 1885 in response to the threat of the Denver & Rio Grande's narrow gauge Utah Extension and Southern Pacific's Sunset Route, both of which would offer alternative routes to California bypassing the UP system. The first CFFL was dissolved in 1889 after a protracted legal battle over the use of the name which Union Pacific won. The second company is the more famous of the two, but they were two completely separate and independent companies with no legal or financial overlap and should not be confused with each other.
The First California Fast Freight Line
The original California Fast Freight Line was a pool operation owned jointly by the Chicago & North Western; Chicago, Burlington & Quincy; Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific; and Milwaukee & St. Paul railroads to direct traffic flowing from New York to California by way of Chicago, Illinois. The Union Pacific and Central Pacific were not co-owners in the pool operation but were parties to the contract to accept CFFL cars without breaking bulk.
This company was organized within a year of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 by Grafton T. Nutter. Nutter was at the time the General Eastern Freight Agent for the C&NW, located in New York, where he worked with the Vanderbilt-associated railroads to organize the CFFL traffic pool to Chicago.
The Second California Fast Freight Line
The second California Fast Freight Line was organized in 1885 by the Union Pacific in response to the recently completed Denver & Rio Grande/Denver & Rio Grande Western Railway Utah Extension that connected Denver, Colorado with Ogden, Utah, allowing traffic from Chicago to bypass the Union Pacific. In addition, Southern Pacific's Sunset Route, opened at the same time as the Utah Extension, bypassed Ogden entirely allowing another through-interchange route outside of Union Pacific's control.
Discussions among the Iowa Pool, a treaty of railroads that controlled all traffic moving through Council Bluffs, to form the new California Fast Freight Line began in 1883, although a corporation was not established until two years later.
While it did accept CFFL cars at Ogden, Central Pacific and Southern Pacific at first refused to participate in the new CFFL, instead directing interchange traffic obtained from the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe over the Sunset Route and interchange traffic obtained from the CB&Q over the D&RG to Ogden. It took several years for these railroads to join the CFFL and contribute its own cars to the pool fleet.
By 1888 the CFFL fleet contained 2,900 freight cars.