Del Mar Racetrack Adventure 2007

Did you know? - Fullerton Station is a passenger rail and bus station located in Fullerton, California. It is served by Amtrak's Pacific Surfliner and Southwest Chief trains, and Metrolink's 91 Line and Orange County Line trains. It also serves as a major bus depot for the Orange County Transportation Authority, and is altogether one of the major transportation hubs of Orange County.

This station is notable because it actually has two historic depots on site: one built in 1923 by the Union Pacific Railroad and the other built in 1930 by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. Both depots are on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Santa Fe depot serves as an Amtrak ticket office and passenger waiting area, and also houses a cafe.

The Union Pacific Railroad was the third railway company to lay tracks through Fullerton and to build a depot. This helped firmly establish Fullerton as the regional rail center for northern Orange County. The Mission Revival-style Union Pacific depot was originally constructed at 109 West Truslow Avenue, on the opposite side of Harbor Boulevard from its present location. To avoid its demolition in the late 1970s, the city's redevelopment agency successfully moved the building to its present site in 1980 and today it is occupied by an Old Spaghetti Factory restaurant.

Did You Know? Until 1923, the main area known as Solana Beach was originally called Lockwood Mesa. The area first settled by the George H. Jones family in 1886. When Lake Hodges Dam was built in 1917-18, the area encompassing Solana Beach began to develop rapidly. The creation of the 12,000-acre Santa Fe Irrigation District in 1918 ensured that the area from Rancho Santa Fe through Solana Beach would prosper and expand.

The coastline from Solana Beach to Oceanside began to boom in the early 1920s. In 1922 Colonel Ed Fletcher, an early community leader and developer, purchased 140 acres at $20 per acre from farmer George H. Jones to develop the town of Solana Beach, with the help of his brother-in-law Eugene Batchelder.

To provide access to the beach for the development, hydraulic water pressure was used to erode away tons of earth and create the Fletcher Cove entry and beach. This took one man three months with a fire hose, using water that was coming over the spillway at Lake Hodges Dam.

The beach was opened with great fanfare including horse races on the beach on July 4th, 1925. The community grew slowly, but steadily throughout the rest of the century, with particular booms occurring in the decade after World War II and a real estate boom in the last quarter of the 20th century. In 1986 the community officially incorporated as the city of Solana Beach.