Old Highway 395, Part 8: Escondido Expressway/Centre City Parkway and "Modern" Old Highway 395 (1947-1969) to CA 76

As we recall from Part 6, US 395's original routing in northern San Diego county took a western loop through San Marcos, Vista, Bonsall and Fallbrook, before turning north into Riverside county near Rainbow. This convoluted arc was mostly due to the difficult terrain further east where a more direct routing could be determined, but an actual alignment would have been cost-prohibitive to build with the technology of the time.

In 1947, this hurdle was finally cleared when the new US 395 routing was revealed, bypassing downtown Escondido along a new Pine Street expressway (now Centre City Parkway) to a completely newly constructed alignment straight to Rainbow near the Riverside county line. The portions of the old routing that were cosigned with CA 78 were now CA 78 alone, and the remainder ceased to be state highway (later becoming county highway, as we discussed earlier). This new routing bridged the rugged small hills and mountains using the natural canyons in the region before descending into the San Luis Rey river valley precariously cut into the side of the cliffs. This routing was always planned as freeway or expressway in the future, but the plan never came to fruition under the guise of US 395, and so this two-lane highway remained US 395's final routing in north San Diego county until the highway's 1969 decommissioning. Both the old and new routes can be seen on the 1949 ACSC map at left (click for a 102K enlargement in a new window).

Amusingly, this routing is what most people think of as "Old Highway 395" nowadays, despite the fact that to the residents of north San Diego county at the time it was considered New Highway 395, and even appeared as such on addresses and postcards (one in my collection reads the "Schneider Motel, six miles north of Escondido, Calif., on New Highway 395"). Nevertheless, this alignment is still officially called Old Highway 395, is still officially signed as Old Highway 395, and was the routing that would persist in most people's memories of the old route until the appearance of the official county Historic Route US 395 signage in 2008; moreover, it was the routing that was TEMPORARY I-15 until as late as 1986 (by my personal recollection) and still today nearly precisely parallels the modern Interstate 15. Yours truly remembers trips home on TEMP I-15 in the early 1980s, when Interstate 15 still wasn't finished, blissfully unaware of the history of the road the family car was trundling over. In fact, this routing is so well-recognized as US 395 that even NAVTEQ and Google Maps accidentally gave it a real US 395 shield until just a couple years ago, as shown at right. After the 1968 Federal Aid Highway Act provided $201.2 million for construction to connect I-15 from San Diego to Colton and Caltrans simply opted to use US 395 instead, US 395 remained signed (even though it had legislatively ceased to exist south of Hesperia) and the TEMPORARY I-15 signs were bolted on to the existing US 395 assemblies which lasted until well into the 1970s; Mark Furqueron has a picture on his historic San Diego highway photos page showing this early co-signage of the two and based on the design age of the US 395 shield in his picture, probably dates from the early part of the decade. By the late 1970s, these final US 395 shields had all but disappeared, and only the TEMPORARY I-15 shields remained.

In this section, we will look at the entirety of the old Escondido Expressway alignment (Centre City Parkway), all of the former routing which exists as North Centre City Parkway and Champagne Boulevard, and the southern section of Old Highway 395 up to the CA 76 junction. Once we reach Mission Road (the termination of our last Part), we will be up for another split in the next Part just before we cross into Riverside county.