The Mass Grave: CA 7, CA 14U, CA 31 (TEMP I-15), US 60, CA 65, US 91, US 99, CA 118, CA 163 (Old), CA 164, CA 195

CA 7 is the original signage for the Long Beach Fwy in Los Angeles, or what is now called I-710. This renumbering occurred in 1984, so it's not too surprising that a few remnants survive, although they pop up in a few unusual areas.

The thumbnail at right opens a new window with a scrolling Flash map of Los Angeles freeways (Flash 6.0 is required). Note how the Long Beach Freeway is signed CA 7 in 1984 (before the renumbering) and earlier, and only appears as I-710 in the final map section. (Prior to being CA 7 it was CA 15, but that introduced an obvious duplicate with Interstate 15. None of the old CA 15 signage is left.)

The most obvious evidence of CA 7 is on the bridge signs; this is only one of many (I also saw them posted on NB I-710 @ Willow St and Florence Ave, and I imagine there are others), chosen because it demonstrates clearly its presence on modern-day I-710. This picture was taken at great personal risk and the annoyance of other drivers on SB I-710 at Pacific Coast Highway in the collector lane. To save your eyes and my bandwidth, here is an enlargement of the bridge sign at lower right, clearly showing both I-710 (on the rear sign) and old CA 7.

No matter which side you stand on regarding Governator Schwarzenegger's vigourous attempts to cut the budget, one thing is certain: the State of California wastes a freaking lot of money. Want proof? Here it is in a roadgeek friendly form: Route 14 Unrelinquished.

In basic terms, when an alignment is abandoned in California (normally after a routing has been moved or deleted), it doesn't just go away; Caltrans has to go through a legislative process called relinquishment where maintenance of the road is offered back to the city or county through which it runs, and the city/county then votes to accept it. Until then, even though the alignment is abandoned, it still carries a route number even though it's not a state highway anymore. To denote this state of bureaucratic limbo, a "U" for "Unrelinquished" is added to the route number; one example of this is CA 103 north of CA 1, which is not part of the legislative routing anymore, and thus is technically CA 103U because the state hasn't yet given (in this case) the city of Long Beach back the actual land the road is on even though the legislative definition of CA 103 no longer goes past that point.

Because the U basically marks the route for eventual legislative destruction, it would seem very silly to sign a route with Unrelinquished markers because why would you waste the money on manufacturing and putting up shields -- let alone custom-made shields with the "U" designation -- on a route you intend to dismantle anyway? Regardless, that's exactly what Caltrans did with CA 14U, an unrelinquished portion of the route's old Sierra Hwy alignment (Sierra Hwy being former US 6) running parallel to the modern CA 14 Antelope Valley Fwy in northern Los Angeles county. For those unfamiliar with it, CA 14 serves Lancaster, Palmdale and Mojave, all the way up to its termination at modern US 395; the freeway was built in segments between 1963 and 1975. However, obviously not all parts of the alignment were apparently relinquished, and that leaves us with a bizarre stretch of signs that to my knowledge have no similar peer anywhere else in the state. While I don't know when they were placed, they are obviously of recent vintage.

According to Google Maps, these signs all exist within Santa Clarita city limits, although portions of the alignment have already been relinquished (south of PM T26.8 at San Fernando Rd, old CA 126, is no longer 14U as of 9/02). There are no signs north of the intersection depicted (Friendly Valley Pkwy), so I assume it was relinquished past here as well. This makes it a logical starting point for us, and we'll U-turn at the light to go south.

An old postmile just south of this intersection shows PM 26.5 (just before the cemetery, if you're in the area). Note that there are no postmiles of any sort along the stretch I've photographed. We turn around and start heading north again.

Much of this is now obsolete due to sign replacement on Route 60, but some of these signs still survive.

It can be argued that CA 31 was never really a route in its own right, merely a legislative stub until I-15 was built (in this case, between Corona and Rancho Cucamonga/Ontario, although at least one of my maps from 1974 seems to indicate that the stub at Devore that would eventually be signed I-15 was also at some point signed CA 31). It was not created as a route until 1964 when I-15 was already well on the books, and CA 31 would be deleted in favour of the Interstate a mere ten years later in 1974 (although signs remained up for a time until the Interstate was completed, thereby making them pointless).

The thumbnail to the right opens up a new window with a 64K slice of a 1976 map showing CA 31's alignment along Hamner and Milliken Avenues, co-signed as I-15. (The Devore stub is at the top right.) At the present-day CA 60/I-15 interchange in Mira Loma, we have several interesting remnants of CA 31 and even TEMP I-15 which literally float right in front of our face.

So is it also with this advance signage indicating the I-15 interchange, and under optimum light can even be seen with the naked eye (around 8 or 9am was when these photos were taken). Click the thumbnail at right for an 11K enhanced high-contrast and threshold-gated image showing the old exit right under the "new" button copy -- Hamner and Milliken, and a 31 shield.

So, if we can't get the enchilada by looking at glue damage, we look at the other type of signage change scarring -- rivets. Contrast boost helps make the rivet holes stand out, as does the sun glare from rephotographing at a slightly different angle. The result is at right (click the thumbnail for an 86K image), with arrows indicating the TEMP shield and the route digits.

Modern-day CA 60 (compare with CA 91, also on this page), which runs between the East Los Angeles Interchange and Beaumont, is the remnant of US 60 in California. Unlike some US routes that were chopped down with the rise of the Interstate system (US 91, for example), US 60 survives nearly intact outside of California, running from Quartzsite, AZ to Newport News, VA and retaining its preeminence as a (now almost) transcontinental route. Its destruction in California was probably because of the multiple multiplexes (say that five times fast) of US 60 and I-10 (old US 70, parts old US 99) along their respective courses; rather than preserve the potentially confusing multiplex signage, it was simply chopped off at the ankles, as it were.

Nevertheless, at the Beaumont interchange, the US 60 shield is still up, ill-covered by a CA 60 greenout plate (enlargement at right). Note how the original US 60 shield does not have button copy. Much of the US 60 expressway between Beaumont and Moreno Valley is still more or less in its original form, making it a fascinating trip back through time. Drive carefully, however, as the Badlands route is very substandard with respect to curves, grades and shoulder space.

Continue on to the US 91 entry for some maps showing the Riverside freeway sign changes through time.

CA 65 is a major state arterial in central and northern California, split into a southern half between Bakersfield and Exeter, and then from Roseville (outside Sacramento) to Marysville. The modern CA 65 in Roseville is constructed on a freeway alignment between Interstate 80 and Lincoln, but the old CA 65 was routed on Riverside Avenue down the main city centre. A postmile still survives a mile or two north of I-80, on the southbound side.

Dan Faigin mentions that CA 65 was routed on US 99E, but it also seems that it was routed on US 40 as there are Historic US 40 signs all over Riverside Avenue.

Like CA 60, CA 91 is the ghost of a mightier highway long since decomissioned in this state. Modern-day CA 91, which runs between Riverside and Gardena, is the remnant of old US 91 in California. US 91 today runs between Brigham City, UT and Idaho Falls, ID, a faint shadow of its former self as US 91 ran originally from Long Beach, CA all the way to Sweetgrass, MT and the Canadian border. Modern I-15 today carries much of the rest of the routing.

The thumbnail at right opens a new window with a scrolling Flash map of Inland Empire freeways (Flash 6.0 is required), as referenced in the US 60 entry above. Notice the US 60 and US 91 freeways in the San Bernardino/Riverside area from 1947 to 1963, and their subsequent resignage as CA 60 and CA 91 (ATGR), respectively, in 1965.

Again, this mini-exhibit depends on the fact Caltrans reuses a lot of their signage; this likely suspect seems to date from the original US 91 freeway, built 1957 to 1961, and stands at the modern Tyler Street/CA 91 interchange south of the freeway in western Riverside.

None of this is as incontrovertible as, say, a big fat US shield pattern, but it still makes for interesting conjecture.

Who doesn't know US 99? This is one of the big ones, the highway everyone's trying to travel when they're not frolicking on US 66. If you've been hiding in a hole for the last half-century, US 99 ran from the Mexican border south of El Centro, CA, through San Bernardino and Los Angeles, then through Bakersfield and Fresno, and into Oregon and Washington states pretty much along the course of Interstate 5 to Portland and Seattle into Canada. Its receiving highway in British Columbia is still BC 99, and most of the leftover alignments in all three states are still signed as OR 99 or WA 99, or in this case, CA 99. CA 99 still serves Fresno along what is the largest of the old 99 alignments, leaving Fresno the largest city in the United States not served by an Interstate as of this writing (I-5 runs on a bypass alignment considerably further west).

All that to say that when you find a US 99 shield in the wild, it's a big thing; here's two (and another two on the northbound side), at Atwater, improperly covered with state shields a la US 60 above.

CA 118 today is a major freeway between eastern Ventura county and Sylmar (at Interstate 210), plus a local arterial for points west to its terminus at CA 126 in Saticoy. An unconstructed portion was supposed to head east of Sylmar partially down I-210 and then west at Sunland Blvd towards unconstructed CA 249 (approximately where LACo N3/Angeles Forest Hwy runs now), probably along Big Tujunga Cyn Rd. This is unlikely to ever get built, by the way.

Before all that, however, CA 118 actually went far south of Sunland along Foothill Boulevard (parallel to I-210) to terminate at US 66 in Pasadena; I-210 technically replaced CA 118 with the 1964 redesignation, although much of the old highway persisted well into the 1970s. This former routing can be seen in the 1957 map at left, including the old Foothill Freeway (which still survives, not to be confused with I-210 itself, which is the new Foothill Freeway -- see Old Highway 30). For this reason, it should not be surprising that this sign showing the old routing on Foothill still stands in Sunland Park, just east of the Interstate. [Or rather, it used to - as of 4/2010, this sign is gone. I will keep the photographs up here as a memorial, since I rather liked it.]

No, not that CA 163 -- the first one. As defined in 1964, old CA 163 ran from Lacy Street and Avenue 26 along Ave 26 to Interstate 5 in Los Angeles (an old stub, apparently, of US 99). This lasted for only a year and I have never found it on any maps, although Dan Faigin has the legislative history.

So, credit where credit is due to the sharp-eyed Stan Konar, who wrote in one fine November day to tell me that old CA 163 lives, and live it does -- here's a bridge sign on SB Ave 26 showing it (sadly defaced), along with an(other) anachronistic reference to CA 11, or modern CA 110, which it crosses.

CA 164 today is a little known (and almost completely unsigned) route between Pico Rivera and Sierra Madre along most of Rosemead Boulevard. "But, wait!" I hear you cry. "This is Route 19!" Well, actually, no, it's not. In fact, this is one of those rare circumstances apart from multiplexes where the legislative route number no longer matches the signed highway, and was actually introduced with the 1964 renumbering that was supposed to eliminate such inconsistencies!

The reason why CA 19 remains over the entire route is because it in fact did possess the whole route between Long Beach to US 66/Foothill Blvd in Sierra Madre before the 1964 renumbering (although apparently over San Gabriel Blvd just a couple blocks west). Unlike many deleted or altered route numbers where the signage eventually caught up with the route number on the books, this never happened for CA 19. Today, CA 19 ends internally at the otherwise nondescript Gallatin Rd in Pico Rivera, and CA 164 continues north from there on Rosemead Blvd, but not on the signage where the signed end of CA 19 was and remains here, now at I-210.

Old CA 195 is one of those ignominous routes to die a painful death twice, first at the hands of US 95, and then at the hands of the CA 86 expressway (current CA "86S" Expwy). CA 195 was first signed in 1934, replaced by US 95 in 1940, and then reincarnated by 1963 between CA 86 in Oasis and US 60/US 70 (soon to be I-10), as shown in the 1967 inset map on the right. The "Mecca/Twentynine Palms" exit on present-day I-10 is the former northern terminus. What most people don't know is that this was actually a major routing during the very early days of the state highway system, for it was the original routing of US 60 through southeastern Riverside county to Chiraco Summit prior to the construction of the later and current route ca. 1937.

All that remains now is this twisty, poorly maintained road to Mecca and a fair bit of lonely desert.