Surrey Inn, 1920s.

The town of Surrey started to take shape in the early 1900s across the highway (Bouquet Canyon Road) from the Southern Pacific Railroad's Saugus train station, which predated it by two decades.

When the train station was built in 1888, there was no town. Other than a few outbuildings, the train station — named "Saugus" for the Massachusetts birthplace of the late landowner, Henry Mayo Newhall — was only thing in the vicinity. There being no railroad dining cars in the 1880s, passengers ate in the depot diner — initially called "Tolfree's" for the surname of the operator but changed to "Saugus" (as it was inside the Saugus train station) in the late 1890s when the diner operation changed hands. Passengers who missed the last train out stayed in the four hotel rooms upstairs in the train station.

The U.S. government officially designated a branch post office inside the train station in 1891 and named it "Surrey" for the county in England. We don't know why.

In late 1906, Ore W. Bercaw took over as the train station agent and postmaster. By 1907, a construction camp for the Los Angeles Aqueduct had taken shape across the highway (Bouquet Canyon Road) at the "wye" where the Santa Paula rail line branched off. Saugus was an important train station; it was where three rail lines converged — the Los Angeles and San Joaquin divisions and the Santa Paula branch. (It might look like a T intersection, but the railroad called it a Y and spelled it "wye.")

The entrepreneurial Bercaw started building a town across the highway near the aqueduct construction camp, and by the end of the first decade of the century, Bercaw moved the "Surrey" post office out of the Saugus train station and into his own general store. He added other buildings including the two-story Surrey Inn (1911).

Exactly when and why the second story of the train station stopped being used for passenger accommodations is unknown, but as railroad signalization was upgraded and passenger service swelled in the runup to World War I, the railroad no longer had room for a diner and hotel inside the train station. Passengers could eat and sleep aboard trains by this time.

Probably to stem the confusion of having two names for one geographic location, the name "Surrey" was abandoned. The government redesignated the post office "Saugus" in 1915. The diner, already bearing the "Saugus" name, moved out of the train station and across the street in 1916, and the former wall-to-wall diner space in the train station was remodeled to suit modern railroad needs.