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History -
Railroads of the Mojave Desert:
Railroads around the Mojave National Preserve
The Southern Pacific and later Santa Fe
transcontinental route
It is a common urge when business entrepreneurs
make a pile of money off of some investment that want
to replicate that feat by doing the same thing or a similar
thing again, and so the builders of the first transcontinental
railroad immediately upon its completion began looking
for places they could make another pile of money by
building a railroad. Relevant here, the “Big Four” of California
capitalism who had built the Central Pacific, Collis
P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Governor Leland Stanford,
and Charles Crocker began looking north and south for
arenas in which they could replicate their success with the
Central Pacific, and almost immediately they incorporated
new companies and undertook construction both north
and south of Sacramento. To the south, they extended
rails first to San Francisco Bay, and then incorporated the
Southern Pacific Railroad to try to replicate their Central
Pacific success by building a southern transcontinental railroad.
From San Francisco Bay their construction headed
southward on two lines, one down the east shore of the
San Francisco Peninsula and then southward generally
paralleling the coast to Santa Barbara and Los Angeles,
and a second line down the central valley and over difficult
Tehachapi Pass
to Mohave, which their construction
crews reached in 1878. From there they resumed
construction southeastward via
Waterman (later renamed
Barstow) and
Daggett
to the
Colorado River
at
Needles
in 1882, and in so doing
they built the railroad line
which today flanks the
southern boundary of Mojave
National Preserve between Fenner and a point about 4.5 miles east of Goffs.
But in transcontinental railroad strategy, while the
Southern Pacific’s principal effort towards building a
southern transcontinental railroad through Texas and
Louisiana to the Mississippi and the Gulf followed a different
route eastward from Los Angeles to Yuma, this Southern
Pacific line from Mojave to Needles was built at least
in part as an attempt to block a competitor, the Atlantic
& Pacific Railroad, Western Division, a part of the Santa
Fe System, which was even then building westward from
near Albuquerque, New Mexico Territory, across northern
Arizona Territory, establishing towns such as Winslow,
Flagstaff and Williams en route, toward the Needles from
the east. When the A.& P. in fact reached Needles in 1883
and bridged the Colorado in 1884, it faced a competitor
already there—the Big Four’s Southern Pacific. However,
the Santa Fe crowd was not without its own leverage, and
threatening to parallel the Southern Pacific all the way
to San Francisco and by other means heading for
Cajon Pass
and Los Angeles, the Santa Fe forced the Southern
Pacific to work out an agreement acceptable to both
parties which among other things involved selling the
Needles-Mojave line to the Santa Fe System, specifically
to the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad, Western Division, and
acquiring trackage rights over the Southern Pacific over
Tehachapi Pass all the way to San Francisco so that the
Santa Fe System would be able to offer through passenger
traffic on that route, although in time the Santa Fe built
and acquired its own line up through the Central Valley
and around via Martinez to Richmond and Oakland on
San Francisco Bay, with ferryboats across the Bay into
San Francisco itself. In taking over this Southern Pacific
line, especially the part between Needles and Barstow, the
Santa Fe System achieved ownership of a transcontinental
railroad from Chicago to the Pacific Coast eventually at
Los Angeles and through trackage rights at San Francisco.
Thus the trackage which runs between Barstow and
Needles south of Mojave National Preserve and, whose
right-of-way from Fenner to a point east of
Goffs
actually
forms the southern boundary of Mojave National Preserve,
started out as a part of the Southern Pacific Railroad,
but soon became trackage of the Atlantic & Pacific
Railroad, Western Division, a part of the system owned by
the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. It was operated
initially with the typical 4-4-0 American Standard,
2-6-0 Mogul and 2-8-0 Consolidation-type locomotives
which most American railroads used in the 1880s, but in
the search for new motive power, larger and ever large
locomotives would be added. Among the first were a
number of 4-8-0 types, not a common wheel arrangement,
but when first put in service they had so many more
wheels than their predecessors that A.& P. railroad men in
the desert between Needles and Barstow and Cajon and
Tehachapi Passes nicknamed them “tarantulas” after the
many-legged spider seen often in those regions.
In the decade which encompassed the Silver Crash
of 1893, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad went
into bankruptcy and when reorganized was renamed the
Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, and its subsidiary
Atlantic & Pacific Railroad, Western Division, followed it
into bankruptcy, was reorganized, and emerged renamed
Santa Fe Pacific Railroad, which operated from the late
1890s until 1902, at which time it was absorbed into the
Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway as a part of the
“Coast Lines” of that company, headquartered in Los Angeles.
The railroad continued under that name until 1996
when through a merger with the Burlington Northern (itself
a merger of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, Great
Northern, and Northern Pacific railroads), it became the
Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway, a name changed
further early in 2005 when the company dropped the
name in favor of being known officially just by the initials,
BN&SF Railway. Thus the trackage between Fenner and
a point east of Goffs, which also runs along parallel to the
southern boundary of Mojave National Preserve although
some distance to the south of it west of Fenner, has been
known by six different names under six different companies:
Southern Pacific; Atlantic & Pacific, Western Division;
Santa Fe Pacific Railroad; Atchison, Topeka & Santa
Fe Railway; Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway; and
finally, BN&SF Railway.
During its long history this line carried not only an
impressive amount of transcontinental freight traffic, but
operated a long list of famous passenger trains, starting
with the California Limited and the Santa Fe De
Luxe and in later years adding The Grand Canyon
Limited, El Capitan, The Chief, and The Super
Chief which, under Amtrak’s operation of passenger
trains since 1971, continues today as an Amtrak train
known as The Southwest Limited.
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