I was trying to find this RR on Google earth. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y3QawyhR3c No luck yet. I need a nearby town for a coordinate. Perhaps Ray could help. It’s near San Diego. Anyway, watch the vid. Very interesting. I did find this NG dismal at Plaster City, Ca.
try N32 43’44.75" W116 10’59.79" It looks like a shadow due to the angle of the sun.
Loved the vid!
Found it!
Follow the RR north out of Jacumba, Ca.
Tunnels, trestles, washouts, wrecked cars.
Amazing country!
I drove around out there one day trying to find it and never could figger out where it was…I did ride the train out of Campo on another trip.
(http://i253.photobucket.com/albums/hh58/rgseng/Campo/100_0029.jpg)
(http://i253.photobucket.com/albums/hh58/rgseng/Campo/100_0037.jpg)
I used to take my Boy Scout troop on hikes to the Goat Canyon Trestle on the San Diego and Arizona Eastern RR, the true name of that railraod. That was always a crowd pleaser.
I cannot believe that they just abandoned those passenger cars and caboose out in the middle of nowhere!
I guess they can’t be retrieved due to poor track conditions, washouts, cave-ins, etc.
It is a hard country. If something falls off that trestle, it is gone. They might try to salvage the contents of the car, but it is too expensive to try to salvage the car itself.
Some interesting pics taken years ago. scroll down.
Pretty cool video.
The caboose and passenger cars were still pretty clean. They can’t have been there too many years.
I too, find it hard to believe they were just left there.
The Goat Canyon trestle looks to be in pretty good shape. I’d say it had some work done to it since the pictures from 1978.
Ralph
Here’s the San Diego Model Railroad Association’s HO model of the SD&AE. Enjoy the many photos. If you are in Sandy Eggo, go there in person, it’s well worth the trip. Scroll down to the bottom for the slide show.
Steve I used to belong to that club, good memories.
This sure brings back some great memories! My brothers and I used to hike the tracks through the gorge many times back in the late '70s through the early '80s.
The first time I hiked to the big trestle, there was a crane car on the spur track next to the old tank car. Also, the semaphore signal was still intact, and there was a small building next to it.
I don’t know what happened to the crane, but the building and semaphore were quickly destroyed by vandals (the scum of the earth!), along with many other things along the tracks. Later on, illegals became a big problem, hiking the tracks to avoid the Border Patrol and leaving lots of trash, starting fires, etc. The timbers in one tunnel were burned out that way, along with a couple of the smaller trestles.
One time we pushed that speeder up the tracks a long ways, then let it coast and rode it back down. That was really cool. Sadly, the next time we were there, the speeder had been pushed over the cliff by vandals.
Some folks used to ride the tracks on homemade carts back then. My brother and I nearly got run over by one of them! We were hiking back to camp shortly after sunset and it was starting to get dark. We hadn’t expected to be gone so long so we didn’t bring flashlights.
As we were crossing a very long trestle with no catwalk, a cart came roaring up the tracks. No headlight, and apparently no muffler either. The engine noise was so loud no one could hear us yelling. We got out as far as we could on the ends of the longest ties and just prayed we wouldn’t get hit. The cart roared past us and never even slowed down. To this day I don’t know if the people on it ever noticed us.
It’s too bad those passenger cars and the caboose were left in the gorge. They’ll be completely trashed before very long.
BTW, the Carrizo Gorge was the inspiration for my layout.
I’ve never been out along the line. Got to the Campo museum a couple of years ago. A very nice collection of RR stuff. There is a maintenance facility for the line in Jacumba that is worth a visit as well as you go thru there. Just make a turn to the north at the main interesction it town and go about 3 blocks.
When was the line abandoned? Judging by the gallery cars in the video it could not have been before the 60’s. I’m surprised that equipment is still in as good shape as it is. Around here all of the glass would be broken out in a month. I agree, vandals are the scum of the earth.
Jon,
On the YouTube page, someone says it was abandoned in 2008. I think there were earlier periods in it’s history when it was also not used.
Ralph
The line was originally built by the San Diego & Arizona Railway. The 11-mile section through the gorge has 17 of the line’s 21 tunnels and a couple miles worth of bridges and trestles. Later the RR was taken over by the Southern Pacific and renamed the San Diego & Arizona Eastern Railway. The route through the gorge was first abandoned after suffering damage from Tropical Storm Kathleen in 1976.
In 1979 the railroad was purchased by the Metropolitan Transit Development Board. There was a brief attempt to repair the line, but another storm just a few months later in January 1980 caused more damage and the work stopped for a while.
Eventually the line was repaired and reopened between San Diego and Plaster City in January 1983. In June of that year two trestles were burned, apparently caused by campfires of illegal immigrants passing through the gorge. In 1984 the MTDB signed an agreement with RailTex to operate freight service under the name San Diego & Imperial Valley Railroad. Freight service only went from San Diego to the border at San Ysidro. Later, it became possible to operate as far east as Tecate, MX.
In 1989 work began to repair the “Desert Line”, though the gorge. Apparently worked stopped when a tunnel partially collapsed after the timbers were destroyed by a fire. In 2001 the Carrizo Gorge Railway was formed and signed a contract to reopen and operate the desert line. Repairs in the gorge were finally completed in 2004. The railroad mainly shipped sand from the desert to be used for concrete in San Diego, however there were also shipments of grain, lumber and other materials. In 2008 the Carrizo Gorge Railway placed an “embargo” on the line. I’m not sure what that means but they’ve ceased operation, at least for now.
In 2010* a tunnel in Mexico was burned, shutting down operations from SD to Tecate. The passenger cars and caboose that are now stranded in the gorge belong to the Carrizo Gorge Railway. I know that they often talked about someday using them to do tourist runs through the gorge but I don’t know if they ever did any.
*Edit: Apparently the correct year of this damage is 2009.
Thanks for the history Ray.
Unless they have their own security force (LARGE) with STK orders, I am not sure the vandalism will not bankrupt any attempt to operate.
Bob C.
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