Here are some more shots from the SP Bull Ring back in August 1978… these were taken on TriX Pan… First is an overview with a couple C630s, RSD12, S6, many U25Bs and even a U50 (Baby Huey #9951’s cab is barely there) in the image.
And the last image is another wider shot, this one includes a DD35 (well half of it), a C630, a couple S6s bookending a U25B, a C415, a smashed up SW1500, and then a row of Centuries in the background.
Memories of the engines and the sugar beet gons from my mis-spent youth.
Sad to see the old horses in the glue factory corral. Sadder, in a sense, looking at the sugar beet gons and realizing that that whole business out here is almost gone, at least by comparison to thirty or forty years ago.
The sugar beet business is not just almost gone in comparison to what it was, it is almost gone. There is only one sugar beet refinery still operating in California (Brawley). There is also the C&H sugar cane refinery in Crockett, which processes cane from Hawaii.
You got me to go back and do some research. In September of 1977 two teenage boys sabatoged a one engine, two car local on the Burbank Branch in North Hollywood (a line that no longer exists and is in fact now a Bus Rapid Transit line). This SW1500 was the victim.
I recall reading that the Holly (in my day) Sugar plant was still operating in Brawley, narrowly missing being shuttered a couple of years ago. Notable feature was the “Sea Level” mark a ways up one of the structures next to the highway.
At the time I caught up on the sugar beet history last year, I ran into some promotional material about someone in or near Brawley promoting sugar cane farming in the Imperial Valley to feed ethanol production there. Funny thing, though, is that I have never seen any mention of or discussion of that in the local paper, the Imperial Valley Press, which I at least scan online every day. If they were to actually do that, it would probably result in a fair amount of tanks for UP, but who knows?
BTW, when I was a wee lad, a significant amount of the sugar beet production in the Imperial Valley headed north on those gons with the added sides, heading I think to the Santa Maria area. Even though the Holly Sugar plant worked around the clock, they couldn’t handle all of the output. A sugar beet field was a great place to lose a baseball, at least until the beets were pulled.