I drove through Hawthorne, NV last week and spent some time driving around many public roads throughout the Army Ammunition Plant that were probably secure military roads some years back. Hawthorne is a huge ammunition storage depot that covers a vast area on both sides of the main highway. I’ve flown over this depot on several occasions on commercial flights and from the air it is huge. It looks even bigger from ground level.
There wasn’t much in the way of tall fences in the areas that we could see so I’m not sure how much of the base is used today. We did see a couple of flatbed semi’s coming in that had low tarped loads with “explosive” placards on the trailers so it is used for something.
There are railroad tracks that run throughout the base and it appears from what I saw there and from a Google Earth view that the tracks run by pretty much every bunker and building. It’s pretty impressive.
I took photos while I was there of some of the trackage, a locomotive and several freight cars. The weather was dark and gray and then started to rain so the lighting was not optimum. Hopefully the photos will give somebody a bit of detail or inspiration that they were looking for.
Note that all cars had military reporting marks. On to the photos:
The Hawtorne facility has hundreds of miles of track. This industry provided many thousands of car movements on SP’s Mina branch, particularly during periods of armed hostility. That branch seemed to go “nowhere” after the Tonopah and Goldfield gold industry collapsed, but the ammunition plant provided a lot of railroad traffic thereafter. The modeling implications are mindboggling.
The one thing that may not be obvious to folks from the more crowded part of the country/world…
Not only does Hawthorne sprawl over a really vast area, but the facility is located in the approximate heart of nowhere, surrounded by miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles.
OTOH, it could make an interesting model for someone who wants to mix industrial tramway operations with placarded-car interchange. Now, where’s that exploding boxcar plan???
Isolation is good in case something goes KABOOM. Although I have lived just a few miles from the Port Chicago-Concord Naval Weapons Depot for almost all my life, I feel just a bit safer now that it is closing. This place did go KABOOM in WWII, but fortunately the population in the area was a tiny fraction it is today.
Neat place, spent the night once while traveling thru from Vegas, on my way to Reno via “Bodie CA”
I like Nevada, something about being out there does me good. The lonely desolation, Art Bell and Area 51, Ely ghost train and that “dusty Winnemucca road”. Goldfield, Austin, Tonapah all offer great modeling examples.
Photo 3 is of the loadout where explosives are loaded on RR cars. There are several of these but not all can be seen from the highway. At the north end as you pass the facility they have stored about twenty 16" naval guns for the Iowa class battleships that are all decommissioned now. This facility probably has more old naval ammunition then any base in the world. They have thousands of rounds of 5" 38 munitions a gun not even used by the Navy any longer.Most of the 16" battleship ammunition is stored here. At one time they sold all of the base housing for 1.00 each all you had to do was move it off base. Its been a couple of years since I was last there but they still had a couple of the base housing units there. Several of the old housing units were moved into the town of Hawthorne and have been turned into some pretty decent housing. Many were torn down and the lumber reused for other projects.
It is to me thousands of acres and dozens of miles of bunkers, installations, etc. The eyeball cannot take in the view all at once from horizion to horizion.
One good thing about it’s location is you really weally gotta want to get there to make it that far. The Land around there is really bad to the west, south and east.
If something did go boom, no one will ever know or hear it.
Great pictures. But you should try continuing north towards Reno, the view along that valley cannot be recorded easily with camera.
I have aboslutey no idea what goes on there, but it is right up near the top of important installations in the USA. Important enough to keep mouth shut and not talk about this place for me anyhow.
To get to it from the south requires patience and careful following of your map. One wrong turn will put you either in Death Valley, Cascades or east into nowhere.
To most first time travelers Nevada is a vast nothingness seperating them from points A and B. And the area around Hawthorne is high quality nothingness. But Nevada is also a land of paradox, in fact Nevada means snow clad. At an enterance on the south side of the ammo plant is a sign stating, U.S. Navy submarine warfare training station; In Nevada?
The railroad originally serving the area was built as the 3’ narrow gauge Carson & Colorado going south from Mound House, nv to Keeler ca. When a major backer inspected the line on completion in 1880 he said the railroad was ether built 300 miles to long or 300 years to soon.
The SP took over the railroad in 1900 and soon standard gauged it from the Overland mainline at Hazen to Mina. Recently the line has been pulled up south of Hawthorne.
You guys have some great info on this base. I never would have considered that they stored the ammo and the guns from the Iowa class battleships there. Thanks for that bit of info, passengerfan.
The only reason that I passed through there is that I wanted to see it. I travelled around a lot of NV on this trip and hit a couple of the Area 51 gates near Rachel on the east side of the test range, the Toluca Peak Electronic Warfare test center gate and the Nevada Test Site gates. Didn’t make it to the Tonopah gate, though. I did get questioned by Navy Security Police at Fallon as to why I was taking pictures of an F-18 and a delta wing aircraft that were in the air over the base. Got to see a Predator taking off and flying over Creech AFB, too. That was pretty cool.
Still to do on my next trip (if I can afford the gas!) is Tonopah, the Project Faultless ground zero blast site in northern Nevada outside the test range and the Lunar Crater near Project Faultless where the Apollo astronauts trained for the moon walks.
A tidbit for others thinking about visiting that area, there is a lake that is to the east of a two lane highway. Along the west shore of that lake the road is extremely tight for two 18 wheelers passing and occasionally the Tractor trailer needs to drift over the yellow line to clear the water’s edge I believe.
If yer already up there, keep going to what I believe is Fallon and then Reno/Donner. It is worth the trip. Just be careful to remember the chain law and weather situation.
If the Iowa Ammunition is stored up there in Hawthorne, they would need to maintain it in a ready condition dont they? Last I hear the 4 Iowas are maintained in a sort of a ready state if need be. Maybe it is hearsay or urban legends however I think those Battleships carry a very large amount of Ammunition. I dont think they will build warships like that ever again.
I do have a stupid question. Based on a Arms plant experience with load delivery, does ALL activity cease upon warning alarm whenever one of those big bunkers are open? The reason I ask is that every so often some crew will enter a small bunker to get work done to make ammo and nobody moves while that light is on. But this is from a tiny plant complex with itty bitty bunkers compared to this Western Paradise to Military Boom.
Pardon me while I put on my military disaster control specialist hat…
Each bunker has a circle of danger around it, radius determined by the type and quantity of explosives stored there. For obvious reasons, on a disaster control map of a base each bunker is assumed to be filled to capacity, even if all it actually contains is a single box of .50 cal belted cartridges (unlike the 16"/50 and 5"/38, the M2 machine gun is NOT obsolete.) When a bunker is opened, everything within its circle of danger is shut down and evacuated.
As big as Hawthorne is, it would be entirely possible to have several bunkers open, so far apart, and so far from the main part of the base, that most folks wouldn’t even be aware of it unless they were directly involved.
I can’t help but wonder just how stable that, ‘Made during WWII,’ ammunition really is. Brings to mind the major danger in abandoned mines throughout the American west - deteriorated dynamite. (That little damp spot under the case is probably nitroglycerine. Don’t cause ANY vibrations, good or otherwise!)
Just as strange is the Nuclear Submarine training base outside Twin Falls Idaho where former President Jimmy Carter graduated from.
To the south of Goldfield on the way to Las Vegas one passes the Nuclear weapon test sight at Mercury I believe it is called. Use to be dozens of buses from Las Vegas every morning to the facility and leaving the facility every afternoon. At one a few years ago I travelled the highway between Las Vegas and Sparks twice weekly for over four months so got to see and ask a lot of questions.
Tonapah has a Casino downtown named the MISPAH not to many people know what it stands for. My mother had a ring given to her by my father with the same word, well actually it is not a word but meaning. Anyone know the meaning of the word MISPAH. It’s not rail realated but the ring I now have was given to my mother by my father in 1942 and was made from a solid gold nugget my father found and had a Seattle Jeweler make into a ring. My mother did not wear it often as it was to soft.
I might mention that it is not unusual to have fighter planes from both the Navy and Air Force make v
While we’re on this subject I have another question for those in the know - many, but it seems not all, of the buildings have tall rods on each corner that are probably two or three times the height of the buildings themselves. The larger buildings often seem to have even more rods. Are these lightning arrestors?
Lightning arrestors? Ground Poles to pull static from air? Gas/hazard sensors? Even Optical viewers similar to those on current M1 Battle tanks today? They could be taking a bathroom fume out of there. Who knows?
Maybe they are network antennas tied into the main control center or other place if there is one.
Anything is possible. Maybe they stick it there to make civilians go hmmmm…
I think once there was a Titan that exploded and the warhead bus system blew the cap off the silo and landed intact with the nuclear weapons nearby. The responders threw a tarp over it and called it destroyed equiptment or something during the problem. Everyone bought it.
During the cleanup following the fuel explosion that destroyed that Titan (initiated by a dropped wrench, IIRC,) some components were removed from the site on flatbed trailers. The technologically-challenged media types made a huge, froth-at-the-mouth, whoop-de-do about the fact that the blue transport cans were stenciled, DO NOT DROP.[(-D][(-D]
Why the hysterical laughter? Anyone in aerospace maintenance could have told them that EVERYTHING used for shipping sensitive aircraft parts is stenciled DO NOT DROP. That includes everything from the one quart can holding a small instrument (control panel variety) to the rather larger cans that protect completely-assembled aircraft engines. The specific cans in the Titan case were T56 engine cans, normally used to transport the turboshaft engines used by C-130 aircraft (Which, at the time, were based at the Titan’s home station.)
Of course, the media types were ignorant of that basic fact, and weren’t smart enough to ask. So they came off sounding like the ignorant fearmongers they are!
Pertinence to model railroading? A couple of nice blue engine cans, labeled DO NOT DROP in white, would make a good flat car or gondola load. During the transition era, they would have been shaped differently (shorter and fatter) for piston engines, and would have been olive drab with DO NOT DROP in black. During my aircraft maintenance career, I saw plenty of both.
Since aircraft engines are large, but light in weight, they would not require a heavy duty car. The biggest modern turbofans would probably be moved on standard-capacity flats.
Chuck (ex-aircraft maintainer, modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Around this area (Carmichael, Antelope, Roseville) you mention Hawthorne to we ‘older’ folks, all we can tell you is that naval ammunition coming from Hawthorne to the port of Oakland during the Vietnam war was the cause of one of the most devastating explosions this area has ever witnessed. One of the naval boxcars carrying the ammunition developed a ‘hot-box’ coming over Donner Pass, and by the time the train entered the Roseville yards, the car was on fire, detonating the ammunition. Which detonated the rest of the ammunition cars and blew the SP Roseville/Antelope yards all to blazes. The town of Antelope was destroyed, the railyard–at that time the largest west of the Mississippi–was decimated, and the blasts were so ferocious that it blew out my bedroom window and knocked my Abyssinian cat off of his perch in the garage–and I was seven MILES from the epicenter. The railyard blew up for something like 12 hours. Newsreel footage of the explosions looked like a WWII bombing run in Germany.
When UP took over SP some years back and was re-configuring the old SP Roseville yards, they came across unexploded ammunition that had buried itself in the ground and been there for years.
Mention “Hawthorne” to us, we just blink a lot, LOL!
I TOLD you about those KABOOMs! In Contra Costa County there was a similar event at Port Chicago during WWII (e.g. Concord Naval Weapons Depot). My dad was busy bombing Germany in a B-17 at the time and getting shot down from AAA. Lots of KABOOMs there too.
