I’ve posted a pictorial account of my recent Nevada-Mojave camping trip on my website… Nevada Trip 2009 Part One: http://www.raydunakin.com/Site/Nevada_Trip_2009_Part_One.html I’ve divided this account of my trip into four parts to keep the page load times short. You can click through from page to page, or jump to a specific page. There are many photos of interest to modelers and railfans. A lot of the buildings and equipment I saw would make great subjects for scale models. Some of the interesting sites I visited include the ghost towns of Delamar, Minerva, Palisade, Ruby Hill, Tybo, Warm Springs, and Carrara. I visited several historic small towns and “near-ghosts”, such as Amboy, Death Valley Junction, Pioche, Tonopah, Goldfield, Carlin, Caliente, and Ely. I also explored various abandoned mines and mining camps – the Everett Mines, the Monkeywrench Mine, the Wide Awake Mine, and the St. Lawrence Mine. Many of the sites were once served by railroads, and some still have railroad related structures, equipment or artifacts. And of course, there’s the fabulous Nevada Northern Railway Museum in Ely, where I photographed and videotaped 2-8-0 #93 in action and at the station. I’ve added a page for vintage machinery and vehicles: http://www.raydunakin.com/Site/Vintage_Machinery.html Here you’ll find detailed photos of some of the interesting old mining equipment I’ve seen, including an amazing steam-powered drilling rig built in the late 1800’s. There’s also a battered International Harvester dump truck, and a small John Deere crawler-type tractor, plus an aerial bucket tram, mine lifts, ore cars, and a horse-drawn ore wagon. Along the way I encountered and photographed a lot of wildlife, including bats, lizards, deer, pronghorn antelope, and a herd of rare bighorn sheep. The weirdest site I visited was a 3000’ wide nuclear sinkhole, site of the 1968 Project Faultless underground nuclear bomb test. It’s very strange to walk around over Ground Ze
Thank you so much for sharing your wonderful photographs with us. I briefly visited Jerome Az a few years ago and found bits and pieces of mining equipment all over the place. I wish I had photograhed some of it at the time. Really looking forward to more of your photos.
Tony
UK railfan
Thanks for sharing the photos - very interesting. I believe the dump truck is from the 1950’s or early 1960’s, but am not an expert so corrections are welcome. Believe the John Deere crawler tractor is from the same time frame. Based on pictures I’ve seen, at that time JD designed their crawler tractors by taking the wheels off a farm tractor, putting caterpillar treads on it, and called it done. The sheet metal was pretty much identical between wheeled tractors and crawlers, so if you find a book with a wheeled tractor in it that looks about the same, odds are that the crawler was built that same year.
RAY; Isn’t the picture of the two UP bridges near Palisade, Nv the site of the old WP bridge that was derailment demolished several months ago? Isn’t the newer looking bridge the replacement? Any signs of the replacement work or was it all cleaned up?
Good catch, blue streak 1 ! I was wondering the same thing myself - if that would be included - as I read through Ray’s narrative and description.
But I’m afraid not. First, I’m pretty sure that the photos of the replacement bridge sections - which were posted by Chad Thomas then and later on - depicted a bridge that was going to be a pre-cast concrete deck girder-type on similar, with most of the bridge belwo the track level. The western bridge in Ray’s photo is a through steel truss, with older piers/ abutments, too, which are not at all consistent with the nature and type of the replacement bridge. Further, the depicted pair of bridges are about 1,400 ft. = 1/4 mile south of the derailment site, which is where the western track [only] again crosses the Humboldt River, at the other end of the tunnel through the hillside that the photographer is standing on. This is one of those situations where the western railroad’s track took a shortcut across an ‘oxbow’ loop of a river, with a tunnel through the mountain on the inside of the ‘loop’ or U-bend, and a bridge over the river on each end of the tunnel. The eastern railroad’s locating engineer - at the other / northen end of its tunnel - elected not to cross the river again, but instead to turn a little further to the east and to stay on the southerly bank of the Humboldt River for a little while longer.
Interestingly, if you click on Ray’s link for Palisade, NV in ‘Part Three’ of this website, at:
Paul, you’re correct. The two through-truss bridges are south of the tunnels. The derailment occurred on the north side, apparently just as the train was entering the west-bound tunnel. The tunnel has a large chunk broken out on one side of the portal, and a long scrape along the tunnel wall on the other side. The damaged bridge was maybe a hundred yards or so north of the tunnel. I did get a photo of the new bridge. I don’t have it online at the moment but I’ll try to post to this evening.
Here’s the new bridge: 