So, I'm trying to get a handle on the Inside gateway basically from keddie wye north. I'd also like a historical overview, but I can't find a good explination on the web. most of what I'm seeing is Western pecific and ends at Bieber. I was following the line on Google maps and it gets confusing. Theres a branch that appears north of bieber that runs west and south, then branches again, at st route 89. On branch heads south along 89, the other branch hooks up with 89 further west and ends up at a junction with the UP (SP) at Mt. Shasta. What's wierd though is that state route 89 branches off of 70 right at the keddie wye. So from the perspective of a person in a car, this is backtracking. What is all this. I haven't gone back to follow the line up to Klamath, but I was hoping there was a good explination of what I was seeing. To bad google didn't have any aireal shots of the area.
Kay, now I'm up by Tulelake and there appears to be a crossing of roads at state route 139 and Great Northern Rd. what am I seeing here? Following this new line west, it connectes with a north-south route at US395. Now I'm really lost. What's going north south at US 395? It would be awesome if some railraod historians could take google maps and plot out raillines with descriptions.
OK, the 395 line ends up in reno which makes sense and parallels the inside gateway up to Klamath falls. What the heck?
Yoho- You are actually looking at a few different railroads here! First off...the branch that appears north of Bieber and heads west and then south along Highway 89...and on to Mt. Shasta City...you are looking at a short line, originally known as the McCloud River Railroad, currently (since 1992) the McCloud Railway Company. Anything and everything you ever want to know about this railroad, plus a whole lot more, can be found on the following website: http://www.trainweb.org/mccloudrails Look at the Maps and Along the Line section for maps of the McCloud River/McCloud Railway. The basic story of the Inside Gateway goes as follows: James J. Hill and his family pushed their Great Northern west from the Twin Cities to the shores of Puget Sound by the close of the 19th century. Hill dreamed of extending his railroad south into California, and during the first decade of the 20th century he tried to do just that. Hill first focused his efforts west of the Cascades, but he found himself blocked at every turn by a rival railroad magnate named Edward Henry Harriman, who at the time controlled both the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads. Harriman considered California as his territory, and he was as determined to keep Hill out of California as Hill was to get into the state. Hill managed to push a subsidiary line as far south as Eugene before finding himself bottled in. Around 1908 Hill shifted his gaze east of the Cascades, which touched off the last great railroad war in the western US. Harriman and Hill were both blasting new railroad grades down opposite sides of the Deschutes River Canyon. The two railroads harrassed each other as much as they could, but most of the actual fighting took place in courtrooms. Harriman's death put an end to the conflict, and the two railroads completed a joint line into Bend, OR in 1912. The Great Northern finally pushed south from Bend in 1926, with Klamath Falls reached in 1927. In the meant the Western Pacific started building a railroad line north from Keddie. The Southern Pacific had controlled all north-south rail traffic moving between California and Oregon since they completed their first north-south line at Ashland, OR in 1887. It would take the combined efforts of three railroads to finally break this monopoly- the Great Northern formed the northern link, the Western Pacific formed the central link, and the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe filled in as the third railroad, extending from their interchanges with the WP in the Stockton area and at other points around the greater San Francisco bay and Sacramento River Delta areas south as far as San Diego. However, a bunch of new construction was required to actually make this three railroad situation work. GN contruction crews headed southeast from Klamath Falls, while Western Pacific crews started north from Keddie, CA. GN and WP initially planned to meet at Lookout Junction, which is several miles north of Nubieber; however, WP's construction budget expired for the last time at Nubieber, and GN was forced to fill in the gap. The three railroads thus completed their north-south line to compete with the SP. I have some of this information, plus a detail about how the McCloud River came to connect with the GN, on the following page: http://www.trainweb.org/mccloudrails/History/History04.html You will need to scroll down the page a ways to get to the part about the GN/WP inside gateway and the McCloud's involvement. The other railroad you are seeing, the one that runs north from Reno along Highway 395...here you are seeing a couple different railroads. First off, let us start in Reno. In the late 1880's the Nevada-California-Oregon Railroad started north from Reno with big plans to build a narrow guage railroad from there to the Columbia River, with branchlines running to a couple key cities on the west side of the Cascades. The N-C-O struggled north over the next several decades, with their construction budget expiring for the last time at Lakeview, OR, a few miles over the Oregon state line. By this point the narrow guage era was over, and the N-C-O settled down to several years of unprofitable existence. To complicate things the railroad found itself with some standard guage competition...the Western Pacific mainline paralleled the N-C-O for many miles, from Beckworth Pass north to roughly the Herlong area, and the Southern Pacific's Fernley & Lassen railroad (which ran from a connection with SP's transcontinental mainline at Fernley, NV, then north along the western shore of Pyramid Lake before turning west into California and running through Susanville to Westwood, CA) crossed the N-C-O at a point known as Wendel. Arond 1917 the N-C-O sold everything south of where they crossed the WP main to the WP...the WP abandoned the portion of the line paralleling their mainline south to Beckworth Pass, built a new connection tying the line in with their mainline at the pass, and then standard guaged and reworked the rest of the line south to Reno. This trackage became WP's Reno branch. N-C-O struggled on with the rest of their system for a decade or two longer before selling out to SP. Here is where things get interesting. SP originated a LOT of lumber and agricultural traffic in western Oregon that was destined for the east. However, in order to get this traffic there the SP had to move in south all the way to Roseville, CA, before heading east. SP long desired a shortcut to the east, but never did have the money or the ability to make it happen. In the mid-1920's the SP finally could achieve this goal, and they set out to do so. In looking at available infastructure they noted that by combining the existing Oregon California & Eastern from Klamath Falls to Sprague River, OR, with the N-C-O from Lakeview to Wendel and then the Fernley & Lassen from Wendel to Fernley they could complete this line shortcut, with the only new construction needed being a relatively short piece between Sprague River and Lakeview. SP's timing sucked, however, as GN also hoped to buy the OC&E at the same time, and in the end the ICC awarded the OC&E to both the GN and SP. SP then did the next best thing, building a new railroad from Klamath Falls southeast to a junction with the N-C-O at Alturas, CA. This line- built by SP subsidiary Modoc Northern Railroad- ran parallel to and to the south of the GN line southeast from Klamath Falls for quite a while. A little past the town of Merrill, OR, the GN line made a sharp right turn and headed due south; the new SP line crossed the GN line at grade at that point (known as Stronghold). From Stronghold the GN continued more or less due south to the WP connection at Nubieber, while the SP line trended southeast to the connection with the N-C-O at Alturas. The resulting shortcut created by the SP became known as the Modoc Line. The Modoc Line served as the shortcut it was built as for a good many years before economics finally closed it in the 1980's. The Modoc line ran on again, off again, depending on the whims of various managements, for the next decade or so; the end finally came around 1999, when UP closed the line as a through route. The middle section- from a little south of Alturas to Wendel- came out two or three years ago. Lumber and mining traffic kept the line between Alturas and Lakeview an active branchline until 1986, when SP sold to line off to the Lake County Government. Lake County contracted operations out to the Great Western Railroad for a few years before taking over direct operations as the Lake County Railroad. The remaining portion of the ex-SP Klamath Falls-Alturas line remained a UP branch until last November, when UP leased the line to a new shortline, the Modoc Northern. To sum things up...if you start in Klamath Falls and head southeast you should see two parallel railroad lines, at first spaced a fair distance apart but gradually coming closer together. The northernmost of the lines in the ex-GN part of the Inside Gateway, while the southern part is the ex-SP Modoc Line. These two cross at Stronghold, with the SP line continuing to the southeast and the GN turning due south. If you follow the GN south you will see that line splitting off and heading west- it is the McCloud Railway Company, which operates from Mt. Shasta City east to the GN connection at Lookout Junction, with the branchline to Burney paralleling Highway 89 south. The GN line continues to Nubieber, where it junctioned with the WP. The WP line continued south from there, running along the eastern shore of Lake Almanor before connecting with the mainline at Keddie. You should see a rail line branching off of this line, running west along the north shore of Lake Almanor- that is another shortline, the Almanor Railroad- which has been mothballed for a year now, but rumors say it may be reactivated at some point. Maybe. Following the ex-SP line southeast from the the GN crossing at Stronghold, you will reach the connection with the ex-N-C-O at Alturas. This line runs 55 miles north to Lakeview and then south to Wendel. If you scroll south along Highway 395 you will come to Wendel- the original N-C-O line south from Wendel should not show up, as it has been abandoned for the better part of 8 decades now- but you should see it connect with an east-west railroad. This line runs 22 miles west to Susanville, CA, where it ends- this is another line that is now out of service and is likely to be salvaged soon. If you follow the line east you should run into a connection with the ex-WP mainline just across the Nevada line. The connection is known as Flannigan, and it is where the Fernley & Lassen crossed the WP main. In the 1960's SP abandoned the Flannigan-Fernley portion of this line in favor of trackage rights over the WP mainline from Flannigan to Winnemucca. You should scroll southwest along the WP main...somewhere around Herlong you will cross the point where the N-C-O crossed the WP main. You should be able to scroll down the WP main until you reach Beckworth Pass, at which point the WP main takes off heading due west across the Sierra Valley while another line takes off to the southeast, eventually ending up in Reno...this is the ex-WP Reno branch, formerly the southern end of the N-C-O. Back to the Inside Gateway...GN eventually merged into the Burlington Northern, and then in 1983 Union Pacific purchased the Western Pacific. During the WP-GN years as many as four or five trains each way per day changed hands at Nubieber; however, by the mid 1980's this was down to one train each way per day, and sometimes not even that. There was a period in the late 1980's/early 1990's when it appeared that the line might be done for, especially after a tunnel fire severed the line just north of Keddie. After some deliberation UP elected to re-build and reopen the line. BN merged into BNSF, and then BNSF purchased the Nubieber-Keddie portion of the line from UP as a condition of the UP-SP merger. BNSF gained trackage rights from Keddie down to Stockton. BNSF is back to running 4-5 trains each way per day up and down the Inside Gateway. I am starting to ramble here, so I will cut this off. In the meantime, I will direct you to my other website, which features the railroads of Oregon's high desert country: http://www.trainweb.org/highdesertrails You will find much, much more to this story on the BNSF & Predecessors, SP, UP, OC&E, Lake County/Great Western, and Nevada-California-Oregon pages of that website. Jeff Moore Elko, NV
Yoho- I created the attached map just now, using a map from the Nationalmap.gov builder site with some photoshop editing. The major place names are labeled; you will have to use this in conjunction with a highway map to see how everything fits that way. Reno is just off the map at the bottom right- the black lines are state boundaries, with Oregon across the top, California to the lower left, and Nevada to the lower right. I will refer you to my High Desert Rails page (http://www.trainweb.org/highdesertrails) for maps of the lines north of where this map cuts off. This map makes a couple assumptions- it shows the pre-merger railroads (GN, SP, WP). You should be able to use this map, in conjunction with my rambles above, to get yourself where you need to go. I hope this helps, and if I have confused you please let me know so that I can hopefully explain myself better! Jeff Moore Elko, NV
Wow Jeff, thankyou very very much, that's exactly the description that Google wasn't giving me. I feel dumb with regards to the modoc line, because it came up in a different thread and my brain just didn't process it as relating to this. And McCloud has come up on and off regulalry here and now I understand where it is. It's funny to discuss places and really people without really understanding where it is. It can even occur for the Class 1s. I also now have a better understanding of Santa Fe operations then I did before. I've bookmarked your 2 sites. That's exactly what I was looking for. I'd gotten most of the railroad fight aspect between Harriman and Hill off the web, but no context. So few sites seem to include maps. I managed to follow google up to near the Dalles where the inside gateway starts with only a handful of photos. All of this is really interesting to me, Previous to moving to SoCal, I grew up in Chicago and then moved to Oregon and I had so little appreciation for the bredth of railroading around me. In Chicago, I was still young and with the Burlingotn Racetrack, the C&NW to Provisio and points west and the Soo/Wisconsin Central, Soo/CP within walking to 15 mintues driving. there's no reason to expand your horizons. In Portland, I had too many responsibilities and too little money. And even when in Oregon, I tried to get into western railroading beyond Portland, I guess I just thought of the major famous artieries, Cajon/Santa Fe, Sunset Route/SP, Donner Pass/SP and Feather River/SP, GN/NP/SP&S transcon. And of course I wanted to see Tehachapi. Now that I can take Tehachapi for granted, I'm angry at all the facinating rails I missed when I lived in Oregon. I mean, I could have railfanned a lot that I didn't. I also have a good idea of just how much I missed during my trip up to Feather River and Donner last fall. To ramble on a little more, one of the most facinating aspects of railroading to me is how much a part of history and society it really is. A railfanning trip can take you to all the beautiful corners of our great country to see history that you might never have seen. It makes me wish I could just quit my job, buy an RV and see it all. I'd say a train ticket, but then I'd only see very little of it. It also disappoints me that we don't see more historical books that really discuss the railroads on library and bookstore shelves. Sure, I can order many online or at Hobby shops and everyone should, but those tend to be more specific to the railroad only. What I wouldn't give for Steven A. Ambrose or the like to give a take on some of these locales. He did do the Transcontinental Railroad and I recommend it to any and everybody. I've been trying to find some good California and Oregon History books in general, maybe I need to start looking harder. Barns and Noble is good for big picture books, but while I like pictures, I want to read about it too. On a completely different note, This whole series of tracks in particular the abandoned Modoc line makes one wonder what could have happened if Union Pacific hadn't gobbled up SP, or if SPSF had become reality, or if another player had been around to make a play when UP had all it's problems a few years ago. From a modelling perspective, my freelance line is a cobbled together assortment of rail that in reality is shortlines, regionals and abandonments. Milwaukee road and others. I'm toying with the idea that in the year UP had it's major issues (was that 2002? I can't remember? or even earlier. It happened twice.) My ficticious company was able to grab control of Donner pass and most of the original Central pacific and whatever other rails I need to make this work and in the process gain a new transcon company with hooks into the powder river basin. I think now that it will also grab control of the Modoc line as it was and relay rails. I'm not gonna model it all, I'm just trying to pull some semilogical locales under the umbrella of the company to justify links to the outside world. To a third player, the Modoc would seem to offer a conneciton up to Oregon. and the Portland&Western/Wilamette&Pacific. Perhaps also connections to CORP. My railroad would have a valid transcon into the bay area and up to Portland. In reality, the Port of Portland is of course desperate for renewed river traffic. Having an additional connection to the east could bolster that. and with P&W/W&P there are links all the way out to Astoria. I could if I wanted to suggest that one of the many Oregon coast deep water ports was being expanded. Similar to the way Mexico and others are looking to create an expanded port south of Tijuana. I suppose one could also look south to Eureka or Fort Bragg for such a connection as well. Or even all of those locations. With the push for NWP passenger service, there could be financial incentives for a frieght railroad to come in and help offset costs. OK, I'm done now. That spiraled out of control, but it was a fun trip.
You are welcome! I don't know if you know or not, but Oso Publishing Company produced a fine book about the Modoc Line a couple years ago. They reprinted the book not too long ago, and they may still have some copies left...if they don't you might try some other dealers. http://www.osorail.com The book the The Modoc Line by Jack Bowden and Tom Dill. One of the best general books about Pacific Northwest railroading that I know of is Main Streets of the Northwest, by T.O. Repp. Volume 1 covered Oregon, parts of Northern California, and Idaho. It is a good book, lots of pictures and good historical text. The book talks about a forthcoming Volume 2 that was to cover Washington and western Canada; to my knowledge Volume 2 never got to the publishing stage, which is unfortunate. Voume 1 makes for a good read, though- I highly recommend it. There are good books about railroad history out there...you just won't find them at Ma Barnes and Pop Nobles. Jeff Moore Elko, NV
BNSF now calls this the Gateway sub, so you can do a few searches on that name. The reason that there isn't much on the Inside Gateway is that it is still largely nowheresville. It is still largely dark territory, i.e. running by train order, not signals. You can also try Microsoft Terraserver which has both older topo maps and aerial photos. You can follow the track on the highest magnification on the aerial maps, starting at Keddie or something. I don't know how it came to pop up, but I just found this thread after being up in that area in the beginning of June. I've got some pictures of various spots up and down the line, certainly not complete by any shot; PM me if interested.
