Out & About—The Cajon Pass by freight train

Even before California was admitted to the United States on September 9, 1850, as the thirty-first state, there was great interest in it. After gold was discovered in 1848, starting the California Gold Rush, the population exploded, mostly “immigrants” from the United States. Travel between California and the United States, however, was arduous, time-consuming, and dangerous.

Not until the Transcontinental Railroad was completed from San Francisco to Omaha did travel become reasonably less time-consuming and much less dangerous. The railroads have always been a significant part of the State of California, and although the Eastern railroads are older, their history is no more significant than the California railroads.

Once the Transcontinental Railroad was completed to San Francisco, northern California, people began looking for a way to build a transcontinental railroad into southern California. The competition for the western terminus was between San Diego and Los Angeles. For a while it looked like it would be San Diego when the California Southern Railroad (a subsidiary of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway) built through the Cajon Pass in the early 1880s to connect Barstow and San Diego. Today, however, the Union Pacific Railroad and BNSF Railway use the pass to reach Los Angeles. San Diego is a secondary afterthought.

The interesting Mojave Desert mountain scenery, as well as the many long trains that transit Cajon Pass, make for a fun day of train watching. The video below is a BNSF container train heading east, so the containers mostly likely are fully loaded with cargo from ships docking at the Port of Los Angeles. There are 117 railcars carrying 234 containers. Quite a load up a 2.2 – 3 percent grade. There are two front engines pulling and two rear engines pushing. All four engines have 4,400 horsepower each, for a total of 17,600 horsepower getting these 117 railcars over the Cajon Summit.

With my new high-flying drone and a new-as-of-today 150-600mm lens for my Canon 760D camera, I have plans to return to Cajon Pass for some great pictures and videos, both from the ground and from the sky, to satisfy my thirst for trains in unique places.

Trains—A short history of the Colton Crossing

If you look back at the rich people in history, they pretty much were land barons, newspaper publishers, or railroad tycoons. In some cases, they were all three because many state and federal governments gave free land to people who were willing to build railroads on that land. The only people who could afford to build a railroad were newspaper publishers, so they became land barons and railroad tycoons.

Many of the railroad tycoons, like Leland Stanford (Stanford University) and Cornelius Vanderbilt (Vanderbilt University), are considered now to have been robber barons, a derogatory metaphor of social criticism originally applied to certain late 19th-century American businessmen who used unscrupulous methods to get rich. The robber baron list is long and includes many names familiar to us today from many industries, such as Andrew Carnegie of Carnegie Library fame, Marshall Field of Marshall Field’s, J.P. Morgan of J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil, Charles M. Schwab of Bethlehem Steel.

In San Diego history we have our own personality who made the robber baron list:
John D. Spreckels, making his claim via the water transport, sugar, and railroad businesses. He built the San Diego & Arizona Railway (SD&A) from San Diego to Yuma. It was during my early research into the SD&A for a railroad book that I’m writing that I discovered the Colton Crossing.

The SD&A’s construction costs were said to be underwritten by Spreckels but in actuality were underwritten by the Southern Pacific Railroad (SP). After the transcontinental railroad was completed with the driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory UT in 1869 by the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads, focus shifted to a southern transcontinental route, either from Los Angeles or San Diego to points east. SP was first to market and pretty much dominated Southern California railroad interests until 1883 when the Colton Crossing was built.

Colton Crossing is a railway crossing in Colton CA and the site of one of the most intense frog wars in railroad construction history. A frog is where two railroad lines cross each other, and a frog war often occurred when those two railroad lines belonged to different railroads. In the case of Colton Crossing, the two lines belonged to the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe (AT&SF), trying to gain a foothold in Southern California, and the California Southern Railroad, a subsidiary of the SP.

California Southern’s construction crew was ready to install the frog tracks when an SP locomotive arrived pulling a single freight car, and stopped. The SP engineer drove the train back and forth slowly at the crossing point in order to prevent the California Southern crew from installing the crossing. SP had hired Virgil Earp to guard its tracks in Colton, and he rode in the cab of the SP locomotive.

The citizens of Colton supported SP, but SP had bypassed nearby San Bernardino, leaving its residents upset. Railroads at that time could make or break a community. San Bernardino hoped that the California Southern line would put their city back on the map.

Ultimately, California Southern obtained a court order on August 11, 1883, in its favor but it still took California Governor Robert Waterman’s involvement in ordering the county sheriff to enforce the court order.

On the morning of September 13, events reached a head in a confrontation known as the “Battle of the Crossing.” Citizens from Colton and San Bernardino gathered on either side of the tracks with the SP locomotive between them. Men on both sides carried picks and shovels, as well as revolvers and shotguns. Virgil Earp stood in the gangway between the locomotive cab and tender facing the San Bernardino citizens, revolver in hand. It was believed that the freight car, a gondola, held SP men with rifles and other weapons, crouching below the walls of the car so as not to be seen.

The Colton Crossing in today’s world is very busy with trains from Union Pacific (east-west), BNSF (north-south), Amtrak (Southwest Chief on BNSF tracks and Sunset Limited on UP tracks), and Metrolink (BNSF tracks). In the 2000’s, Colton Crossing got so busy that Union Pacific decided to build a flyover, a bridge over BNSF’s tracks, to alleviate delays for both railroads.

Colton Crossing and the West Colton railroad yard, within a mile of each other, are great places to watch railroad action, and that’s what I did on February 5. Here are some videos of the action I saw just in the three hours I was hanging out.

BNSF southbound on the lower tracks
There are two “helper” engines on the rear,
one of which is a Norfolk Southern engine.

Union Pacific westbound on the upper flyover tracks

Metrolink southbound on the lower tracks

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