Western Railroad Discussion > End of the Mina Branch?

Yahoo News reports that the Hawthorne Nevada Army Base is on the latest list of base closures.

This will undoubtably bring the end to the branch east of Wabuska.

With only a few shippers at Appian and Wabuska; this might give UP an excuse to close down the whole thing.

John Maky
spdonner1@sbcglobal.net

You beat me to the post John. As soon as I heard that Hawthorne Army Depot was slated to close I figured there was no reason for UP to go past Wabuska. There was still a fair amount of tank car business at Wabuska about 3 years ago. I wonder how much now?

That's got to be devastating to the small town of Hawthorne but, I think the Ammo storage and disposal site has been in considerable decline over the last several years. Has it been quite some time since the Local has gone all the way to Hawthorne? I saw a few cars on spurs near Wabuska when I last passed through about three weeks ago.

Didn't the feds buy the line past Wabuska and operate it themselves? I guess one way to look at it will be the amount of ammo and whatever hauled out of there should increase service for a while.

Here is the line in better days---1984 Northbound from Mina taken just South of Luning.

---

Folks in Hawthorne were waiting for the shoe to fall and I think most were resigned to the outcome. There are about 250 civilian employees still working there - a huge loss in jobs when you consider the whole population of Mineral county is less than 5,000 souls. Most of what is done there now is rendering old munitions safe. The explosive is removed, processed, then sold to the mining industry. The shell itself is scrapped out, but unfortunatly little (none?) goes out by rail. On the bright side, the cleanup of this huge facility will requre a lot of people, a lot of time and probably some opportunities for the railroad. I was up there two weeks ago and there was no railroad activity, but there were three loaded gons of scrap waiting to go out. In my own humble opinion, this branch, even as far as Wabuska, will not last long after the bases closes.

Lets buy it, extend it down back to Mojave, and sell it to BNSF to get traffic up north!

I was following the Wabuska Job for several months last year. My son and I were trying to put enough material together to do a Winterail show about the Mina and Fallon Branches. Almost impossible when they used the same SD-40/SD-40T-2 combo for six months.

Traffic then was as follows...

An unknown loader at Appian (Silver Springs) was getting about 5 covered gons 3 days a week. They were being loaded with something they were scraping off one of the nearby dry lakes.

The wood treatment plant at Appian would periodically get a mty centerbeam spotted to go out w/a load of that copper-treated lumber.

At Wabuska, they would spot 1-3 carloads of grain a week at the loadout where the depot used to be.

I think they're closed down now; but the plastic company at Wabuska was getting 5-6 centerflows of plastic pellets a week.

Only once during that period did a ammo train go to Thorn/Hawthorne. Once we found out it went down; my son camped out for three days waiting for it to return. He got several shots of it. Haven't heard of another one since.

I went to Hawthorne on several occasions; and almost always got the US Army switcher somewhere along the public road. Seems the crew went to work daily shuttling cars around the facility. They would go off duty and go across the Hwy 95 crossing about 1530.

I don't remember which one actually did it, but some US Government agency rebuilt the track RR east of Fort Churchill. All the UP milepost markers also sport a US Army milepost number which decrease as the UP mileage increase. Thorn yard is smaller than SP days; but fully rebuilt. Only the floor of the Thorn depot remains; but the Army put up a station sign.

The job was going on duty M/W/F Sparks at 0800. He would usually inform Omaha-76 if he was going down the branch when he locked in at the R-Max facility at Fernley. It was a coin toss if he worked R-Max or the branch first.

John Maky
spdonner1@sbcglobal.net

Why give-up so quickly? Why not have Sierra Pacific Power build a huge coal-fired power plant on the Army Base property to fill the need for electric power in the West, and haul all the Utah or Wyoming coal in by rail? Sounds like a good deal for everyone to me!

Here is a photo taken of the SP in Mina during the summer of 1978. Not a good photo but one of historic importance it seems.

JMW
http://www.arizona-rails.com

---