Seeking the T&G
It took us a fair bit longer to get packed out of the hotel room in Tonopah today, and indeed, we just barely made the 11 AM check-out time. Leaving Tonopah took even longer because the ROL card-lock gas pumps (off the main road) weren't working. That's a shame because they were 20 cents/gallon cheaper than the ones on Main Street.
We took a long time getting home: nearly eight hours. That's because we spent the day looking for remnants of the Tonopah & Goldfield Railroad, which connected Goldfield and Tonopah to Mina, Nevada, where it connected to the Southern Pacific (Carson & Colorado) Railroad.
This is the base of the turntable, on which steam locomotives were turned at the T&G's roundhouse and servicing facility at Millers, north of Tonopah. There is a rest area on US-6/95 at Millers. While the old railroad facilities are less than 1000 m west of the highway, they are invisible due to the lay of the land.
We spent a long time recording footage for a future Railway Legends, Myths, and Stories, including a portion with me standing in the bottom of this turntable pit, after we experimented and found that I could indeed get out of the pit once I climbed into it. It was really strange standing on the pad at the center of the pit where the turntable used to rotate, because it was a massive echo chamber.
After our recordings of the T&G facilities at Millers, we continued north, making numerous stops to photograph remnants of the T&G right of way. The railroad was abandoned and torn up in 1947, but many things decay quite slowly in the desert, and it's often quite easy to see where the railroad once ran. Much of the T&G runs parallel to US-95 and is easy to spot, but in other places it veers away from the main highway and it takes some searching on back roads to find the traces.
I'm not going to share any more of the photos tonight because we got home after sunset and I'm really worn out. Indeed, I'm going to try and take most of Monday off if I can. I should have scheduled that in advance. It's a lot harder for me to recover from these trips than it was twenty years ago.
We took a long time getting home: nearly eight hours. That's because we spent the day looking for remnants of the Tonopah & Goldfield Railroad, which connected Goldfield and Tonopah to Mina, Nevada, where it connected to the Southern Pacific (Carson & Colorado) Railroad.
This is the base of the turntable, on which steam locomotives were turned at the T&G's roundhouse and servicing facility at Millers, north of Tonopah. There is a rest area on US-6/95 at Millers. While the old railroad facilities are less than 1000 m west of the highway, they are invisible due to the lay of the land.
We spent a long time recording footage for a future Railway Legends, Myths, and Stories, including a portion with me standing in the bottom of this turntable pit, after we experimented and found that I could indeed get out of the pit once I climbed into it. It was really strange standing on the pad at the center of the pit where the turntable used to rotate, because it was a massive echo chamber.
After our recordings of the T&G facilities at Millers, we continued north, making numerous stops to photograph remnants of the T&G right of way. The railroad was abandoned and torn up in 1947, but many things decay quite slowly in the desert, and it's often quite easy to see where the railroad once ran. Much of the T&G runs parallel to US-95 and is easy to spot, but in other places it veers away from the main highway and it takes some searching on back roads to find the traces.
I'm not going to share any more of the photos tonight because we got home after sunset and I'm really worn out. Indeed, I'm going to try and take most of Monday off if I can. I should have scheduled that in advance. It's a lot harder for me to recover from these trips than it was twenty years ago.