Triplex said:
Why does that make me think of Cajon Pass?
Cajon and Los Angeles are the only places in the country where all three railroads operated in close proximity as far as I know, until U.P. bought S.P. and S.F. merged with B.N.
Jeff, there is one place I know of in the country where S.P. ran a double track mainline. That is San Timotao Canyon between Colton and Beuamont on the Yuma Sub. Looking at your traffic desires compared with the prototype, I don't know of anyplace that S.P. handled coal. However Kaiser Steel had the Eagle Mountain iron mine just Northwest of Desert Center 1/2 way between Indio and Blythe. I'm not sure if the mine was opened in the 40's or not. In any event, it would have been late 40's after WW2. However there is no problem with using a little modeler's license to back date the mine to your operational period. In the case of Eagle Mountain, Kaiser Steel built a branch line from the S.P. yard in Indio to the mine 50 miles East. S.P. bought locomotives and a caboose from S.P. They used S.P. ore cars to haul the iron from the mine to the Indio yard. I think the ore cars are the prototype for the MDC ore cars. Basically S.P. would drop empty ore cars at the Indio yard, and pick up loaded cars to take to the Kaiser Steel mill in Fontana. The Eagle Mountain Railroad would drop loaded ore cars in Indio and take the emptys back to the mine for loading. I think on you proposed layout I would make the staging at one end the Indio yard. If you put hidden staging on the other end of the layout, you could then have destinations fro San Bernardino North, including the steel mill. I think the steel mil and the Eagle mountain branch would take too much space to model in your space. San Timotao Canyon would give you an area for country scenery, the North end of the railroad could be Colton and Riverside. If you wanted to do a visible yard, you could do Colton, but it would be very big. I think I would do Colton off scene in hidden staging at the other end of the layout. Corona, Riverside, San Bernardino, and the San Gabriel Valley were the center of the citrus industry in So Cal. There were dozens of citrus packing houses in those towns. I think there might have been cotton being shipped in from Texas and manufactured goods from the Northeast, although most of those would probably have come in on the U.P. or Santa Fe. You could run a fleet of PFE reefers as well as the ore cars on the layout. You would have citrus ranchers ordering tank cars loaded with fuel oil for smudge pots, probably fertilizer would come in by train as well. If you are interrested, you can get a lot of information from
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/citrusmodeling If I got the url correct it is a group that Bob Chaparro started to focus on the citrus industry in So Cal. I guess I've rambled enough.