The Southern Pacific Lines, comprised of the rails of the Southern Pacific Transportation and the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad Companies, join 15 states with over 15,000 route-miles of railroad, the largest percentage of which lies in the Golden State of California. The Los Angeles and West Colton Divisions contain 10 percent or 1500 miles of those routes, spanning from the Arizona border to the central California coast.

The Yuma District is one of five in the West Colton Division; it extends from West Colton, California to Yuma, Arizona. The Yuma Line is the major artery under the control of the District, with the San Bernardino and Riverside branches serving the Inland Empire area while the Calexico, Sandia, El Centro and Yuma Valley Railroad branches support the transportation needs of the Imperial and Yuma Valleys in Arizona and southeastern California.

In the past, the Yuma District has been called the Yuma Subdivision; the SP seems to change the appellation back and forth over time.

What is the purpose of this guidebook? It's to assist the SP rail enthusiast, the railroad modeler, perhaps even the occasional SP employee to have a better sense of feel for the Yuma District and the country through which the railroad passes. It's for the armchair railfan, for the folks who would rather not fight the traffic, the desert, the heat. It's for the railroaders who for whatever reason can't get to the Yuma District, whether because of distance, money, health, or bad tires.

This guidebook attempts to provide an general overview of the railroad as it existed in 1990. I tried to pay attention to detail so that, as I said before, if you're not able to get out and about the Yuma District, that by reading this you'll still get a good feel for the railroad and its physical plant.

The guidelines that are set forth in the following paragraphs are exactly that; these are the rules of observation and reporting that I attempt to follow while researching the railroad. They will also help to explain features of the book and the methods for measurement and recording.

A difficult problem was what to make note of and what to ignore. I hope that I have recalled all the pertinent details and left out most of the chaff. In areas where there is a dense population of railroad features (signals, switches, bridges, grade crossings) this isn't a problem. There is always something to write about and there are plenty of landmarks and points of interest for the reader. But in the stretches of spare country, like between GLAMIS (MP698.1) and CACTUS (MP712.3), there are few landmarks to go by and so I will pay a bit more attention to minor drainages, power lines and dirt roads.

Like many of you, I have spent weekends cruising the Tehachapi Loop, checking out the Lone Pine Branch (Trona Line), waiting atop the Pepper Street Bridge at the east end of the Departure Yard at West Colton, watching the action or the lack thereof. I noticed that many others seemed to do the same thing, and that everyone had their own secrets to successful railfanning.

I found no source of information that really described the railroad at the detail that I desired, especially out in the forbidding reaches of the Yuma Line. So I began to write down everything that I saw or heard, whether from railfans or railroaders. I used a microcassette recorder to capture on tape many bits of information that were too fleeting to stop the car and write down.

In all, compilation of this Guide has cost at least several hundred hours of time in the field, a few dollars in repairs to my car, and probably a failed relationship or two in my personal life.

Being of moderately well-ordered mind, it seems apparent that a sensible method of constructing a Guide is to write one that uses the nearly ubiquitous Milepost as the index. So this Guide starts at the lowest Milepost on a route, and proceeds upward. By definition, this is always eastbound, although it's sometimes less than apparent that the rails are going anywhere near eastbound.

Location names are printed in CAPITAL letters for three reasons. The first reason is that it may be a station or siding and so is called out in the Southern Pacific Western Region Timetable dated October 1987. Second, it may also signify a name of a specific place referred to by either train crews or by the dispatcher. An example of the first instance is "the west switch of North GARNET Siding"; Garnet siding is described in the Timetable. Of course, the third reason is that the reader can see it that much more easily during a quick scan of the manual.

A fine example of the second occurrence is the BLYTHE CROSSING (MP612.9); this is actually where Dillon Road crosses the railroad tracks at the southeast end of Indio. Although not called out in the Timetable, SP crews near the Dillon Road grade crossing will sometimes call out this name where asked for a location by other crews working in the same area. Why? Because along Highway 86, parallel to the railroad, there is a highway sign indicating to automobile drivers and also visible to the train crews, that the town of Blythe is "thataway" down Dillon Road.

Almost all switches not directly coupled into the main track will have a number stenciled on their target. This number refers to the spur that the switch controls and not to the switch itself. Examples of this are the interchange tracks at Niland: The same numbers are on the switch targets at either end of the track (tracks 0592, 0593 or 0594). So technically the switch labeled 0594 at around MP666.9 would be described as "the switch (or turnout) at the west end of 594". But in some cases the spur is single-ended, and therefore there is only one switch target with that number, as exists at the equipment spur 1145 near the west end of Glamis siding. The point is that although the number is specific only to the spur track I will use that number to refer to either the switch or the spur; the text description will (hopefully) clarify the reference.

The Yuma District consists of the Yuma Line and six branch lines that act as feeders. The Yuma Line is the primary portion of track in the District, and certainly the most important freight route and through route for the traffic coming from the west coast and headed to the southeast and east; depending on season, the southern route can be safer, faster and more reliable than the central route through Nevada, Utah and into Colorado.

The guidebook stresses operations on the Yuma Line, with auxiliary chapters on the various branch lines within the District.

The guidebook is organized by milepost: the guide begins with the lowest milepost number and, in the case of the SP, travels eastbound. I have made numerous trips along the right-of-ways in both directions, and I debated at some length as to how I could construct a book that could be read either east to west or west to east. I looked at other types of guides that I have seen in the past; I could see no simple way to present a bi-directional trip log. If you intend to travel the route east to west, then you'll have to read backwards, just like me.

Mileposts along the SP are almost always marked with a milepost sign. Sometimes a trackside signal line pole doubles as the post, but often there is a special pole devoted to milepost duty, sitting all alone, perhaps even on the opposite side of the tracks from the signal line poles. In a few instances, the milepost sign (the number board) is missing, but on these occasions you can usually recognize the post since the lower half of the post itself is painted white. If the whole post is missing, you'll have to rely upon your odometer or upon the "count the poles" method.

The signal line poles along the right-of-way support power, control and signal wires that carry the commands that the dispatcher issues to operate the railroad. There are, on average, about thirty-three poles per mile. Depending on the soil type, weather conditions and such there may be more or less; the minimum number I have counted between mileposts is twenty-five and the maximum nearly forty.

While wandering around along the right-of-way, I will often use these poles to estimate my position with respect to the mileposts. For instance, if the number of poles per mile has been averaging 30, the distance covered by three poles is about 0.1 mile. This comes in handy when you find that your odometer is inaccurate or there are few culverts or bridges with stenciled markings indicating their locations.

I could have used pole count for the distances as described in this book: for instance, the bridge at MP673.7 I could have described as MP673+27, where 27 is the number of poles east of the 673 milepost marker. Although it might have been of some added ease for a few people, I realized that the majority would prefer the locations given in actual miles, so that most could consult maps without necessarily having to have been there. However, some of the distances I measured in making up this guide are based upon pole count.

The accuracy of my measurements is about 0.1 mile; therefore I do not display more precision than that. I always round down to the previous 0.1 mile. The bridge that crosses the American Girl Wash has the location 715.78 stenciled upon the abutment; I will include this bridge in the list of items for the milepost 715.7.

Often there are multiple items of interest in a given tenth mile; generally the guide book will always list the features in order of location. However, the most predominate railroad features in that tenth mile will always get top billing over any other observations, with the following text clarifying the order of appearance. An example is the following listing from Milepost 576.5:

576.5 MONS Crossovers

Colorado River Aqueduct Crossing

The most important structure is the Mons Crossover itself, followed closely by the fact that this location is the east end of the Mons Siding and the west end of the Fingal Siding; there are signal bridges at either end of the crossover. Lastly, the Colorado River Aqueduct that supplies the majority of water to Southern California passes under the tracks just a few dozen feet west of the west end of the Crossover.

Also note that there are a few irregularities concerning the mileposts: the tracks cross Mammoth Wash on a 200' bridge with the marked location of 679.98; however, the 680 milepost is immediately west of the bridge. Therefore sometimes the mile markers aren't exactly where they should be. Often it will seem that the distance between mileposts is not exactly 1.00 miles. It rarely is.

OK. So you read that MP552.7 is the site of the EL CASCO Station. Then immediately after that entry, the mysterious "RIV9BB6" appears. What's that, you ask?

I had to standardize on some set of maps for the reader to begin with. The United States Geological Survey topographical maps (topos) are a wonderful trove of invaluable mapping information, but aren't generally much good as day-to-day highway maps. Since the Automobile Club of Southern California is not in the habit of distributing their fine maps to the general public, the next best are the publications of the Thomas Bros. Map Company and the DeLorme Company.

Both companies provide a set of mapbooks that cover all of California in varying levels of detail. "RIV" refers to the Thomas Bros. Riverside County mapbook; "9B" is the mapbook page, "B6" are the x-y coordinates on that mapbook page. The combination of the Thomas Bros. "Riverside & San Bernardino Counties Street Guide and Directory" can get you in reasonable detail all the way to about Ferrum Station at MP639. From there, the "Southern California Atlas and Gazetteer" published by DeLorme provides reduced resolution and detail all the way to the Colorado River and Yuma and to well beyond MP740.

Most all of the field observations taken for this Guidebook were made between March 1989 and May 1991. I have strived to report accurately all the information in this Guide and have attempted to keep the errors to a minimum since there is little advantage to me to fabricate untruths. I have no affiliation with the Southern Pacific, except as an interested observer and have no secret hot line to the people in the know. In fact, as was mentioned in the book The Southern Pacific, 1901 - 1985 and from personal communications with SP employees, much of the history of the company is lost to the company. What remains rests outside the company and in the minds of the employees and retirees of the railroad.

Since the Southern Pacific is a living, dynamic entity, there will be regular changes and modifications to its equipment and physical plant, and what is in evidence one day may be nothing more than a bit of subroadbed or a few scattered ties a month later. I therefore cannot guarantee anything more than that I have made an honest attempt at reporting.

I welcome any information from readers that helps to clear misunderstandings that I might have inadvertently caused. I also hope that those with additional information about the railroad's history in this region will come forth so that it may be included in any future editions (Hope Springs Eternal) of this Guide. In fact, I hope that there will be subsequent editions that cover other portions of the Southern Pacific Lines, the Santa Fe and other interesting railroads.

There is obviously no one book that has provided me with the information that this book contains. (If there was, I would have bought it instead of writing this). Of course much of what is detailed here is through field work: personal reconnaissance, talking with railroad employees, camping out along the route and watching the traffic. Books about railroading, California history, general history, geology and geography, and newspaper articles pulled off microfilm from a storage vault provide more input and breadth. The last and equally important are the maps: old maps from a variety of sources printed over the last hundred and fifty years, United States Geological Survey (USGS) Topographic (Topo) maps, Defense Mapping Agency Maps, maps published by the Automobile Club of Southern California, Thomas Bros. maps, freebie maps given out by developers and museums, etc. All maps that I had available to me have provided some input, directly or indirectly, to the formation of this Guide.

The following is a partial list indicating the major references used. The list is not exhaustive, and I'm sure that there are many references that I never saw that might provide me with a clearer picture.

"Western Region Timetable 2", Southern Pacific Transportation Company, October 25, 1987

"Western Region Timetable 3", Southern Pacific Transportation Company, October 29, 1989

"All About Signals", John Armstrong, Kalmbach Publishing Co., 1957

"Trackwork Handbook", Paul Mallery, Boynton and Assoc., 1977

"The History of The Southern Pacific", Bill Yeane, Bison Books, 1985

"The Southern Pacific, 1901 - 1985", Don L. Hofsommer, Texas A&M Press, 1986

"Southern Pacific Country", Donald Sims, Trans-Anglo Books, 1987

"Santa Fe' Route To the Pacific.", Philip C. Serpico, Omni Publications, 1988

"San Diego and Arizona Eastern", Robert Hanft, Trans-Anglo Books, 1984

"City-Makers", Remi Nadeau, Trans-Anglo Books, 1955

Trains Magazine, CTC Board, Pacific Rail News, Various Issues

"Flimsies! The Newsmagazine of Western Railroading", many issues

"The History of California", H. H. Bancroft, 1883, Vol 1-7

"The Compendium of Signals", R. F. Karl, The Builder's Compendium, Celeron, NY, 1971

"The Southern California Guide to Railroad Communications", James Ciardi, 1987

"Railroads of Arizona, Vol. 1", D. Myrick, Trans-Anglo, 1975

Unpublished List of Railroad Frequencies, Greg Ramsey / Brian Hunell, 1990

"Early California Atlas - Southern Edition", R. N. Preston, Binford & Mort Publishing, 1988

"San Bernardino & Riverside Counties Street Guide & Directory", Thomas Bros. Maps, 1987

"California - Road Atlas and Driver's Guide", Thomas Bros. Maps, 1988

"Southern California Atlas and Gazetteer", DeLorme Publishing, 1986

"Los Angeles and Vicinity", Automobile Club of Southern California, May 1986

"Riverside County", Automobile Club of Southern California, March 1988

"San Bernardino County", Automobile Club of Southern California, June 1988

"Imperial County", Automobile Club of Southern California, June 1988

"Salton Sea", Kym's Guide, Triumph Press, Los Angeles 1986

United States Geological Survey, 7-1/2 and 15 minute maps