100 cars and 10,000 tons per train. You had to have rear and swing helpers, often used retainers, the whole works, in heavy slow train handling.....up the hill at Beaumont so slow you could drop off the lead engine and catch the rear unit to reset a low oil button, an restart the engine.

And, if you like that earthy smell, just let one of those beet gondolas derail, in the desert, like when they pulled the car in two (yes the center sill fractured and just separated in the middle of the car) just west of Hugo, and pushed it off to rot by the tracks....... You could smell that car and the several hundreds of millions of flies breeding the rotten beets for about a mile before you reached the car.

Short beet set outs at Industry of 40 to 50 cars would often go to the sugar mill in Dyer via the UP, Los Nietos, Anaheim, and Santa Ana. There were Coast beets, Valley Beets, El Centro Beets from mid spring to August to sugar mills all over CA.

The "roots" were once as sure of a sign of Spring on the old SP, as the CA poppies blooming in the hills.