> I know a few years back they upgraded the track a
> little when they were hauling the pipe for the
> ruby pipeline. Evidently they need more.

The inbound pipe was handled several years ago by LRY dba Lake Railway who had the contract from Lake County (Oregon) to operate their Lake County Railroad. Goose Lake Railway has been the contract operator since Sept 9, 2017 and has no direct connection to the former operator. There are several track and bridge projects scheduled, but kind of hard to do until the weather is consistently better.


>I can't help but recall what a person with the Lake County Railway said when they took over the branch from the Espee. He said the who railroad was worn out, and the railroad is "54 miles without a switch" when it came to sidings and spurs.

Since the County assumed ownership, new track has been constructed by the perlite plant. In addition, a spur was built at the south end of Lakeview near the industrial park in the pipeline era, and has since seen a second switch added making it a runaround. It is available as a team track, but its primary function has been for staging excess loads/empties.

Your statement about 54 miles without a switch might be correct at the time of purchase. But early in the Great Western era there was at least one spur.

At present, the south/west switch of the team track at the industrial spur is about MP510.5, a short spur at Willow Ranch about MP491.2, another short spur at Davis Creek about MP478.6, and the former gas spur in Alturas about MP458.1 - so there are currently two spurs (primarily for MOW use) in 52.4 miles. SP sold the County the line from 458.6 to Lakeview, and the first switch (other than Willow Ranch or Davis Creek) is about MP512.0 (S 3rd St near enginehouse) so the County potentially bought 53.4 miles without a spur.

The primary stations, at one time, appear to have been Surprise (466.9 - stock loading?), Davis Creek (stock?), Willow Ranch (lumber mill) and Fairport (497.8 - lake resort). I'm not sure if Fairport had an active station or how long it survived into SP days, but the other stations did have sidings and generated loads in the early days. The only other physical obvious evidence of a former station/siding is at Ramers, MP487.3 on Sugar Hill which is not visible/accessible from any road which had a siding and maybe a section house at most - not sure when it was removed.

There was an RPO to Lakeview into the 1940s which if I recall ran as a passenger train 3x week from Reno to Alturas, then as a mixed to Lakeview, and returned the next day. Once that was discontinued, I think it was rare to have a second train on the branch. At some point, SP didn't even bother issuing train orders, running under Train Register (ABR after 1985 GCOR) since there was only one train.

My guess is the NCO used 35-40# rail, so SP had to put in heavier rail when they standard gauged the line. I don't know about Wendel-Alturas-Texum (KF), but on the Lakeview branch they used several different sections (primarily 75# variations) of relay rail. So most of the rail on the Lakeview branch predates even the NCO's construction and is now 90-100 years old. One estimate for 115# welded rail was $27+ million. This is the problem for many shortlines today - the cost to upgrade bridges and track to current standards (286k loads) can't be justified by the current traffic levels at 10-20 year depreciation. Even if it is purchased by a government agency to preserve the transportation infrastructure and preserve local/regional economic development, the sad fact is that money for any upgrading is generally scarce, and many times the rail traffic levels aren't even sufficient to keep up with normal maintenance.