Rich Hunn Wrote:
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> The estimates are that the pit life would be n
> early fifty years as a trash dump but I think
> they
> would do some consolidation and processing to
> reduce the "bulk" of the waste.
> It's interesting to note that the Palldon/Iron
> Mountain project will be an ore ship out through
> Richmond so Eagle Mountain to China isn't all that
> far fetched, It seems to me as I remember that
> the remaining ore is less consolidated and the
> extraction costs would be pretty high. Eagle Mtn
> ranks right up there with the Atlantic City mine
> trains as things I wish I would have chased!!

I chased, rode and photographed the Eagle Mountain many times; chased the Atlantic City line for two glorious days six weeks before that outfit shut down. Both lines were really neat.

Eagle Mountain ore was economical to extract only because of the proximity to the Kaiser furnaces at Fontana. The ore mined there was never competitive for sale to other markets. Kaiser quit mining at Eagle Mountain in 1982, I think...I chased one of the last loaded Fontana trains on the EM in October, 1983 and it was mostly stockpiled stuff. There were sporadic shipments of fine ore for cement use after that. The last big hurrah on the EMRR was the "Tough Guys" filming with 4449 in the mid-1980s. The U30Cs were taken to Fontana and scrapped several years later. The basic steelmaking plant at Fontana was dismantled (as reported above) and much of the property converted to today's California Speedway. The finishing side of the mill was reorganized (and thrived) as California Steel Industries; later sold to Oregon Steel Mills and it continues today under that name.

The trash-by-rail plan of the 1990s would have utilized double-stack container trains hauling compacted trash from collection centers around Southern California to a new yard developers proposed to build east of the town of Eagle Mountain. The service would utilize ocean containers near the end of their service lives. Containers woulld arrive at the Eagle Mountain yard, get a straddle-buggy lift from railcar to a truck, then the truck would transport and dump the contents at the landfill face somewhere in one of the Eagle Mountain pits. A second operation adjacent to the yard would handle the scrapping of the containers and processing of scrap aluminum from that.

The trash scheme, as I recall, was postponed by the Orange County bankruptcy. When trash-by-rail appeared to be a sure thing, the landfills in LA County were nearing capacity and there was no space for new ones. Suddenly OC went broke and opened it's landfills to anyone willing to pay the fee, as a way to easily fill the county's coffers. That kept dumping fees low enough to make the Eagle Mountain project uneconomical until OC, LA and the others finally filled every nook and cranny of every existing landfill. As I understand it, that point may be on the horizon, so the Eagle Mountain project may still happen in our lifetimes....

Keep in mind that EMRR was designed as a railroad for loads to move downhill. The 52 mile-long pike is quite spectacular, and the prospect of loaded double-stack trash trains moving uphill on the Eagle Mountain will make it well worth seeing, if the trash-by-rail project ever reaches fruition.

When the trash-by-rail