Trains & Tracks

Edge of the Mesa – Part Three

Following the dirt road a quarter mile after the pavement ends (a mile or two from our house) looking for the edge of “the Mesa” (where the valley floor drops away into the canyons of the Cajon Pass) I was primarily looking for the BNSF train tracks that I know are there. It’s the two lines of the BNSF main transcontinental line, and I’ve been watching it for several years ons some of the railfan webcams. There used to be a Virtual Railfan camera that I watched all the time, but apparently that house next to the tracks got sold and the new owner didn’t want to maintain the camera and let it die. (Interestingly, I actually looked at that house on Zillow without realizing that it was THE house where the VR webcam was. I knew that it was near that site, and the house ticked off several green flags and boxes to match what we were looking for, but it sold before we could come up and look at it. What could have been…) Anyway, there’s now a very good camera there from RRPhotographer. The location near my house where I could get to the edge is about four miles from the RRPhotographer camera location, but only about a third of a mile from the tracks climbing up the hill. I was hoping to see them and find a good viewing spot.

There they are! Not a ton of viewing, and it really helped that there was a train going by when I was trying to spot it. There are also a couple of at-grade crossings of fire roads and access roads out in the boonies, and the trains blow their whistles at these crossings, so just from listening at our house, where we can hear them off and on 24/7/365 (I love it!) I knew where to look.

Heading both uphill and down, we see (and hear) dozens of freight trains a day, plus two Amtrak passenger trains every day, one from Chicago to LA and one from LA to Chicago. I’ll keep looking for great spots to railfan and trainspot from.

Speaking of tracks, in the soft dirt of the road there were plenty that looked like this. Lots of homes out here that aren’t in tracts, with an acre to ten or twenty acres. Many of those folks have horses, and there are parts of town and plenty of dirt roads to find folks out riding.

My Boy Scout days are way, WAAAAAY behind me, so I can’t positively identify these tracks. But the smart betting money is on “dog,” although other critters such as deer or coyotes can’t be ruled out. But just as lots of folks ride their horses out on these dirt service roads, so do lots of folks go hiking and walking their dogs. Usually on a lead I would think, not running loose, since I would worry about rattlesnakes and other less-than-friendly critters off in the brush and tumbleweeds.