Hawthorne US Army Depot railroad, 1999
Hawthorne Nevada is a small town of around 2700 people that lies between Reno and Las Vegas south of Walker Lake. The highway from Reno to the area I was working in near Tonopah (one of the last gold rush towns in the US) runs through Hawthorne. Hawthorne was primarily a railway town from the arrival of the narrow gauge Carson and Colorado RR in 1881. The Southern Pacific purchased the C&C in 1900, and there were hundreds of miles of SP narrow gauge in the area to serve the mining boom towns of Tonopah, Goldfield and elsewhere. The SP converted the line to dual gauge and/or standard gauge in 1905. Most of the narrow gauge was abandoned by the late 1940's. The Army purchased most of the branchline from SP in 1991, with the SP (now UP) providing service on the line as the US Army is now the only customer on the branch. Many years ago there was a bunch of slides of SP cab forward locomotives running freight trains along the sh...