The Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad was a former class II railroad that served eastern California and southwestern Nevada.
The railroad was built mainly to haul borax from Francis Marion Smith's Pacific Coast Borax Company mines located just east of Death Valley, but it also hauled lead, clay, feldspar, passengers and general goods across the desert to a connection with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad at Ludlow, California, and to the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad (later Union Pacific Railroad) at Crucero, California.
The railroad was originally intended to run from Tonopah, Nevada, to San Diego, California (the "tidewater"), but never made it to either on its own rails. It was famous for being the last of the three railroads built to cross the Death Valley region, and outlasting them by over 30 years providing dedicated and reliable service to the desert residents. The T&T also formed part of a potential north-south transcontinental railroad route, connected together by four different US railway companies, later used as the basis to potentially form a Mid-Pacific Railroad.Myrick, David F. : Railroads of Nevada & Eastern California: Volume I, The Northern Roads, pg.86.
The railroad operated from 1907 until 1940, when it suspended operations due to a lack of profitable traffic. The rails were taken up in 1943 for use in World War II and the company itself was officially abandoned by 1946.Serpico, Phil: THE TONOPAH & TIDEWATER R.R., The Nevada Short Line.
History
Francis Marion Smith was one of California's most successful entrepreneurs and mining tycoons. In 1890, he had incorporated the Pacific Coast Borax Company and operated the largest borax mine in the world at Borate, located north of Daggett, California, with the Borate and Daggett Railroad running a more than adequate service between the two stops. Smith was also responsible for building several interurban and rapid transport systems around Oakland, California, and San Francisco, California. By 1901, Smith started searching some old borax claims located in the Black Mountains, just east of Death Valley, and located the Lila C. mine, about from the nearest railhead of Ivanpah, California, on the Santa Fe.
To bring the borax out from this remote region, he tried to use an old steam tractor to haul the ore, but it was not suited for the harsh desert conditions and was quickly taken out of service. Smith then considered the idea of building a railroad from the nearest point possible on the Santa Fe, to connect the Lila C. to the most intermediate route to his refineries at Alameda, California and Bayonne, New Jersey. He had also hoped of extending the railroad towards Tonopah, Nevada, as during that time there was a great mining boom going on in the region, with gold and silver mines popping out from all over the area, and even as far south as Beatty, Nevada, Goldfield and Rhyolite, Nevada. On July 19, 1904, Francis Marion Smith had incorporated the Tonopah & Tidewater Railroad Company in New Jersey, with Smith as president, and his associates DeWitt Van Buskirk as vice-president, C.B. Zabriskie as secretary-treasurer, and John Ryan as superintendent and general manager.
After considering building his railroad from several locations including Manvel, California (now Barnwell), and Daggett, California, Francis Smith eventually ran into William A. Clark, Montana senator and head of the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, at Las Vegas, Nevada. Clark proposed to Smith that the T&T could be built out of Las Vegas, as the quickest and most direct way to the borax mine and Tonopah goldfields. Smith reacted enthusiastically to Clark's proposal, and he agreed. However, Clark himself was considering building a railroad to Tonopah, and allowing a direct competitor to build right in his way put Clark in a very awkward position.Hildderbrand, George F.: Borax Pioneer: Francis Marion Smith.
Beginnings
In 1905, Francis Marion Smith immediately sent crews out to Las Vegas to begin construction of the Tonopah & Tidewater Railroad. Grading was started on May 29, and by mid-July, about of roadbed was graded. William Clark had tried constantly to discourage Smith from building his railroad, from raising rates for construction materials to consolidating the Nevada Rapid Transist Company and building an auto road from Las Vegas to Beatty. The sharpest point in the barb poked in Smith's side, was when he was openly denied by LA&SL railroad officials to allow the T&T grade to connect to their main line. Smith tried to get in contact with Clark to figure out what was going on, but Clark had completely evaded Smith by hiding out in Paris. There, Clark had come up with the idea of building his own railroad to the Nevada goldfields, which would come to be known as the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad.
Despite Smith's disappointment, he held no resentment for Clark, and instead went to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad to propose they use their stop at Ludlow, California, as the T&T's new terminus. This was the perfect get-back at Clark's double-cross, for Clark and the Santa Fe were in direct competition to one another. Plus, building north of Ludlow would bring about more business opportunities for the T&T to profit off of, as there were plenty of mines in the area where the Tonopah & Tidewater was planned to be built. The biggest drawback however, was that the railroad would be twice as long as it would've been if they built out of Las Vegas, about distance.
Francis Smith sold all of his Las Vegas railroad work, graded roadbed, property and supplies to Clark, and moved immediately to Ludlow and started building the T&T with new construction material provided by the Santa Fe. Starting construction in November, it soon got too hot for the railroad workers during the summer months. Water was the hardest to provide, but plenty of meat was made available by the butchers located in Daggett. The T&T construction crews eventually reached Crucero, California, by 1906, where they had to cross over the mainline of the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad. An agreement was written by the T&T and the LA&SL to use Crucero as an interchange and crossover point between the two railroads, but it did not entirely suit either party. They eventually came to a mutual agreement, and the T&T construction crews pushed further north.
The hardest part of building the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad was going through the Amargosa Canyon. It took several thousand head of mules and men to blast their way through the canyon, and took nearly three years to get to the other end where Tecopa, California now stands. The Tonopah and Tidewater reached Death Valley Junction, California, by 1907, the closest point to the Lila C. borax mine. Here, a branch line was built to the mine and trains immediately started transporting the borax to the Santa Fe. The last spike was hammered into place at Gold Center, Nevada, with no celebration, as the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad had already beat the T&T to Goldfield, and the financial panic of 1907 was severely crippling the operations of the gold mines.
Nevertheless, the Tonopah and Tidewater was in a better position to be more profitable than the Las Vegas and Tonopah, and in 1908 merged with the Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad to reach Goldfield, also connecting to Tonopah by way of the Tonopah and Goldfield Railroad. The T&T's rates were cut shorter than the LV&T, and passengers preferred the shorter route of the T&T over the LV&T as it was shorter than it took to get to Los Angeles by the former. By the time World War I broke out, the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad was in a bad state. The United States Railroad Administration took over the T&T and the LV&T as with all the nation's railroads, but deemed the latter as an unnecessary route and had the LV&T taken up for scrap in 1918.
The Lila C. mines eventually ran dry by 1913, and the T&T filed to extend their branchline to the new mines at Ryan, California (formerly Devar). However, with their mounting debt of over $4.4 million they were denied to do so by the ICC, and instead Pacific Coast Borax organized a new railroad, the 3 ft-gauge Death Valley Railroad, to haul the ore from Ryan to the T&T at Death Valley Junction.
Decline By 1927, Pacific Coast Borax Company had moved their mining operations to Boron, located away from Death Valley. The Tonopah and Tidewater had to resort to hauling lead from Tecopa, feldspar and clay from Bradford Siding, north of Death Valley Junction, along with gypsum, talc and general goods. Without the borax mine however, the T&T only showed profit for about four years before finances dropped sharply. The Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad was abandoned by 1928, severing the T&T's rail link with Goldfield and Tonopah, forcing the railroad to cut back its tracks to Beatty.
The T&T tried to campaign tourism to Death Valley in an effort to stay alive. The railroad campaigned with the Union Pacific to have a Pullman sleeper service run from Los Angeles, interchange with the T&T at Crucero, and be hauled as far as Death Valley Junction, where guests could explore the valley and stay at exquisite hotels such as the Furnace Creek Inn and the Death Valley View Hotel at Ryan, by way of the Death Valley Railroad. The Great Depression severely crippled the tourist trade for the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad, and people began to use automobiles to get to and from the valley. It was soon becoming evident that the T&T was losing too much money to keep itself afloat, maintenance costs skyrocketed due to the many floods that plagued the right-of-way in several places. By 1938, the "Tired and Tardy" as the railroad was known by then, was over $5 million in debt.
Abandonment filings with the Interstate Commerce Commission were applied by the T&T as early as 1938. Many protests were made by the local businesses that relied on the T&T for their very existence, but the ICC eventually approved of the applications for abandonment by 1940. The railroad was laid in submission for a time in hopes of reopening to better traffic, but when the United States entered World War II in 1941, all of the T&T's rails and equipment were requisitioned by the War Department for use in Europe. It took nearly a year for Sharp and Fellows, Inc., to remove the entire railway between Ludlow and Beatty, leaving but the old trackbed behind, and a few ties in the lonely desert. Much of the salvageable wood from ties and bridges was used to build a few structures, most notably the Apple Valley Inn located at Apple Valley and the El Rancho Motel in Barstow. A few buildings in Tecopa, California, along with the facilities for the hot springs, were also built from old T&T railroad ties. Many of them built by Harry Rosenberg Sr., who was the section gang foreman for the railroad from 1927 till abandonment in 1943.
Only a boxcar #129, flatcar #205,Orange Empire Railway Museum Stocklist: Other Railroads caboose #402,Tonopah & Tidewater Caboose No. 402 parts of coach chair car #30 (car itself scrapped 2022),Tonopah & Tidewater Chair Car No. 30 (mistakenly labelled as a Las Vegas & Tonopah car, proved wrong!) outfit diner car #506 (formerly coach #20),Jensen, Larry : Hollywood's Railroads Volume One: Virginia & Truckee. a handcarhandcar from the T&T, now on display at the Borax Museum in Furnace Creek and a gas-driven railcar #99 still exist.TONOPAH & TIDEWATER #99 FOUND Whatever else that remains is now scattered across museums and private collections located in the Mojave Desert and around the world.
A portion of the route between China Ranch and Tecopa was converted to a rail trail, the Amargosa River Trail.
Museum