La Linda is normally a pretty quiet place. You hear a few diesel engines and electric motors and a bit of clanging across the river at the mine. When the wind is right, you can also hear the church bells across the river on Saturday evening to announce that la misa is about to begin. Flora’s, the local cantina, can around holidays (US or Mexican), get a little loud with a little music spilling out onto the dusty streets of the village.
On this day, the LCN railroad added a little buzz. As most mornings, we see the local arrive with six empties for fluorspar loading.
The four loads waiting to go north are shoved to the main track.
And the empties spotted.
A load of Agnes’ perlite is pulled next. Agnes has been shipping pretty regularly from her modest mine on her ranch near town.
Only one of the two SP 40 footers is loaded, the other has to be re-spotted for loading.
Two empties at Mendoza’s are pulled next. One of them was filled with canned goods from California.
The engine and two empties run to the head end. Tomorrow morning’s train will then be made up and the crew can head for their houses. The crew really like the new operating scheme where the trains meet up mid-way and trade trains. They love being home every night.
What’s this? It sounds like another train coming into La Linda! Indeed it is. The LCN has run a work train south to La Linda behind the Marathon switcher.
Some of the cars are empty so some work must of been performed after the local got by the work train earlier today.
That’s an interesting collection of work train cars the LCN has. The work train crew will spend the night in La Linda and their train will follow the local north tomorrow morning, working track locations designated by the track inspector that are in need of ballast or rip-rap. There’s only a couple of sidings between the meet up spot at Sotol Siding and La Linda, so that can involve some waiting.
Once the work train parked in town, Pablo, the La Linda-based crew engineer, walked over to greet the crew and joked, “How come we didn’t know you guys were heading this far south? Ain’t that some kind of safety thing?”
Rogelio, the work train engineer and crew boss replied, “Now Pablo, Lenny, your very own conductor, told us y’all have a potential washout south of Ocotillo! Y’all oughta talk sometimes.”
Pablo replied, “Sounds serious, we best have a “safety” meeting over at Flora’s raht now!”
With both crews off the clock, a couple of beers were shared and the La Linda crew got the skinny on the going ons in Marathon!
We’ll let the crews have some fun and get some rest before we pick things up in Part 2.
Rails West 