The Tehachapi Railroad Loop Still Powers California Trade | Lost LA

[00:00:00]Hey, everyone. Nathan Masters here.

[00:00:02]If you know me, you know I can't resist a good train story, but this one's on another level.

[00:00:06]The loop isn't just impressive, it's one of those engineering marvels that sounds impossible until you see it work. Let's take a look.

[00:00:15]So, Doug, to hatch.

[00:00:16]Oppy is a town about 70 to 80 miles.

[00:00:19]As the crow flies north of Los Angeles.

[00:00:22]A lot of Southern California's maybe have never even been here.

[00:00:25]No, they can't spell it that right.

[00:00:28]And yet, this is one of the most important places in the history of Southern California.

[00:00:34]The modern metropolis of Los Angeles might never have come into existence without a single feat of engineering.

[00:00:40]In 1876, the transcontinental railroad finally crossed the mountain ranges that divided Southern California from the rest of the country, and it changed everything.

[00:00:50]I'm headed to the Torture Depot Museum up in Kern County to meet with local historian Doug Pickard.

[00:00:56]Well, come on up here and I'll show you some more of the what we have here.

[00:01:01]Wow. This is a railroad map of the state of California.

[00:01:04]And you'll most Californians know there's the big Central Valley surrounded by mountains.

[00:01:10]The first intercontinental railroad, or transcontinental, went over Donner Pass, Truckee and went to Omaha.

[00:01:17]This was 1869, the transcontinental railroad.

[00:01:20]Correct.

[00:01:20]And as soon as they finished that, they started, they knew they wanted to build down towards Los Angeles and Southern California.

[00:01:28]They started building our railroad here.

[00:01:31]And there were several different choices of how to get over the mountains.

[00:01:36]But to be was deemed the best choice.

[00:01:39]Because the Sierra Nevada is just such an imposing mountain range.

[00:01:41]Right.

[00:01:42]When this railroad going south was originally chartered with the government, it was to go through to hatch and then go over to the Colorado River.

[00:01:52]In 1872, the citizens of Los Angeles, they voted $600,000 plus an already existing LA and San Pedro railroad, that they were going to give them to change the route and build into LA.

[00:02:10]So I shouldn't use the word bribe, but I think it was.

[00:02:14]We could call it an incentive.

[00:02:16]But but they did effectively bribe the railroad company in making Los Angeles a terminus, which was a huge decision in the history of LA.

[00:02:28]This is a big bell.

[00:02:29]Yeah. It weighs over 300 pounds. Oh, wow.

[00:02:32]And we have the documentation that it was put on an engine that was built in 1913 for the Union Pacific Railroad.

[00:02:41]It's not working.

[00:02:42]Yeah.

[00:02:45]It works.

[00:02:46]Yeah.

[00:02:48]That's more of an outdoor bell.

[00:02:55]Nathan, I'd like to introduce Mark McGowan.

[00:02:58]Pleased to meet you.

[00:02:59]Mark went to high school in Tehachapi and went to work for the railroad.

[00:03:03]And he was a signal maintainer.

[00:03:06]I think if I got that right.

[00:03:08]Yeah.

[00:03:08]So you explain these to what they do and stuff, and I'll go in and see if I can make them work.

[00:03:14]Mark, I've been to a lot of gardens, but I think this might be my first signal garden.

[00:03:18]All of these signals belong to my first boss, whose name was Bill Stokoe.

[00:03:23]And these were all at one time in his backyard.

[00:03:26]Okay.

[00:03:27]And they donated him to the museum, and they have been put back.

[00:03:30]These all worked in Bill's backyard, and they all work here.

[00:03:37]The signals Marc showed me were once part of the vast network of track connecting Southern California to the rest of the nation.

[00:03:44]There's just one problem with train history.

[00:03:47]You never quite know when history is going to come rumbling through.

[00:04:04]I didn't see the engine to know what stranger did.

[00:04:08]You can really feel.

[00:04:10]You can feel the train moving here.

[00:04:11]I mean, it's if you had a seismometer that would register.

[00:04:18]The spot where two sets of tracks met in 1876 on a homestead in the Santa Clarita Valley known as laying station, is celebrated as California's golden spike moment.

[00:04:29]But none of it would have been possible without a feat of engineering.

[00:04:32]Some 50 miles to the north, where the railroad had to climb nearly 4000ft through the to hatch a P pass.

[00:04:39]To hatch a P is actually the most important piece of track built for Southern California's history, because it was the most challenging. Yes.

[00:04:48]An engineer by the name of William Hood, who had got his experience building the first cross-country railroad up by Donner Pass.

[00:04:57]They put him in charge of building the railroad down through here.

[00:05:00]And he had a certain limiting grade.

[00:05:04]So he just added a whole bunch of climbing track around in a circle, which has become known as the loop.

[00:05:12]Kind of like switchbacks if you're on a hiking trail or a mountain road.

[00:05:16]Yeah.

[00:05:16]Trains are just so much more sensitive to grades than automobiles.

[00:05:21]Right. Like the iron, the steel would just.

[00:05:22]Slip amazingly.

[00:05:24]Do you know that all these engines carry sand?

[00:05:27]And if the wheels start to slip, he can push a button and it'll put sand in front of the wheels.

[00:05:32]Okay, so if that's not the problem, then what is it?

[00:05:34]Just. Just too much power.

[00:05:36]Yeah, yeah.

[00:05:37]So he had learned from experience that there was a certain angle he shouldn't make it any steeper 2.2% going downhill.

[00:05:46]It's just as bad you don't have brakes.

[00:05:49]Enough brakes.

[00:05:50]Maybe even worse. Really? Yeah.

[00:05:52]Back in the old days, they would have a man riding on top of each car.

[00:05:59]And if the engineer needed brakes, he'd blow the whistle and the guys would all go trying to put the brakes on by hand on each car.

[00:06:07]Called brakeman. Right? That's right. Yeah.

[00:06:10]So people come from all over the world that are trained nuts to see the loop.

[00:06:17]Well, let's go take a look at the real thing.

[00:06:18]Okay. Works for me.

[00:06:20]Doug took me to a spot on the old highway between to hatch a P and Keene, a vantage point that hasn't changed much in 150 years.

[00:06:27]To see the loop for ourselves.

[00:06:29]When you look at it here in person, I mean, you can really see that this was a huge undertaking.

[00:06:35]I mean, as was most of the construction of the transcontinental railroad and then the linkage between Northern and Southern California labor manual labor and the people who played a big role in that were people who weren't even citizens of this country and in many cases, weren't even permanent residents.

[00:06:51]They had come over here to Gold Mountain.

[00:06:54]Yeah, to raise money for their families and send it back home.

[00:06:58]And they work here in really harsh conditions and did the most dangerous work on this railroad.

[00:07:03]We're talking about the Chinese laborers. Yeah.

[00:07:05]Go back to not our railroad, but the first transcontinental.

[00:07:10]There were two different companies.

[00:07:11]One company was in Omaha building to the west, the Union Pacific.

[00:07:16]Central Pacific was blowing to the east.

[00:07:19]Right.

[00:07:19]Well, the Union Pacific, they had available to them all the railroad construction workers that had built already to Omaha.

[00:07:29]So they had a huge pool of labor.

[00:07:31]The people here on the West Coast, we didn't have any pool of labor at all.

[00:07:36]There were Chinese people that were willing to work.

[00:07:41]So if we go back to those original days when they were building this track for the first time, all of the food, all of the construction supplies had to be trucked up here on wagon, probably wagon.

[00:07:52]Yeah.

[00:07:53]By wheel, I mean. Yeah.

[00:07:54]Well, when we first got down here a half hour ago, I said, if you taken photoshopped the freeway out of this picture, you've got what it looked like 150 years ago.

[00:08:05]Yeah.

[00:08:06]Okay, maybe right now, just to the left of that tree in the middle, you see a light?

[00:08:10]Oh, I see it. Yeah. Bingo.

[00:08:12]It's coming up.

[00:08:24]Some people might say that the railroad age ended long ago, but America still runs on trains.

[00:08:29]Well, it's going to be a long time before railroads go away.

[00:08:32]Yeah.

[00:08:33]Everything gets moved.

[00:08:55]Thanks so much for watching.

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