By Ryan Weaver
The Alpine Sun
     About five years, ago a small group of people hiked into the deepest part of the Back Country along the old railroad tracks. Weeds and shrubs had grown tall between the rail ties. Rockslides had buried the rails in the mountain passes, and down in the desert sands had shifted thick over the tracks. Many of the tunnels that had been shorn up nearly a century ago with thick redwood timbers that had caught fire and caved in. With these challenges in mind, the group decided to clear the tracks and reopen what was once called “The Impossible Railroad.”
     Four years later, the train rolled again between the Imperial Valley and Campo, and has been doing so for about a year now. The main freight hauled up from the desert is sand. With increasingly strict regulations imposed by the EPA and other agencies, it has become nearly impossible to mine sand in San Diego County. Sand has become a hot commodity, because San Diego continues to grow and builders need sand for concrete.
     The train runs between Campo and the Imperial Valley almost every day of the week. A typical day could consist of either bringing empty cars down into the desert to spend the night or bringing loaded cars back to Campo, where they are dumped at the old station in huge mounds to be loaded into semi trucks and shipped off.
     A day beginning in Campo would unfurl something like the following.
Around one in the afternoon the empty cars needed are coupled and connected to the right tracks behind the locomotives. The locomotives are the engine cars where the engineer and conductor cause the engines to pull the train. The conductor is basically responsible for making the train go and stop, and it remains for the engineer to oversee everything else.
     There are four locomotives operating out of Campo, although on any given day there may only be one or two in use simultaneously. These diesel electric engines generate 3,800 horsepower each, and each has a 4,000-gallon fuel tank. Each V16 engine turns a 600-volt generator, which churns about 5,000 amperes of electrical current to the electric traction motors. Electricity turns the wheels.
A voyage into the desert will take anywhere from seven to 10 hours, depending on whether there is a scheduled stop, such as one in Jacumba for fuel, for instance. This one-way trip will burn 200 gallons of diesel, and the conductor never likes to see fuel get below a certain level.
     These modern locomotives are designed to push a train up to 70 mph over modern tracks, but over the chewed boards and rattling spikes of the Corrizo Gorge Railway, top speed is limited to 10 mph.
     Perhaps a greater danger than derailing is the possibility of fire erupting in the brittle Back Country. In older trains, it was common for burning bits of coal to dribble from the exhaust onto the tracks or go where the wind would take them. In modern trains a similar threat exists, said Mike Reneau, an engineer on the Corrizo Gorge Railway. 
     “You might see some sparks at night,” Reneau said. “Carbon builds in the exhaust stacks and the hot gas going by heats it almost to incandescence. When you rev and put a load against it, the embers can shoot out like projectiles. I’ve seen them load an engine on purpose to clean it out and it looks like the Fourth of July.”
     To guard against such a threat, company policy on the railway is to have a fire protection speeder trail the train. A little Fairmont A-4 motorcar with two people inside is supposed to trail at a distance of a half-mile to a mile, which would give a potential fire enough time to become visible before the speeder passes it by.
     The speeder is equipped with a 500-gallon tank, a gas pump, and 150 feet of fire hose. It is a precautionary feature, but it is only required to follow the train from Campo to Jacumba and vice versa. The sand and boulders of the desert, it is presumed, are naturally fire-retardant.
     For the time being, the train will be used primarily to haul cargo and freight. There could be a passenger service launched in the next five years between Tecate and Tijuana, along the original tracks laid to connect Yuma to San Diego.
     The Corrizo Gorge Railway was once criticized as being “The Impossible Railway.” Sugar magnate, entrepreneur, and the man that built and owned almost all of San Diego at the turn of the twentieth century, John D. Spreckles, took the track on as his biggest challenge. He wanted to put his city on the map by connecting it to the rest of the world, and only the most rugged rail terrain ever taken on stood in his way.
     “These mountains, they are a heartbreaker,” reported the chief engineer of the Corrizo Gorge section of the project to Spreckles. He pushed his workers on, carving inch by inch through boulder and thorny shrub from the mountains to the sandy desert floor. In November of 1919, after 13 years of crushing setbacks being overcome by persistent triumphs, after $18 million dollars and roughly 140 miles of railway later, the golden spike was punched by Spreckles himself.
     The Impossible Railroad had become a reality, although in Spreckles’ day, it would never be a financial success. Passenger trains moved by day and freight trains by night, but with time improved transportation and wars and maintenance problems would pummel the train decade after decade until, at last, it shrank into the impossibility from which it was sprung.
     Now it runs again. Someday, perhaps, the passenger service will return. Then everybody will be able to see the breathtaking beauty of the Back Country and realize that these hinterlands are not a dusty outcropping of a world-class city, but the very bloodline that made a dusty city world-class.

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