Southern
Pacific

Making the Grade

GeoCache GC1HEX3

Looking west into south Courtland

Southern Pacific grade around the
mountain and into Gleeson

Piece of coal from an SP train

100 year old spike from the SP tracks

Clinkers next to the grade

To the west-northwest of you is Courtland...to the east of you is the vanished "town" of Kelton (really just a railroad station). The dirt road you walked on to get to this GeoCache was originally built by the Southern Pacific railroad company. It was constructed as a railroad bed. A "bed" is usually a raised strip of land which is created to make a smooth surface for the laying of tracks. Railroads need a bed because the trains can't deal with the sharp variations in terrain that are a natural feature of the land. Raised beds also tend to keep puddles of water from sapping out the foundation from under the ties and track.

The purpose of this particular spur of railroad was REALLY to undercut the business of the El Paso & South Western (EP&SW) railroad, which was owned by the Phelps Mining Company. The director of the Southern Pacific (SP, or Espee) was E. H. Harriman (whose name was bandied about in the popular movie "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"). Harriman was a real go-getter, whose dream was to create a monopoly on coast-to-coast railroads. His primary rival in the southwest was the Rock Island line, which had tracks all the way from Chicago into New Mexico. The Rock Island also had a deal with a small railroad going from San Diego to Yuma. That left only a gap spanning Arizona, which the Rock Island was hoping to fill by making a deal with the EP&SW line.

Harriman wanted to undercut the business of the EP&SW line, causing it to fail and thus thwarting the ambitions of the Rock Island Line. The main east-west tracks of the Southern Pacific ran through the town of Cochise (where I-10 now runs) about 25 miles north of Courtland. From Cochise, the SP ran tracks south to the town of Pearce. It then planned to continue down the middle of the Sulphur Springs Valley (the valley between you and the Chiricahuas to the east), all the way to Douglas. They got as far as Kelton, which is about 2 miles east of here on the road you walked (or drove) to get here. Kelton no longer exists, but the grading can still be walked, at least until it is fenced off at the private property line, about a mile east of you. (Actually, according to the Arizona State Land Trust website, this whole area is State Trust land, but a fence is a fence, and I play it safe.) The last section of railroad going south between Kelton and Douglas was never fully completed, because three things happened:

First, the EP&SW got to Courtland first (coming up from Douglas), making deals with the mining companies to haul their ore. In fact, the EP&SW pretty much encircled the whole town with railroad tracks, cutting off any real opportunity for the SP in town.
Second, E. H. Harriman died in September of 1909, and a whole truckload of his special projects just stopped in their tracks (pun intended), at least until they could be re-evaluated by the men to took over control of his empire.
Third, by the time those men had re-evaluated this particular project, the urgency of "beating" the EP&SW line was considerably less, as the ore deposits in these mountains had run thin, and so business was not quite as bustling. (The Southern Pacific ended up just buying the EP&SW in 1924.)

The work on the tracks south of Kelton towards Douglas was stopped cold, only a mile short of Douglas, after the death of Harriman. The road bed was done, and the tracks that far were laid (although not "finished"), but the crews were pulled, and sent to work elsewhere. No train ever ran on the tracks that went south from Kelton towards Douglas.

The spur you're standing next to here went from Kelton to Courtland, although it came in on the FAR south side of town. The station was named "Holmes", and from there the tracks curled around the mountains into Gleeson, where they stopped. The SP decided to focus on freight and passenger travel, and left the ore-hauling to the EP&SW. The Holmes station wasn't exactly convenient, however, to the folks of Courtland. In fact, it was so far removed from town that nobody heard when the station safe was blown up on the night of September 24/25, 1909. Explosions in the middle of the night are not unusual in a mining town, but nobody even noticed. The safe robbers got $1.50...a buck and a half.

If you were a resident of Courtland and wanted to go south, you could get a ticket on the EP&SW to Douglas, and then go from Douglas either west to Tucson or east to El Paso. If you wanted to go north you would take the Southern Pacific up to Cochise, where you could get on the main line (Sunset Limited) west to the Pacific or east to the Atlantic. If you wanted to change lines and go from the SP to the EP&SW, you probably never even came into Courtland. It was much easier to make the change at the Kelton station, where both train lines stopped. It was in fact a common practice for citizens of Douglas to take the EP&SW to Kelton, then transfer to the Southern Pacific, which would take them all the way to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, or New York.

If you walk along the railroad bed, you can still find chunks of coal, especially where the tracks crossed a stream-bed. The train would travel over a low trestle (the pillars of which can still be seen), which would shake a bit, and chunks of coal would fall off the edges and railings of the tender car. You can also find some pretty large clinkers...these are the spent, burnt remnants of the coal which were pulled out of the boiler and thrown aside the tracks. The size and quantity of the clinkers indicate the poor quality of a particular load of coal. If you look carefully along the edges of the road bed, you can also find 100 year old rusty railroad spikes and other pieces of metal which were used on the tracks and the cars. The rails, ties, and trestles were pulled up in late 1933, leaving only the road beds, like the one you just walked on.