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Tecopa Railroad
Tecopa Railroad at Noonday Mine
The Tecopa Railroad was a narrow-gauge mining railroad in the Mojave Desert, built to transport ore from the Tecopa area to a processing facility. It was primarily associated with the mining operations of the Pacific Coast Borax Company, which had extensive holdings in the region.
The railroad ran from Noonday Camp, a small mining town near the southern end of Death Valley, to the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad (T&T), a standard-gauge line that connected the remote desert mining districts with the rest of the country. The T&T was built by Francis Marion Smith, the "Borax King," in the early 1900s to support borax and other mineral extraction.
The Tecopa Railroad efficiently moved ore across the rugged desert, but like many mining railroads, it operated for only a short time.
Once the Noonday and War Eagle Mines began to decline in productivity, the railroad's usefulness diminished. By 1930, operations ceased. At the same time, improvements in road transportation-particularly the rise of trucks capable of handling rough desert routes made short-haul mining railroads like this one obsolete.
Today, while the Tecopa Railroad is long gone, traces of its old roadbed and infrastructure can still be found in the hills near Tecopa and Shoshone. These offer a glimpse into an era when railroads were the lifeline of desert mining operations.
