Carson & Colorado Railway

The original Carson and Colorado was incorporated on May 10, 1880, and built a 3 ft narrow gauge line from Mound House, Nevada, south into California's Owens Valley, reaching its Keeler terminus below the Cerro Gordo Mines on August 1, 1883. Sold to the Southern Pacific in 1900 — which romantically dubbed the remote desert route the 'Slim Princess' — the line was whittled away through the twentieth century until the last narrow gauge train in common-carrier service ran on April 29, 1960. In Independence, California, a nonprofit group re-incorporated under the Carson and Colorado Railway name to bring a piece of the railroad back to life: Southern Pacific locomotive No. 18, donated to the town when steam was displaced in the 1950s, was returned to operating condition in a restoration spanning 2009 to July 2017, and on October 15, 2016, it steamed under its own power again — the first time in 62 years. The engine is now housed in a two-stall engine house at the Eastern California Museum in Independence, with close to 1,000 feet of track to operate on.