1882 Atlantic and Pacific Railroad
The Mojave Desert portion of the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroad was the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe (AT&SF). Builders designed it to cross the Mojave Desert, and later connections to mining railroads created an extensive network.
This included the Ludlow and Southern, Calico and Odessa, Borate and Dagget, Saltus, Pacific Gypsum, Randsburg and Boron railroads. Mining districts near the A&P were the Sacramento, Piute, Clipper, Marble, Bristol Mountains, Bristol Lake, Southern Cady, Hector, Kramer and Mojave.
Railroad magnates P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Governor Leland Stanford, and Charles Crocker built the Southern Pacific Railroad. They started in Sacramento and built to Bakersfield, thence over the Tehachapi Mountains to Mojave, which Southern Pacific reached in 1878.
Proceeding eastward, they reached Waterman in the Calico Mining District (now Barstow) and finally Needles at the Colorado River in 1882 (Chappell, 2005:41-42, Myrick, 1963).
The Southern Pacific (SP) was building another line from Los Angeles to Yuma, while its competitor the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad (APR, a subsidiary of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway) was building track from Winslow, Arizona, to Topock (southeast of Needles), which was reached in 1882 (Chappell, 2005, p. 42).
With one railroad coming from the east to Needles and another from the west, a negotiation between APR and SP resulted in the sale of the Mojave-to-Needles segment to Santa Fe. After a series of mergers and bankruptcies, the old Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (AT&S) became the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe (BN&SF) railway in 1996 (Chappell, 2005, p. 42).
Whipple Expedition
Tribes of the 35th Parallel
Trans-Mojave Railroad
Kingman
Needles
Santa Fe Railroad