The iron Eagle
Kaiser Steel’s Eagle Mountain railroad boosted
the action on Beaumont Hill
WITH AN ESTABLISHED STEEL MILL in Fontana,
Calif., just east of Los Angeles, in the late
1940s, industrialist Henry J. Kaiser wanted to
streamline iron ore deliveries by building a
private railroad to the source of the ore in
nearby Riverside County. Thus was born the
Eagle Mountain Railroad, a 51-mile operation
that wound its way south from an open iron
ore pit at, no surprise, Eagle Mountain, Calif.
The straight-line distance was 35 miles from
the mine to a Southern Pacific interchange at
Ferrum (Latin for iron), near the Salton Sea.
The SP lugged the heavy stuff in special ore
cars another 101 miles west. Strictly a compa-
ny town, Eagle Mountain once boasted a pop-
ulation of about 4,000. Today, like the railroad,
it is a ghost of prosperity past.
Its remoteness, combined with blistering
summer heat or wildly swinging winter tem-
peratures, made chasing and photographing
the railroad a chore. For those who did, how-
ever, it was a worthwhile effort to witness
m.u.’ed six-axle Baldwin road-switchers —
some purchased new, others picked up
secondhand — walking their train down to
Ferrum and lugging empties back. At its peak,
the railroad sometimes operated two trains a
day, seven days a week.
By 1967 the Baldwins were understand-
ably worn out, and with the builder out of the
locomotive business, an order for five 3,000-
hp U30Cs was placed with General Electric.
Arriving in early 1968 in a bright new red paint
scheme and numbered 1030-1034, the
432,000-pound diesels boasted the heaviest
per-axle load (72,000 pounds) of any single-
engine, six-axle GE locomotive delivered at
that time. Heavy servicing, such as wheel
truing, was done at Southern Pacific’s Taylor
Yard locomotive facility in Los Angeles, but
since they were non-FRA-inspected units,
they could not move under their own power,
instead being hauled dead-in-train.
The mine shut down in 1983, but the rail-
road kept rolling until 1986 when the last
stockpiles of already-dug ore were finally de-
pleted. The locomotives were then deadhead-
ed to the Fontana mill and eventually cut up.
At this writing, what is left of the railroad is
slowly being salvaged for its steel rail.
While the Eagle Mountain Railroad may be
gone, those who never had the opportunity to
see it in person can find motion-picture
evidence of what it once was.
In early 1966, Columbia Pictures came to
the Eagle Mountain for its railroad scenes in
“The Professionals,” a western with Lee
Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, Woody
Strode, Jack Palance, and Claudia Cardinale.
For many of us, the real stars, however, were
the railroad and Great Western 2-8-0 No. 75.
Twenty years later, Touchstone Pictures
spent weeks filming on the line for its 1986
release “Tough Guys,” with Kirk Douglas, asecond dose of Burt Lancaster, Eli Wallach,
Charles Durning, and Dana Carvey. The plot
centered on Lancaster and Douglas as two
train robbers recently released from prison
after a 30-year stretch. Their prey was the
“Gold Coast Flyer.” With the announcement
the train was about to make its last run, the
pair decide to try one more robbery. The train
sequences, using former Southern Pacific
4-8-4 No. 4449, with Doyle McCormack in the
engineer’s seat, make up quite a bit of the last
half of the movie. — David Lustig40 SEPTEMBER 2019Bright red U30Cs provided the motive power
in the Eagle Mountain Railroad's final years
of operation in the desert of Riverside
County, Calif. David LustigIn its last Hollywood moment, “Tough Guys”
— with Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, SP 4449,
and engineer Doyle McCormack, was filmed
on the railroad. Christine Loss, Touchstone PicturesFour Baldwins lead an Eagle Mountain ore
train downgrade toward the interchange with
the Southern Pacific. Richard Steinheimer