Cajon Pass: The Trains That Never Stop

If you pull off the road at Cajon Pass and wait ten minutes, you will see a freight train.

Two Class One railroads share this corridor through the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains: Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Union Pacific. Together they make the Cajon Pass one of the highest-volume freight rail corridors in North America. The double-stacked container trains that move through here are a quarter mile long, carrying goods from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to distribution centers across the country. There is a grade on the southbound approach that is steep enough to require helper locomotives.

The pass has been a transportation corridor since long before the railroad. The Old Spanish Trail crossed it in the early eighteen hundreds. Jedediah Smith and his party came through in eighteen twenty-six. The Mormon colonists descended through it in eighteen fifty-one, four hundred and thirty-seven people and their livestock and their wagons, making their way down to the San Bernardino Valley to build the city that still bears that name. The first transcontinental railroad connection reached Cajon Pass in eighteen eighty-five.

The Mormon Rocks formation at the pass entrance is a California Historical Landmark. It is a set of massive sandstone outcrops left by ancient fault movement, the kind of geology that reminds you that the ground under Southern California is not stable and never has been.

The trains keep moving regardless. Twenty-four hours a day. A quarter mile of cargo every few minutes. The pass that carried horses and wagons and Dust Bowl Fords now carries your Amazon packages through the same gap in the mountains.