Laws Railroad: The Narrow Gauge to Nowhere

A few miles north of Bishop, off the highway, there is a train station that still has the rolling stock.

The Carson and Colorado Railroad reached the Laws depot in eighteen eighty-three, built on a narrow gauge track four feet less wide than the standard American railroad gauge. The plan was ambitious: a rail line connecting the Carson Valley in Nevada to the Colorado River, running through the Owens Valley and carrying the wealth of its mines and farms to markets in both directions.

The railroad never reached the Colorado River. It stopped at Keeler, on the shore of Owens Lake, roughly two hundred miles short of its intended terminus. For decades it carried what the valley had: ore from the eastern Sierra mines, hay and grain and dairy from the Owens Valley farms, passengers moving between the isolated communities of the desert corridor. It was not glamorous, but it was what made the valley economically legible to the outside world.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power ended that.

As the city bought up the farmland and the agricultural economy collapsed, the railroad's reason for being disappeared. There was less and less to carry. The mines that had not already played out lost their agricultural customers in the towns. The last train ran in nineteen sixty, seventy-seven years after the first.

The Laws Railroad Museum preserves what is left: the depot, the water tower, several pieces of rolling stock, and a set of historic structures that were relocated to the site after the railroad closed. It is one of the last intact records of what the Owens Valley was before Los Angeles decided it needed the water.