Beautiful and Dangerous

The scene on this post card is of a small section of Southern Pacific railroad in northern California. It is located in very northern California, 150 miles east of Eureka and 200 miles north of Sacramento. To get to this loop in the tracks one can drive Highway 5 to Shasta Springs and get onto some side roads that take you to the Cantara Loop Road.

There are two similar sharp loops in the same area to help the trains to negotiate the mountainous grades. The Cantara Loop crosses the Sacramento River shortly after the river leaves Lake Siskiyou.

On the post card you can see the famous Mt. Shasta in the background.

This loop became infamously famous about 20 years ago when a train derailed right on the bridge and a tanker spilled its contents into the river.

Following is a quote from the website: http://dtsc.ca.gov/cantara.cfm, “The accident still ranks as the largest hazardous chemical spill in California history. In the darkness of a Sunday night, July 14, a Southern Pacific Railroad train rounding the Cantara Loop over one of the Sacramento River’s most pristine stretches jumped the track. A tanker carrying 19,000 gallons of the deadly soil sterilizer, metam sodium, toppled into the water below, a gash in its side. The surreal green chemical gushed into one of America’s most renowned trout-fishing rivers. The spill, accompanied by a toxic chemical cloud that sent area residents to hospitals, quickly stripped bare a 41-mile stretch of the Sacramento River. Wildlife experts estimate the agricultural fumigant designed to kill soil pests killed more than one million fish and thousands of trees during a three-day floating journey to Shasta Lake.”

I understand that mother earth has healed herself over the past 20 years.

The car was printed by Curt Teich and Company. It says in the middle of the back of the card that they used the “C. T. Photo Colorit” system to produce the card. The number on the front, bottom right (5A-H811) tells us that this is what has become known as a linen card, invented by Curt Teich. That is what the H in the number tells us. The 5A tells us that a) it was printed in the 1930s (that is what the A tells us) and to be exact, it was printed in 1935 (the 5 tells us that). It is production run number 811 for that year. There were 2701 production runs that year, so this came early in the year. The post card was mailed on September 11, 1938.

The card was published by no less than the Southern Pacific Company of San Francisco, California! Their description on the back of card is: “The train spends five hours crossing and recrossing the Sacramento River. This loop was devised to get out of the canyon and up on the plateau where stands Mount Shasta. … Nothing could be a more glorious tribute to the marvelous skill of the modern railroad engineer than the obstacles met with and overcome in building a railroad through this rugged country.”