Not Salt Lake Utah Exactly

This post card is showing the Union Pacific Railroad Bridge, spanning the Santa Anna River, west of Riverside, California.

This bridge has significance because the Union Pacific Railroad Bridge was part of an overall plan initiated by Senator William Andrews Clark to connect the rail centers of Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, thereby creating a route of strategic importance for the shipping and transportation of materials. The Bridge was also, at one time, the largest concrete bridge on earth.

When built in 1903 it was billed as the largest concrete viaduct in the world. It is 984 feet (300 m) long, 17 feet (5.2 m) wide, averages 55 feet (17 m) in height, and contains about 14,000 cubic feet (400 m3) of concrete. As a comparison, Glenfinnan Viaduct (the "Harry Potter" viaduct) was built in 1901 and is 1,035 feet (315 m) long and up to 100 feet (30 m) high.

The post card is from the divided back era, so it is from around 1907 to 1915. M. Reider (in business from 1901 to 1915)printed and published view-cards of the West and of Native Americans. His cards were printed in Germany except those contracted out to Edward H. Mitchell in the United States. On E-bay, there is a post card published by Edward H. Mitchell (EHM) that uses the exact same picture on the front, but says it is published by EHM. I am trying to purchase the card to add to my collection!

I am sorry about the quality of the pictures of this post card. The program and my new Windows 8 don't seem to like each other. I can scan the post card onto my computer with my trusty Epson V500 scanner, but I can't get it onto this program from there. So, I held up the post card to the webcam on my computer and took a photo of the post card directly into this blog. Hopefully, things will get better.

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.”