One of the Union Pacific engine units parked at Lompoc before heading up the Grade to the white hills. The gondola car behind it carries diatomaceous earth product from Celite Mine.
One of the Union Pacific engine units parked at Lompoc before heading up the Grade to the white hills. The gondola car behind it carries diatomaceous earth product from Celite Mine.
One of the Union Pacific engine units parked at Lompoc before heading up the Grade to the white hills. The gondola car behind it carries diatomaceous earth product from Celite Mine.
Those flashing red railroad crossing lights encountered by motorists on H Street and Laurel Street stop traffic to allow Union Pacific diesel-drawn freight trains to cross twice weekly.
Lompoc residents have encountered these freights at other locations in town and heard the diesel’s horn as the train makes its way through traffic intersections. This train pulls anywhere from one to dozens of freight cars from Guadalupe up the hill behind the veterans building into Miguelito Canyon to the white hills — John Manville, aka Celite World Minerals, diatomaceous earth mine. This weekly event has been ongoing since 1923.
Prior to that time, the Celite mine was sending trucks and wagons loaded with tons of diatomaceous minerals down what is today H Street, up Harris Grade, over the grade, down a dirt road on the right side of the canyon to the rail station at Harris onto the Pacific Central narrow-gauge railroad, which then followed the present day Route 135 from Los Alamos to Orcutt.
At Harris, the minerals were loaded onto the trains and sent to Port Harford at Avila Harbor about 70 miles north, where they were trans-shipped by ocean steamer to markets all over the world.
Diatomaceous earth is used for insulation in boilers, filters, fillers in cosmetics and paint, and in many other products. This now famous mine began in the 1880s.
The original route was difficult and circuitous and the many trucks traveling every day were wearing to the town of Lompoc.
To improve the route, Lompoc passed a bond to grade and pave H street, put a bridge across the Santa Ynez River on H Street and build a new road over Harris Grade down the west side of the canyon where it is today.
Initially, the bond effort failed to get the 2/3 majority required in the 1923 election. Later efforts succeeded, and the bridge was finally built in 1926.
At about the same time Celite, in 1922, began negotiations with the Southern Pacific Railroad in order to ship its products by way of the Southern Pacific’s existing spurline, which ran from the Lompoc Station on Laurel Street, 10 miles to the mainline at Surf. This spur and station were installed by Southern Pacific in 1899.
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To support this plan and make this a viable new route, Celite formed a franchise and stock issued at $100 a share to build an extension of the Lompoc railroad spur from the Lompoc depot, across the south end of Lompoc and up Miguelito Canyon to the white hills mine.
Illustrated is the route of the narrow-gauge Pacific Coast Railroad in 1915. Note Harris Station at the bend.
Courtesy of the Lompoc Historical Society
Route surveys were completed and right-of -ways were acquired in early 1923. Grading of the roadbed with a new model steam shovel began in mid-1923.
The roadbed went up ‘A’ Street and then veered to the west through the sparsely populated southside of Lompoc, along a gentle slope. First, grading cuts were made at the site of the old mission at the end of present day South F Street, where they can be seen today. Further cuts were made about a half -mile further west above what is today the site of the veterans building, built 15 years later.
Pouring ballast stone for the roadbed, on which wooden ties and rails were laid, continued throughout the fall of the year until the 3.5-mile railroad was completed in late November. The first train pushed up the 3% grade on Dec. 7, 1923. Since then, trains with the valuable earth have been running down the hill from the mine for 86 years.
The railspur became well-known to railroad buffs, so much so that on Aug. 16, 1953, the Pacific Railroad Society sponsored a one-day excursion from Union Station in Los Angeles to the mine.
The twice weekly trains are often seen parked on Laurel. The original trains were black steam engines with clanging bells and shrill whistles that spewed steam and coal ash all over the neighborhood.
Today they have been replaced by the giant orange diesel-electric engines that hum and throb and blow horns instead of whistles. The engines and cars are often seen parked on Laurel Street while the crew breaks for lunch at the Whistle Stop or Café San Martin, or perhaps a break for coffee and doughnuts at Lompoc Doughnuts.
However, before proceeding up the hill with its train of cars, a graffitied and vandalized caboose is added to the end of the train and it is pushed end-first up the hill so the crew can have a car to stand on to blow whistles as the train crosses intersections and streets that have been built up since the first trains in 1923.
Train cars being pushed into the Celite's mine loading shed by a steam engine, circa 1930s.
Courtesy of the Lompoc Historical Society
Shown is the east side canyon of old Harris Grade Road.
Courtesy of Lompoc Historical Society
Justin M. Ruhge is a Lompoc resident and local historian. *Historic facts for this article were located in brief comments in bound copies of the Lompoc Record and Lompoc Review for 1922, 1923 and 1924, located at the Lompoc Library. Additional information was located at the Lompoc Historical Society.
