Santa Maria Valley Railroad - June 1981

Santa Maria Valley Railroad crew prepares to depart Guadalupe, California with Imperial Valley sugar beets just received off of the Southern Pacific interchange.

You know what they say about good intentions. I promised these guys I'd send them a copy of this picture. Never did. Two very nice guys.

Lacking Lilliputians, the SMVRR was not running the train from U6B number 60 which was being used a lead "B Unit"

Check out the double Hancock Air Whistles!

Each GC Beet Gon is tagged with a placard  "Union Sugar - Betteravia"

At the junction with the line to Santa Maria.

Arriving at Betteravia. Note the eucalyptus wind break. The Santa Maria Valley gets a stiff breeze off of the Pacific most of the year.

Union Sugar processing plant, Betteravia, California
The two SP hopper cars on the dump trestle are for lime which is used to precipitate out impurities during processing.

California's Imperial and Santa Maria Valleys have one thing in common, agriculture, but the similarity stops there. Sugar beets were intensively farmed and were a winter crop in the Imperial Valley, a place where summer temperatures routinely exceed 100 degrees. If ever there was a place that typifies intensive industrial cultivation, the I.V. is the place. Let's just the say the place has a certain "air" about it. The Santa Maria Valley, by contrast, is a bucolic near Eden, with a Central Coast feel to it. The mill closed in 1993, the victim of the changed economics of sugar production. The Southern Pacific mainlines between the two valleys used to be littered with shriveled sugar beets. A byproduct of the refining process, sugar beet pulp, made its way back to Southern California via truck, as an ingredient in dairy cow feed.