Tag: moundhouse

News Carson City is reporting that they've broken ground on the railroad bridge that will carry the Virginia & Truckee tracks over Hwy 50 in Mound House. This bridge is a little bit west of the original alignment of the V&T, right at the peak of the hill on the Carson-Lyon county line. The bridge itself, if I remember the details right, is an old Union Pacific bridge out of Vegas that was donated to the V&T a couple of years ago. So all they have to do is built supports for it, then set the thing down over the roadway. Estimates are for the bridge to be in place by January, then the tracks will be laid across it next summer.

After that the project will be out of money, and the tracks will end somewhere in the brush above Pick N Pull. So if they want to go any further they've got to start raising funds soon. But at least the rails will be within spitting distance of Carson City, and conceivably the Grays could start running excursions to Mound House and back.

It looks like fire season has come to the Carson area. A wildfire sparked up in the hills above Mound House this afternoon, the Industrial Fire. I saw the thin white smoke curling up right around 4:00 today, when the fire was only fifteen minutes old. An hour later it was turning black and thick, the ash from the burning brush being released into the air. The fire is currently closing in on 1,000 acres, but at the last report it was about 25% contained. Hopefully they can get a good handle on it overnight.

Everything is coming together to make this a really bad fire season. A dry winter has led into a dry spring which will soon turn into a dry summer, and all the sagebrush and cheatgrass is just ready to burn. There are apparently 11 small fires burning in the desert north of Reno because of the lightning storm that came through the area.

And it's only May. Hold on for a long summer.