Home  Photo gallery

Fifty years ago this Sunday, Kern County was shaken to its roots by the third largest earthquake in recorded California history.

The town of Tehachapi was heavily damaged, and 12 people were killed. A month later, an aftershock heavily damaged Bakersfield, killing two.

Today, some Kern County residents vividly remember the earthquake, but several more would find themselves unprepared in the event of another big quake.

Damaged rails took months to fix

By TIM BRAGG, Californian staff writer
e-mail: tbragg@bakersfield.com

Monday July 22, 2002, 07:00:00 PM

Photo courtesy of Southern Pacific Railroad A view from the entrance of a railroad tunnel (designated "Tunnel No. 3") showing bent rails between two tunnels near a zone of intense fracturing along the White Wolf fault.

As westbound Southern Pacific Train 55 made its way to Bakersfield early in the morning of July 21, 1952, James Strong, then 22 years old, took the opportunity to catch a little shut-eye.

Strong, a University of California, Berkeley student working for the Southern Pacific railroad in Bakersfield during his summer vacation, had spent the day before on an excursion train ride on several rail lines along the California coast.

Because he was a railroad employee, he caught a free ride on the mail and express train back to Bakersfield, which carried one sparsely occupied coach car for passengers.

Just before 4 a.m., the ride got bumpy.

"I thought we had derailed, we were bouncing up and down so much," Strong said.

He didn't know it right then, but that Monday would be the beginning of 12- to 15-hour work days as he and hundreds of railroad employees and contractors worked to reopen the only railroad link between Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley, which was shared by the trains of Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads.

The line handled thousand of tons of freight and hundreds of passengers each day and remains an important link in the nation's railroad network to this day.

According to John R. Signor's book "Tehachapi," the railroad was in shambles.

Track was shifted out of alignment in many places. Water tanks used to supply the steam locomotives still in use on certain trains had collapsed in three different locations, including one in Caliente that fell on a standing freight train.

The quake had knocked out the signaling system used to govern movement on the rail line, so Strong's train was stranded.

In the morning, Strong got hungry, so he walked down the tracks to the store in Caliente to find something to eat.

As he walked, he saw the extent of the damage.

"There was a place where a fill had collapsed, and the track was just hanging there above the tracks," Strong said. "It's a good thing we weren't on top of that when the quake hit."

His walk to Caliente was for nothing: the shelves of the store had fallen over, spilling everything on the floor.

According to Signor's book, the worst damage occurred on the 11 miles of track between Caliente and Rowen, below the famous Tehachapi Loop.

Four tunnels in the area were severely damaged. The walls bulged in several of the bores, and the rail inside had been twisted. Tunnels No. 3 and No. 4 were shoved several feet closer, causing the track in between to contort into sharp curves.

The worst damage was at Tunnel No. 5, where two separate cave-ins blocked the line.

Strong said the government released construction crews from the Morrison-Knudsen construction company - who were building Lake Isabella dam - to help to reopen the rail line.

"Morrison-Knudsen's tunnel expert came out from the headquarters in Boise and saw the damage to Tunnel No. 5. They asked him how long it would take reopen it and he said, 'Hell, I don't know,'" Strong said. "He said, 'I've never repaired a tunnel before, I've only driven new ones.'"

The Morrison-Knudsen crews got to work building roads to access sites where major damage occurred.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce's 1954 U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, an army of earth-moving machines and supplemental equipment, representing an estimated total value of $3.5 million, clawed into the earth and rock of Tehachapi mountain slopes to rebuild the damaged train tunnels. The machines battled 24 hours a day.

The east end of Tunnel No. 3 and all of tunnels No. 4 and No. 6 were "daylighted," meaning crews removed the earth above the rails completely.

But it was determined that Tunnel No. 5 required major repairs. Because it would not be ready for trains when the rest of the line would be, crews decided to build a temporary bypass track around it, known as a "shoofly."

To build the 4,358-foot-long bypass, Strong said construction crews moved an immense amount of dirt, creating a huge fill across Clear Creek Ravine that can still be seen above Bealville today.

Strong said engineers using a passenger car as a makeshift command post near the site apparently used dinner plates in the car as templates to help sketch the shape of the bypass that featured sharp curves.

Soon after the quake, Strong was pressed into service on a surveying crew.

One day, Strong decided to tag along with members of another survey crew assigned to go into the heavily damaged section of Tunnel No. 5 to see how fast the walls of the tunnel were coming together. Constant aftershocks from the original quake made working in the damaged tunnels a harrowing experience.

"That one time was wild enough for me, I never went back," Strong said.

During the first 26 days after the quake, Southern Pacific and Santa Fe freight trains were rerouted down Southern Pacific's Coast Line, a stretch of tracks along the Pacific Coast between the Bay area and Los Angeles.

Passenger trains were unloaded of riders, express freight and mail at Bakersfield, Barstow and Los Angeles. Passengers were bused between the locations while the cargo traveled in trucks.

According to Signor, the first train traveled over the rebuilt line on Aug. 15.

Repairs to Tunnel No. 5 wouldn't be completed for another three to four months, but once they were, the shoofly track was abandoned.

About a month and half after the quake, Strong's technical training program job with Southern Pacific was over for the summer and he returned to UC Berkeley before repairs to the line were complete.

Strong, now 72 and retired after a long career with the railroad, said the experience stills holds a special place in his memory.

"I don't think people realize how much work was required to get the railroad going again," he said. "It was so isolated out there, nobody else really saw all the work we did.