Re: Carnotite

An interesting news report, especially from Farmington as the shipping point. That being the case, the carnotite probably came from mines in the King Tutt Mesa in the Chuska Mountains or on the east side of the Lukachuki Mountains of northwest New Mexico/northeastern Arizona.

As for the reason, it was likely to extract radium, which was a commodity of great economic interest. There was a radium extraction plant in Denver at the time, along Speer Blvd. [I think].

Uranium was used in various dishes and glassware at that time, but I do not think that a car load of carnotite would have been for that purpose.

At the same time, many [but not all] of the uranium deposits in western Colorado, eastern Utah and northwestern New Mexico have vanadium associated with them [in fact, they are actually vanadium deposits with by-product uranium]. Vanadium mills were operating in western COlorado at the time - at Newmire [on the RGS], Joe Jr. [later renamed the town Uravan], Gateway, and Slick Rock. Operators of these mills were Standard Chemical and Primos Chemical. Union Carbon and Carbide later bought Standard [and obtained the Joe Jr. mill] and Primos ended up as part of what became the Vanadium Corporation of America. THe Newmire [the town site was also known as "Vanadium for a while] vanadium mill was serviced by the RGS, but none of the other vanadium mills had rail service. Note however, that the AS&R [Asarco] plant at Durango, serviced by the D&RGW, was converted to a uranium/vanadium processing plant and operated by VCA, but that was during and after World War II.

I am a bit surprised that there was not much interest by the RGS in servicing the vanadium mills along the San Miguel River downstream from Placerville, as there would have been a fair bit of incoming freight, as well as outgoing "red cake" [vanadium concentrates] for steel-making.

TED
u3o8geo