For some reason mines and mills rarely were built next to each other .It may be that mines were often in very remote locations ,and mills needed to be near a good water source ,like a river . Often ore was transported by wagon and later by truck to the mill .Some mines ,Like the Sheanadoah-Dives mine near Silverton ,was on a high mountain side ,and a spectacular tramway transported the ore in buckets down the mountain to the top of the Mayflower Mill .Buckets also took miners and supplies up to the mine .Aerial trams were popular in the Colorado Rockies ,as many mines were so remote that they were inaccessable even by road .The Ophir tramhouse straddling the RGS mainline came from the Alta Mine a couple of miles high above the station .The Smuggler-Union mill originally was served by a tramway ,but later had the ores fed to it directly by the Idarado mine . This was another pattern in mining .Mills originally built to serve one mine ended up serving other mines . the Mayflower was part of A mining complex on the east side of the Animas River .Later it served the American Tunnel at Gladstone ,to the west .
A number of mine-to mill railroads ran in the American West as late as the 1990s . Some were "island' operations ,with no outside links . the famous Virginia and Truckee started as a mine-to-mill road ,transporting Comstock ores from Virginia City mines to the stamp mills along the Carson River . Later the owners built a connection to the Central pacific at Reno . Several interesting mine-to-mill roads existed in Arizona .One 30-inch gauge line had its second hand Forney-style 0-4-4 transported 40 miles by a team of oxen ! Another five mile line ran in the hills southeast of Tucson at Helvetia ,with a Shay and a0-4-0 . The last big mine-to-mill operation was the San Manuel Arizona R.R. ,a 9-mile line .It had a control car on the back of the train and, after unloading at the mill, the ore train ran 40 mph backwards ! Some mines shipped their ores qiute soem distance by rail to a mill ,Custom mills often handle ores from small mines .
Mills were ideally situated close to good transportation . Besides shipping concentrates out ,they always needed new pumps ,pipes ,and specilty equipment brought in . The milled product ,the concentrates ,while far easier to ship than ore ,but still problematical . Concentrate was heavy - 70 pounds a shovelful ! SO they were loaded over the bolsters of the trucks ,preferably in box cars so they would not get snow or ice in them . Overloading could and did break the arch bars in the truck .It also ,due to all the chemical reagents would tear up the wood floors and stain the sides ,as indicated by some of the surviving box cars today .
