The earlier thread regarding the Chili Line and Los Alamos got me once again pondering the real mystery (at least for me) about the narrow gauge-Manhattan Project connection - What happened to the yellow cake hauled by the RGS? In fact, which direction was it hauled from the tailings dumps around Telluride, Vanadium, and other points? Was the ore first reduced in the smelter at Durango?
Krause/Grenard (Colorado Memories of the Narrow Gauge Circle) wrote: “Carloads of a seemingly worthless form of tailings called ‘yellow cake’ rolled into Durango and then on to an Army plant in Utah.” So how did the reduced ore get to Utah? By truck? By rail? If by rail, was it backhauled from the Durango smelter on the RGS? Or did it go the long way around, over Cumbres and then the Tennessee Pass perhaps?
Then there is this: Beebe/Clegg, who were never known to let facts ruin a good story, wrote about “the leased Rio Grande locomotives hauling machine-gun-guarded high cars over Dallas Divide, [which] had an ultimate destination…of Hiroshima.” Wasn’t Dallas Divide to the north of the vanadium mines? Wouldn’t that have meant the ore trains were headed to Ridgeway?
Don Richter, in his thorough timeline below, cites Richard Rhodes’ book, stating that “Uranium ore (yellowcake) was processed at the sprawling facilities at Oak Ridge, TN and the concentrated U235 brought to Los Alamos by car.” Was this referring to the FINAL processing of the ore after it was initially reduced elsewhere? Or did it go directly to Tennessee?
So what happened to the yellow cake hauled by the RGS. We know it got from Oak Ridge to Los Alamos to Hiroshima by car and by airplane. But how did it get to Oak Ridge from the RGS by way of Utah? And did the San Juan Extension play a role?
