page_title: Waterloo Mining Railroad
section_title: American Borax Company
hierarchical_section_title: Waterloo Mining Railroad / History / Borax mining / American Borax Company
caption_attribution_description: English: H.K. Porter built 0-4-0 saddle tank engine 'Emil', built June 1888 for use on the Waterloo Mining Railroad (also known as Daggett-Calico Railroad), later used by the American Borax Company to mine colemanite shales out of Lead Mountain and later on, in Tick Canyon, 30 miles from Los Angeles.
context_page_description: The Waterloo Mining Railroad, also known as the Calico Railroad or Daggett-Calico Railroad, was a 3 ft narrow gauge railroad built to carry silver ore from the mines in the Calico Mountains north of Calico to the mills located at Elephant Mountain near Daggett, California from 1888 to 1903.
  The American Borax Company leased, and later bought, a small length of the railroad to use for their borax mining operations near Lead Mountain in 1901, and the line managed to last for about another 6 years afterwards. During this time, it was referred to as the American Borax Company Railroad, and the Columbia Mine Railroad.
context_section_description: In 1899, the American Borax Company bought mining claims at Lead Mountain, about four miles west of Calico, to mine boric acid and plotted to build a railroad to reach Daggett across the river where they had their processing plants. American Borax agreed with the Waterloo Mining Company and D.D. Connell (who by then was also leasing the line from Waterloo Mining along with fellow miner Marcus Pluth, to transport the last of the ore from Waterloo Mine in 1899) to reserve running rights on the line to allow their trains to use the same track in between the junctions going towards Calico and the borax mine at Lead Mountain (named "Columbia"). They had also leased the line's first locomotive "Uncle Dan," to operate the borax trains outgoing from Lead Mountain.
  The line was extended from the mill branch at Elephant Mountain to cross the Mojave River on a Pratt through truss bridge before pulling into the Columbia Mill on the other side of the river, where the calcining plants were located. Once the boric acid was processed into borax, the train took the ore to the railhead in the town of Daggett where the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad came and took away the borax to sell in the market.
  American Borax and D.D. Connell both ran the line for their reasons, until a disastrous train wreck between the two engines at a switch in 1903 happened due to Connell hurrying with his engine (No. 2, "Emil") to get back to Daggett during a storm to terminate his lease. After Connell had been contracted to tear up the rail line towards Calico and all the wooden structures in the town, Waterloo Mining Co. gave full ownership of the railroad to American Borax to use the remainder of the line for the borax traffic from the Columbia Mine at Lead Mountain.
  By 1907, the American Borax Company discovered better deposits of borax in the Tick Canyon Formation, about 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Once they partnered up with fellow borax company, Sterling Borax, to take a hold of the borax claims there, the mining operations at Daggett were shut down and all the mining equipment, even the railroad itself was moved up to Lang, California, and the mining operations of the Calico Mountains ceased to exist.
caption: Daggett & Calico/Waterloo Mining Railroad's No. 1 'Uncle Dan'.
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