Nevada Northern Railroad, Ely, Nevada – June 24th 2025

Nevada Northern Railroad, Ely, Nevada – June 24th 2025

An amazing heritage railway in the middle of Nowhere !!

The day we visited only diesel locomotive 801 was operating.

The Nevada Northern owes its beginnings to the discovery and development of large porphyry copper deposits near Ely early in the 20th century. Two of the region’s largest mines (including the Robinson Mine) were purchased in 1902 by Mark Requa, president of the Eureka & Palisade Railroad in central Nevada.

A series of corporate financial transactions in the 1920s and 1930s brought Nevada Consolidated under the control of the Kennecott Copper Corporation, and Nevada Consolidated was merged into Kennecott in 1942. The Nevada Northern thus became a Kennecott subsidiary.

Faced with declining ore reserves and low copper prices, Kennecott closed its Ruth-area mines in May 1978, thus ending the ore trains between Ruth and the McGill smelter. The smelter closed on June 20, 1983, and the Nevada Northern suspended all operations immediately thereafter.

in a series of donations beginning in 1986, Kennecott transferred the entire Ore Line, as well as the railroad’s yard and shop facilities in East Ely, to the White Pine Historical Railroad Foundation, a non-profit organization that today operates the property as the Nevada Northern Railway Museum which operates a heritage railroad on this part of the former NN.

Passenger excursion train service is offered between Ely, Ruth, and McGill using period equipment pulled by historic steam and diesel locomotives.

In April 2006, Nevada’s National Historic Landmarks Committee granted unanimous support to nominating the Nevada Northern’s East Ely shops complex as a National Historic Landmark. The nomination was approved by the National Park Service on September 27, 2006.

The remainder of the Nevada Northern has largely been moribund since 1983. In 1987, the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power purchased the Cobre-East Ely line, in anticipation of the construction of a coal-fired generating plant along the route, which was never constructed. Meanwhile, the 1990s saw a brief resumption of copper mining near Ruth, this time by BHP. This project saw the construction of additional trackage near Ruth, and the resumption of service from there as far as Shafter by the BHP Nevada Railroad in 1996. Both the mine and railroad shut down again in 1999, and when mining resumed in 2004 concentrates were hauled by truck rather than by rail.

The disused line between Ely and Cobre was acquired by the city of Ely in 2006. Plans near 2008 by Sierra Pacific Resources for the construction of the Ely Energy Center, a 2,500 megawatt coal-fired generating plant in the Ely vicinity raised the possibility that the railroad may have seen another revival, carrying inbound loads of coal to White Pine County.[8] Since then those plans have stalled; however, the Nevada Northern Railway Museum and Ely have considered other options to possibly restore the entire mainline route for heritage use. On October 14, 2021, plans to extend the line to McGill were announced.