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[quote user="nanaimo73"] So Rock Creek Canyon should have been bridged. Egeria, just to the north, is the Roman Goddess. What is that hole at Crater ? An old coal mine ? It is not mentioned in "The Moffat Coal Road" article in the 7-94 Trains. [/quote] Now you have #7 and #8, congratulations. The "hole" at the west switch of Crater probably wasn't mentioned in the Moffat Coal article because it is a cinder cone that's being quarried for scoria, which is used mostly for landscaping.  It ships by open-top hopper on a sporadic basis -- maybe two or three carloads a month.  The Moffat Road at one time used this scoria for ballast because it is very cheap to quarry and it was in a convenient location.  It makes a very poor ballast because it's soft and is quickly crushed under traffic.  You can often see remnants of the scoria ballast peeking from beneath the good slag ballast the Rio Grande dumped in the 1960s and onward when it rebuilt the Moffat for heavy coal traffic.  (Look at photos from the 1960s for track conditions, and it's a far sight from what it was by the 1980s.)  There was a second cinder cone just west of Volcano siding that was also quarried for ballast. The original engineering study considered bridging the mouth of Rock Creek Canyon, but big steel bridges were very expensive at that time, and tunneling was cheap.  The Moffat Road was starved for cash and engineered its route on the cheap, making its operating costs exorbitant.  A threat to the UP it was only in the minds of latter-day aficianados. S. Hadid
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