May 2008 we will be on the trail of Billy the Kid. Just west east of Silver City, the Chino open pit mine is in Bayard/Santa Rita. My google earth shows tracks into the mine. A web site says that the big trucks are used and the ore is processed on site.
Are the tracks still in place to transport the billets? I sure would like to hear from someone who has visited the mine recently. Thanks
Here's a nice web site on the Southwestern Railroad:
http://www.trainweb.org/southwestshorts/swrr.html
There are two copper mines served by Southwestern, Chino and Tyrone. The Chino Mine and Tyrone Mine now mine oxide ores and use solvent extraction-electrowinning (SX-EW) to produce copper cathodes. The Chino Mill and Chino Smelter at Hurley, N.M., which concentrated sulfide ores and then smelted the concentrate to produce blister copper, closed permanently in 2005. Chino also produces byproduct molybdenum.
I looked on the Freeport-McMoRan website to see if there was any recent news about Chino and Tyrone, like a shutdown, and there isn't, so presumably the railroad is running.
RWM
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