From Dunsmuir we ascended 1300 ft elevation through the Cantara Loop, past Mt Shasta City to Black Butte. Black Butte is a big cinder cone north of Mt Shasta which came up around 10,000 yrs ago, hence its name.
This is a junction where the old Southern Pacific line (now Union Pacific mainline) turns northeast over to Klamath Falls, however the line splits and a branch heads up to Weed and over Siskiyous. There is a wye track which allowed out train to turn around to head back to Dunsmuir, however we were delayed 90 minutes to wait for an express container train called the “Z train” headed up into Oregon, then the dispatcher couldn’t get detection of the switch so the conductor had to go out, throw the switch manually and talk the engineer through the red signal.
The major benefit was that I was able to take this photo of the sunset behind us while waiting.
