User:WMThomas/my sandbox2

Glendale & Mount Verdugo Railway

One of the earliest attempts to access and develop the interior of the Verdugo Mountains was the 1912 proposal by Colonel Lewis Ginger to build an cable incline railroad to the summit of Mount Verdugo, now known as Mount Thom. The proposed Glendale & Verdugo Mountain Railway was to run in a straight line from the Pacific Electric’s Casa Verdugo station at the top of Brand Boulevard to the summit of Mount Verdugo, employing cars with stepped seating similar to those of Angel’s Flight on Bunker Hill in Los Angeles. Initially, Colonel Ginger proposed that his cable railway would lift a Pacific Electric car directly to the summit, but Henry E. Huntington did not approve of this scheme. The railway was to have four or five stations along the incline and a large visitor’s center at the summit. Several months after the initial proposal, the route was altered to run up the east side of Verdugo Canyon from a hoped-for extension of the Pacific Electric up Verdugo Canyon to Montrose. Interest in the cable railway continued for about a year, but the project was abandoned before a company could be formed, largely as the result of the Pacific Electric’s decision not to build the Montrose extension.

My second sandbox

Geology (Forest Falls)

The rocks immediately surrounding Forest Falls are basement rocks characteristic of the major part of the San Bernardino Mountains, that is, Paleoproterozoic gneiss, Neoproterozoic to Paleozoic marble and quartzite, and Late Cretaceous granitic rocks. Marble and quartzite are present only in minor amounts in the immediately vicinity, although a small marble quarry up-canyon from the town was operated sporadically and uneconomically from 1908 into the 1940's. The extremely linear canyon in which Forest Falls is located follows the trace of the Mill Creek Fault, a now-inactive strand of the San Andreas Fault system along which approximately 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) of right-lateral strike-slip displacement occurred during the period from 500,000 to 250,000 years ago. (Presently active strands of this fault system lie to the south.) The canyon itself is the result of erosion by Mill Creek of the highly fractured rock along this linear fault zone. Because the San Bernardino Mountains are a young, steep and rapidly rising mountain range, erosion rates are extremely high and have been estimated to be as high as 1.7 millimetres (0.067 in) per 1,000 years on hillside gradients as high as 36 degrees.

Geography and geology

Downey is located in the central Los Angeles Basin, 10 miles (16 km) southest of the Los Angeles civic center and 12.5 miles (20.1 km) north of the Pacific Ocean at Long Beach, California. The cities of South Gate and Bell Gardens are adjacent to the west and northwest; Pico Rivera lies to the northeast, Santa Fe Springs and Norwalk to the east, and Paramount and Bellflower to the south. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 32.6 km² (12.6 mi²). 32.2 km² (12.4 mi²) of it is land and 0.4 km² (0.2 mi²) of it (1.35%) is water.

The city is situated on the featureless floodplain of the San Gabriel River at elevations ranging from 145 feet (44 m) in the north to 90 feet (27 m) in the south. In common with the neighboring Los Angeles and Santa Ana Rivers, the San Gabriel River did not maintain a constant channel before the era of flood control, but shifted it course at times of major flooding. Most significant in historic times was the flooding of 1867. Before 1867, the San Gabriel River flowed into the Los Angeles River immediately southeast of present-day Downey, following the present course of the now-channelized Rio Hondo. During this major regional flood, the San Gabriel River shifted its principal flow from the Rio Hondo course on the western side of Downey to the present channel on its eastern edge. The earlier channel, now called the Rio Hondo, also became known as the "Old River," a name which persists in the street name Old River School Road. Similarly, the present course was often called the "New River." Flood control channels were constructed on the Los Angeles and Rio Hondo Rivers by the Los Angeles County Flood Control District beginning in 1940, following the disastrous county-wide flooding of March, 1938. Similar channelization was constructed on the San Gabriel River in 1955. Local flooding occurred in the downtown part of Downey in 1950.

The entire surface area of Downey is covered by thick Quaternary alluvial deposits and no bedrock exposures occur within the city limits. Downey lies near the center and deepest part of the Los Angeles Basin as geologically defined, with a depth to probable granitic crystalline basement of as much as 35,000 feet (11,000 m). Above this basement is a stratigraphic section of Upper Cretaceous to Plio-Pleistocene marine and non-marine sedimentary rocks similar to those exposed in the hills around the margin of the basin. Despite the proximity of the Santa Fe Springs Oil Field less than one mile east of the city limits, there has been little or no commercial petroleum production within the Downey city boundaries.