Cajon Pass Railroad Webcam

Click in to view this live feed streamed by RRPhotographer of the Cajon Pass in the early hours of a California morning, around 4.00am, and you may well think you’re witnessing a strange phenomena. Don’t get too excited, you’re not. While what you see may look like a huge ball of light racing down the tracks, it won’t be an unidentified flying object manned by extraterrestrials on an exploration of Earth mission. What you will be seeing is a train passing through with its headlights on full beam.

Cajon Pass doesn’t have a box-like appearance, but its name, pronounced ka-hon, translates from the Spanish language to English to mean just that. Whether Cajon Pass is no longer box-like due to the effects of erosion wearing away the surrounding rock or it was just a bad choice of name at the time of the Spanish land grant is, and will probably, remain a mystery.

Whether it’s box-like or not, Cajon Pass is a well-used route for rail traffic passing through the Mojave Desert. The pass slices its way through the San Bernardino and San Gabriel Mountains at an altitude of over one-thousand metres. That’s a fact which makes it sound as if you’d be taking a scenic journey if you purchased a ticket to ride the route on your way for a flutter in Las Vegas. But, looking at the view on this webcam, it might be worth thinking about taking a book with you rather than planning on staring out of the carriage window.