Railroaders in charge of fixed plant — often carrying the “roadmaster” title — rarely attract much fame, but a significant exception is James C. Mahon, the longtime Southern Pacific official who won some of SP’s most significant battles against nature and along the way developed legions of fans, especially in California.
Mahon, known across the SP system as “The Bear,” died Monday, Dec. 9, at age 87.
Mahon racked up an impressive list of accomplishments. Among his triumphs were helping SP recover from the historic Tehachapi earthquake of July 1952 (as a young, green trackworker), his years-long war against the Sierra Nevada snows of Donner Pass, and his leadership of the team in Utah that in 1986 raised the Great Salt Lake causeway Utah out of the water and reopened the railroad.
That latter victory on what is known as SP’s Lucin Cutoff was significant. High winds and water sank about 11 miles of the causeway, and threatened up to 40 total miles of railroad. Mahon was dispatched from the Sacramento Division, and his crew’s effort to reopen the main line ended up as a cover story in the April 1987 issue of Trains entitled “The Bear vs. The Lake,” written and photographed by Richard Steinheimer. Mahon, concluded Steinheimer, was “the kind of guy you’d pick to help fight a football game or a riot.”
Mahon was born to work for the SP. His father, Walter G. Mahon, was a track supervisor for the railroad’s San Joaquin Division, and Jim was born in 1937 in Caliente, in the heart of SP’s famed Tehachapi line. Altogether, several other members of the family spanning four generations would earn Southern Pacific paychecks. Jim Mahon would retire in 1999 with 47 years on the railroad.
Along the way, Mahon held various posts in SP’s engineering department, including track laborer, track supervisor, general track foreman, roadmaster, assistant division engineer, and division engineer, among others. He once told SP historian Scott Inman that his proudest accomplishments were restoring mainline track between Lordsburg, N.M., and El Paso, Texas, as well as his long-running effort to keep the Mountain District of the Sacramento Division — the famed Donner Pass line — open during winter.
Mahon’s relationship with the latter earned the respect of at least two generations of railroaders and railroad photographers drawn to the epic confrontation between trains and snow. Backed by a hardened crew of railroaders and equipped with an armada of plows, spreaders, and rotary snowplows, Mahon inevitably came out on top of the weather.
As Inman, past president of the Southern Pacific Railroad History Center puts it, “under Jim Mahon’s watch, no passenger train was ever stranded over Donner Pass or delayed for a period of greater than four hours.”
Services for James C. Mahon are planned for 10 a.m. Thursday, December 19, at the Church of Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1255 Bell Road, Auburn, CA, 95603.
