Cinco — A Siding on the Aqueduct Railroad

Blink and you'll miss Cinco — today it's little more than a name and a scatter of foundations along Highway 14. But around 1910 this was a working railroad siding, one link in an extraordinary supply chain.

To build the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the city had to move mountains of cement, steel pipe, and machinery into a roadless desert. So the Southern Pacific laid a 118-mile branch line from Monolith, near Mojave, all the way north to Olancha, finished in 1910. Sidings were strung along it every few miles, and this one was simply called "Cinco" — Spanish for "five."

From points like this, mules and the first motor trucks hauled supplies out to the aqueduct's construction camps. When the great ditch was completed in 1913 and the water began flowing south, the traffic dried up, the rails were eventually pulled, and Cinco settled back into the silence of the Mojave — a ghost of one of the largest public-works projects of its age.