Sacramento Valley and Eastern Railway

The Sacramento Valley and Eastern Railway (SV&E) was a railway company that operated in Shasta County, California from 1908 until the early 1930s.

History

From 1908 until the early 1930s, the town of Pitt (now under Shasta Lake) was the terminus for the standard gauge Sacramento Valley and Eastern Railway, which extended from the Southern Pacific 15 miles (24 km) up the Pitt River northeast to the town of Delmar. Although stated to be a common carrier, the SV&E was solely dependent on the success of the mine and smelter at Bully Hill, about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) above the railroad’s easternmost terminus. The decline in copper prices and lack of revenue led to the closure of the railroad.

DeLamar Railroad

The Bully Hill and Squaw Creek areas of Shasta County had been worked for gold in the 1850s and 1860s and quartz in the 1880s, the more precious of the region's mineral resources. In July 1899, a colorful New York financier, Captain Joseph Raphael De Lamar, purchased the Bully Hill mines for about $200,000 and set about building a smelter of 400 ton capacity and developing the area for copper. A 30" gauge railroad (1.5 miles long) was used to connect level 3 of the mine with the smelter, using a diminutive Shay locomotive bought new for the project, which became informally known as the DeLamar Railroad. The smelting plant began operation in 1901.

In 1901 DeLamar built an electrolytic refinery in Chrome, New Jersey to handle the product of the Bully Hill smelter in the form of flat ingots of blister copper. This was the first operation in the Bully Hill area that met with any kind of success.