Mojave Magic 2

Mojave Magic 2 is a very good RR video, especially if you like desert scenery.  The wide screen format really brings out the vastness and beauty of the desert.  Highball videos can be very good but they can also be very bad with respect to image quality; this is one of their very good ones.

We begin the journey in Needles, CA, and run westward for 167.9 miles on the BNSF Needles Sub Division to Barstow, CA, on the western end of the sub.  The narrator informs us that 60 to 70 trains a day make use of the double track mainline.

It would have been very helpful to the viewer if maps had been used to show our route but that was not the case, which is almost unforgivable.  For maps and other information about the Needles Sub go to www.trainweb.org/brettrw/bnsf/needles.html.

Mixed manifest and double stack trains are pulled with a nice variety of locomotive types in the lash-ups.  We see a Norfolk Southern SD70M-2 locomotive teamed up with the BNSF locomotives on one train.

Places encountered as we make our westward progress are Java, Goffs, Danby, Cadiz, Amboy, Bagdad, Klondike, Ash Hill, Ludlow, and Daggett.  Someone had a sense of humor when they named a place in the middle of the desert “Klondike” and there is another place called “Siberia.”

This video was a good purchase but it would have been so much better if maps had been included along with periodic updates showing where we were on the map.