Magma Arizona Railroad

The Magma Arizona Railroad (reporting mark MAA) was built by the Magma Copper Company and operated from 1915 - 1997.

The railroad was originally built as a 3 ft (914 mm) gauge line and was converted to standard gauge in 1923. Originally headquartered in Superior, Arizona, the company primarily hauled cattle and copper on 30.2 miles (48.6 km) of standard gauge track to and from the Southern Pacific mainline in Magma, Arizona, between Florence and Queen Creek.

The Australian mining giant Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP) purchased the Magma Copper Company and its lines in 1996 for A$3.2 billion and suspended rail operations on this line a year later.

The Magma was the last industrial short line railroad to use steam power.

Read more about Magma Arizona Railroad:  Revival, Famous Locomotives

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