Qualla: Cadiz, California

Cadiz, California: Introduction

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit G. Edward Johnson, CC BY 4.0. Lewis Kingman named the stations on his railroad line alphabetically — Amboy, then Bagdad, then Cadiz, continuing through the desert like a lesson in the ABCs applied to geography. When he named Cadiz in 1883, he was probably thinking about rhythm and sequence more than the Spanish port city, the ancient Phoenician colony, or any of the other things the name carries. The station has been Cadiz ever since, a water stop on what is now the BNSF Southern Transcon, the main freight line from Los Angeles to Chicago. The water beneath it has become, a century later, the subject of a legal and political battle that the railroad naming never anticipated.

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Image: G. Edward Johnson | CC BY 4.0

Cadiz, California: The Station and the Line

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Missouri Pacific Lines, Public domain. Cadiz sits on the BNSF Southern Transcon — the railroad line that carries more freight between Los Angeles and Chicago than any other route in North America. The station is, in railroad terms, a siding: a place where trains can pass each other on the main line, a functional piece...

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Image: Missouri Pacific Lines | Public domain

Cadiz, California: Cadiz Inc. and the Aquifer

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0. Cadiz Inc. owns more than 35,000 acres around the railroad station — a landholding assembled specifically because of what lies beneath it: the Mojave Aquifer, a vast underground water reservoir that took thousands of years to accumulate and that the Cadiz water project proposes t...

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Image: Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, USA | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cadiz, California: Political Reversals

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bureau of Land Management, Public domain. The Cadiz water project navigated through the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations with its status changing each time. The Obama administration blocked a proposed pipeline route across federal land, a decision that the Trump administration reversed in 2017 by reinterpreting th...

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Image: Bureau of Land Management | Public domain

Cadiz, California: What Cadiz Is

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Theschmallfella, cropped by Phoebe, CC BY-SA 3.0. Without the water project, Cadiz is a railroad siding, a landing strip, and 35,000 acres of Mojave Desert. The Southern Transcon passes through continuously, carrying the freight of the national economy through a landscape that the economy otherwise overlooks. Trains move at spee...

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Image: Theschmallfella, cropped by Phoebe | CC BY-SA 3.0