05-06-2010, 06:53 PM
You may be right , Carl. I've never heard of where they get it from, but the Santa Fe and now BNSF mainline here and clear across the desert and across Az, and NM is red or pink ballast. I've picked up pieces from along side the mainline to see if I could figure out what it was and it appeared to be lava, but I had never seen any source of red lava. All of the lava beds I've seen in Calif were black.