We hit US 50 in Austin, NV, the county seat until it was moved to Battle Mountain (now on I-70) in 1979. Austin is the site of Stokes Castle, built in 1897 for Anson Phelps Stokes, an eastern financier who had a lot of mines in the area. The castle, an exact replica of a tower outside of Rome, was built out of local granite and using railway ties as the floor joists and balconies. It is now in ruins. Austin was the site of silver mines that played out very quickly. We left Austin, stopped at Spencer Hot Springs, and then had a flat tire on Snoopy. It's a good thing US 50 is a lonely road as we were stopped on the pavement, learning how to remove the spare from under Snoopy and changing the tire. A couple guys stopped and asked if we needed help, but we managed on our own. The next stop was Eureka, NV (pictured above), where silver was discovered in 1864 (the first important lead-silver discovery in the US). This photo shows the opera house. Numerous immigrants arrived to work in the mines and prepare charcoal. They included people from Italy, China, and German Jews. There were ultimately 16 smelters in Eureka, poluting the air with lead and soot. We drove on to Ely.
Before we headed for Great Basin National Park, we stopped at the Nevada Northern Railway Museum, an amazing museum created from the railroad that had been built from the copper mine in Ruth (6 miles from Ely) to the SP mainline in Cobre. The railroad closed in 1983 and everything was given to the city. At the time they were working on refurbishing some wheels for the locomotive and they are still in the vises. The upstairs of the East Ely depot (the city didn't want to have the depot) has original offices for the superintendent. At its height 44 trains a day went through. Some of them carried miners to the mines. The locomotive was extremely fast (almost 100 mph). There are the usual train rides (which we didn't take), but if you are a real railroad fan, you can drive either the diesel or steam locomotive yourself (with or without passenger cars). The mine in Ruth used to be a copper mine, but now they are using cyanide heap leach mining to remove gold from the tailings. It's a boom and bust economy for the employees and ownership of the mine has changed multiple times (it's now owned by a Polish company). 
Here is a snow plow that was clearly put in front of the engine. It had a blade on either side that could be extended along with the blade in front.
The engine barn (note the soot over the doors).
This fully-restored vacuum was used to clean the passenger cars. 
Our first view of Wheeler Peak, 13, 063', from the pass to the north.
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