It is increasingly difficult to discover a rail-siding intact that the mindless vandals haven't flattened or outright destroyed. Some remnants of the spurs with working areas and workmen dwellings do exist. Only by careful eye scrutiny of the lay of the land can the searcher find evidence of the various spur lines that lead to abandoned mines that hold habitation crumbling into the desert, countryside and mountains.

Many difficult to detect roads, trails and mining paths lead down from the hills and mountains where old abandoned mines, ore piles, debris aprons exist from the past diggings. Such ore remnants piled at the mine apron will give evidence as to what had been mined in the old shafts. Without entering the dangerous vacant old mine shaft the searcher can deploy a chemical analysis step-by-step mineral test right on the mine apron. The searcher's testing will show what the prospector, miner had mined and what overlooked fortunes in today's exotic rare-earth minerals had been passed by lay strewn over the mine apron.

Search, test and evaluate the abandoned rail-beds (spikes) as the road-bed most likely was built from the waste ore that the mines had dumped out onto its debris apron. The rail road builders came along and scooped up the discarded waste ore which was composed of rare-earth metals unknown to the miners in their day, and used this to build and repair their road-beds with.

Where are these abandoned ghost rail-beds? Colorado, California, Idaho just to name a few locations have hundreds of such locations. Check with the library for books, journals and professional papers under headings; "railroads, transportation and history", for each locality of interest the railroad commission or those in charge of with regulation of railroads in the desired state (history of railroads).

Check in these books by Delos Toole:

• pages 132-138, "Where To Find ARIZONA'S Placer Gold",
• pages 135-140, "Where to Find Gold in California",
• page 136, "Gold Nugget-Teering in NEVADA, Book One",
• pages 137-143, "Where To Find Gold In OREGON"
• and page 91, "Where to Find YANKEE Placer Gold".

These pages go into detail for, "Ore dumps may hide modern day bonanza in Rare Earth Minerals, exotic metals", and, "Treasures and Fortunes await the searchers on the Old Railroad Right-away and Ancient Rail-beds", and "Chemical Analysis Testing step-by-step for evaluation of hidden rare-earth metals and minerals."

Here are hundreds of places that a searcher can use their metal detector in locating rail-road memorabilia, overlooked gold nuggets and ore gobblets of value. Time to load up the vehicle and plan the trip into forgotten fortunes.