13th August 2016 - Wells NV - Kms to date: 11968

Kms today: 610

We left Las Vegas early without availing ourselves of the Travel Lodge continental breakfast. We headed north to Alamo (not THE Alamo) about 60 miles away for breakfast. When we arrived we couldn't find the town centre, in fact we were having trouble finding the actual town. We kept heading down the highway when suddenly we came upon a cafe/motel on the top of a hill. We had a good breakfast and got back on the road to Wells NV. Highway 50 is known as the loneliest highway in the USA but I think highway 318 beats it hands down. We traveled down this road for about 100 miles and could count the number of vehicles we saw on two hands. The road was classified as a 'C' road but the surface was anything but C class. We have found that most of the roads we have traveled on in the USA are far superior to similar grade roads in Australia. We eventually made Ely NV which is actually at the start of highway 50, around lunch time. Our friend Rafe had told us of a great Railway museum in Ely so we decided to visit it. It was  hard to find, even some of the locals didn't know where it was. After a few wrong turns we eventually found it and were pleasantly surprised with what it included. We booked a trip on a steam train that did a fifteen mile round trip to a village which used to be the centre of an old copper mine.

Pub at Ely Copper Mine.

 This used to be the Pub!

After the train trip we did a tour of the machine shops. They have a number of steam and diesel trains that they maintain and we saw a couple in various stages of strip down. All their steam trains date back to the early 1900s and are still in full working order.

Which one is older???

Enthralled by a dirty big steam train.

They even have an old steam crane that they had to use last week to pick up another train that had been derailed!! We resumed our journey to Wells NV and arrived at our Super 8 motel around 7pm. The motel was pretty basic and not super at all but it served its purpose as a base for visiting the Bonneville Salt Flats over the next couple of days.