Barstow

Barstow is a railroad town that Route 66 happened to run through, and it has been a crossroads ever since. It began as Waterman Junction, a mining and rail point, and took the name Barstow in 1886 for a Santa Fe president; today one of the largest classification yards in the West still sorts freight day and night on the town's north edge. The building that draws travelers off the interstate is Casa del Desierto, House of the Desert, the Harvey House depot the Santa Fe raised in 1911 to replace a wooden station lost to fire. It is a broad, arcaded pile of Spanish Renaissance and Classical Revival brick, one of the finest surviving Harvey Houses anywhere, where Harvey Girls served travelers in two dining rooms, one formal enough to require a jacket, through the golden age of rail. The Harvey House closed in 1973 and the building nearly followed the wrecking ball after the 1992 Landers earthquake, until the city bought it and spent millions on restoration. It works again now as an Amtrak stop and holds two free museums under one roof: the Route 66 Mother Road Museum, with photographs and artifacts of the highway from wagon trail to interstate, and the Western America Railroad Museum, with locomotives and cars parked out along the tracks. Barstow is the practical hinge of this whole region, the last full-service town before the long empty run east on Route 66, and the place to fuel, eat, and sleep before or after the Mojave. The silver camp at Calico sits ten miles northeast, and the long empty run east leads to Amboy and Needles.