The Rail Road Flat plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
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Rail Road Flat’s center stands about 2,630 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,210 ft to 3,290 ft, a difference of 1,080 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Blue Mountain, about 6,020 ft, 8 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Tertiary nonmarine rocks, undivided (sandstone, conglomerate), from the Paleocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 66 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 4×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Argillite, quartzite, phyllite. Age: Ordovician to Triassic, 202 to 487 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Paleocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Rail Road Flat reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of the North Fork Calaveras, the Calaveras, the San Joaquin and New York Slough: about 110 river miles.
Lake on the way: New Hogan Lake.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Rail Road Flat; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
