Epsom Salts Monorail Epsom Salts Monorail The Epsom Salts Monorail or Magnesium Monorail was a short-lived Lartigue Monorail in San Bernardino County, California, in the United States. It was built to carry epsomite (hydrated magnesium sulphate) from a deposit in the Owlshead Mountains to a siding of the Trona Railway. It ran nearly due east from Trona, for a distance of about . The monorail was opened in 1924 and closed in June 1926. Thomas Wright, a florist from Los Angeles, set-up a camp in Crystal Hills Wash in 1918 and prepared an area for salt mining, where he had previously found some
Magnesium oxychloride dioxide from the air to form magnesium chlorocarbonates. Anhydrous and partially hydrated forms also absorb water, turning into phase 5 and then phase 3 on the way to the chlorocarbonate. The exceptions are the dihydrate and hexahydrate of phase 9, that remain unchanged for many months. The crystal structure of phase 3 is triclinic with space group formula_1 and "z" = 2. The solid consists polymeric aquohydroxo cations, in the form of double chains of magnesium atoms surrounded and bridged by the oxygen atoms in hydroxy groups and complexed water molecules. These linear cations are interleaved and neutralized by chloride