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 It can be prepared by calcination of magnesium hydroxycarbonate ·4 at about 600 °C. (Higher temperatures increase particle size leading to lower reaction rate.) It is believed that, during the reaction, the magnesium oxide is continuously hydrated and dissolved, helped by the slightly acidic character of the magnesium chloride solution. The acidity is attributed to hydrolysis of the magnesium hexahydrate cations: The protons (which are actually hydrated, e.g. as ) make the solution acidic; the pH varies from 6.5 to 4.7 as the concentration of increases from 30% to 70% (weight basis). The protons then react with and dissolve the