Cattle Corner Movie Set (Once Upon a Time in the West)

The rails here once carried haematite ore, not passengers: an 11 kilometre spur completed in 1899 linked the Alquife mines in the Sierra Nevada foothills to the main Granada-Almeria line at La Calahorra, and stayed in service until the mine closed in 1973. Leone spent four days filming here, casting Jack Elam, Woody Strode and Al Mulock as the three gunmen holding the platform, all three killed once the train's passenger steps off. Ennio Morricone wrote the film's score before a single scene was shot, on Leone's instruction, and had it played on set so the actors could perform to the finished music. The film's own account of the scene calls it a tense send-off to the Dollars Trilogy, the run of Westerns that had just made Leone's name. Little of the original station survives; the site is hard to pin down on the ground today, though the rail bed and the wider valley it crossed are still there.