Special Feature: Early Railroad History in Box Elder

Railroad Terminology and General Facts

Bents- Railroad trestles and bridges were built of timber, with upward columns typically driven into the ground with steam-powered engines, later called pile-drivers. Cross members ran across spans on tops and bottoms of the columns, forming rectangles in the framework. In order to add additional integrity to the structure, longer timbers, called bents, were installed diagnally from top to bottom, forming triangles with the other timbers, greatly increasing its strength and ability to bear heavy loads.

Berms- Since railroads struggle with grades above 2%, railbeds must be built on flat surfaces whenever possible. Berms are earthen structures, stabilized with piles and cross-members, often elevated to allow trains to travel above ravines, crevices and waters. Berms, which are essentially dykes, elevated rails above the water level when the Lucin Cutoff was constructed across the Great Salt Lake.

Blasting- Chipping away at solid granite and basalt with hand tools is at best a long and arduous task. In the earliest days of construction of the Transcontinetal Railroad, options to remove rock were limited to kegs of black powder. Holes were bored into the stone with hand-drills, and when of sufficient depth, kegs of black powder would be introduced, and a fuse lit, as workers scrambled to safety from flying rock and debris. Later, after nitroglycerin was produced, its more powerful blasts were much more efficient at removing rock. It was, however, incredibly unstable, especially in its earlier days. The blasts ranged in intensity, depending upon how much needed to be removed. One famous blast lifted a two-ton boulder through the air, finally slamming to earth with such force that it was half-buried in the earth. Blasting produced stone remnants in various sizes, ranging from gravel and pebble to large boulders. Earthern structures were normally reinforced with remnants, used as fill in low spots or as riff-raff to reenforce dykes and other structures.

Fill- Building railroads through mountainous areas required removing lots of stone from mountainsides and alternately to fill in crevices and revines in gulleys. Work crews became expert at managing the debris of blasts into lower areas, to elevate and level areas so trestles and bridges could be built on top of the fill.

Freight Sidings- Most sidings established at the turn of the 20th century, were built to accommodate ever-increasing rail traffic, fueled by population growth and the increasing demands of the grazing industry. Sidings allowed trains to pass those traveling in the opposite direction, and those taking on freight and water. Facilities generally included a landing platform, train car body and a siding. Many sidings approached half a mile long, and were installed parallel to the main track to allow trains to pass slow-moving or on-coming traffic. An additional use included loading/unloading of freight of livestock. Note: not to be confused with hand-car pull-offs. There is no evidence of permanent habitation at most freight sidings- they are assumed to have been unmanned facilities.

Hand Cars- Work crews often utilized hand-driven cars, powered by up-and-down motions, like a teeter totter, to move along the tracks for maintenance. These relatively light and maneuverable cars could easily be derailed from tracks and removed from rail lines as maintenance of the track was performed.

Helper Engines- The maximum allowable rail grade allowed was generally 2% (rise of two feet in one hundred linear feet,) since locomotives struggle to haul heavy loads uphill. It was often encessary to position additional engines at stops to assist in pushing or pulling the loads up steeper grades. These extra engines, known as “helper engines” were permanently stationed at the bottoms of steep hills. Helper engines would generally assist trains to summits, then return to their assigned station until needed for the next train needing assistance.

Piles or Pilings- Heavy support beams were driven vertically deep to bedrock to maintain the structural integrity of bridges and trestles. Originally hand-driven or driven by work animals, eventually piles or pilings were driven by steam engines. The wooden beams, normally made of Douglas fir, usually measured 12″ square and were enormously heavy. Wooden derricks and priimite cranes often assisted as heavy beams were lowered into place and secured.

Rails- Iron rails were manufactured in the eastern US, then shipped by rail or boat to the west. Standard rails were twenty feet in length and weighed over 360 pounds. It was stated that eight train cars of rail were required for every mile of completed track. Rails had to be bent to evade obstacles on-site, with the bends having to match those of the rails laid parallel to it. Rails were laid into place by hand, with teams of four handling each rail with heavy tongs, placing it on top of wooden rail ties, which had been placed in grades, spaced uniformly from one wooden railroad tie to another. Precise measuring instruments verified that rails were spaced uniformly in height and in width from its companion rail. Bolts and fittings attached rails ends to ends. Based on a bet between officials of the Central Pacific an Union Pacific Railroads, one team set a world record by laying 10 miles and 56 feet of track in a twelve-hour day, beginning at CP’s Lake construction camp. It was calculated that each man lifted an astonishing 124 tons of rail that day.

Railroad Stations- Stations were established every ten to twelve miles to maintain rail facilities and track in their assigned areas. Materials needed to maintain tracks. culverts and bridges, replace ties and ballast were shipped to, then stored at station sites. Over time, heavier rails were installed to handle more modern and heavier engines and machinery. Maintaining aqueducts, wells and holding tanks were also important duties of those in the station, which also served as home to the engineers who ran “helper” engines to assist over-loaded engines scale steep inclines. Facilities included a section house, eating and sleeping accommodations, water tank, freight platform, light-duty turntable (later replaced by wyes,) a siding and a spur.

Riff-Raff- The tern =m is used to classify boulders, rocks and rock particles placed on the banks of canals, berms and causeways. These heavier rocks provide stability to earthen structures, protecting the earth from erosion caused by water, wind and other weather conditions.

Round House- An arc-shaped building for housing and repairing locomotives and railcars. Common configurations were designed to handle sixteen to thirty-two repair stations, complete with turn-tables, so round houses were massive buildings.

Section House- The house and facilities necessary to accommodate maintenance section crews responsibly, over the track section they were assigned to maintain, typically 10 to 12 miles of track. When on-duty, crews would sleep and live in the section houses. Often cooks were assigned to provide food, but often workers were charged for their food.

Terminus- Rail terminuses were select stations, providing essential services for the railroad, including; transfers of passengers from one line to another, station and hotel services, ticketing, freight transfers, telegraph services. Maintenance services and facilities included a turntable, roundhouse, coal shed and water tank, bunkhouse, including isolated facilities for Chinese workers, a shipping point to facilitate local trade, and a helper engine base where one wass needed.

Trestles- Bridges and other supporting structures were built of a network of heavy timbers to support the great weights of passing trains. Numerous trestles were built in mountainous terrain to allow trains to run at relatively flat levels. In deep ravines amd gulleys, trestles would sometimes have four, five or more levels of structures, built one on top of the other in depending upon what was needed to keep trains running.

Water- Water was essential to railroad travel. For many years, engines were steam-driven, which required massive amounts of water. Water tanks were an essential structure at terminuses, stations, and many sidings. In many cases, water was diverted from streams located miles from stations, often delivered of wooden pipes, made of cedar and stored in cisterns or water towers, agacent to the tracks.

The Process of Laying Track

• Catching the Vision– The dream of building a railway, uniting the railways in the east to the recently settled western territories was acquired over a period of time, with several men being instrumental in making the dream become a reality. In 1854, a young railroad engineer named Theodore (Ted) Dehone Judah announced he was going west to California, after construction of the Erie Railroad was completed. Along the way, thought gelled on the feasibility of constructing a Transcontinental Railroad. his ideas crystalized of the importance of uniting a country that was on the verge of a Civil War, splitting the North from the South. He conducted reliminary studies and surveys, eventually traveling to Washington D.C. to lobby for its construction. However, Judah died before concrete plans could be formulated, but his fwervor had planted seeds among legislators and other prominent officials of the feasibility of such a plan.
• Glenville Dodge
• In 1853, a young army officer named Glenville Dodge led a party to survey a route for the proposed route west. At that time, there was a heated exchange in congress as northerns and southerners lobbied to have a railway through their area. Then Congressman Jefferson Davis, who later became President of the Confederacy, fiercely opposed a route through the north, hoping for the rail to run through the southern states. Dodge, making a meticulous search forthe best route, became convinced the best route ran through the northern planes, passing through what became known as South Pass in Wyoming, the only break in the Rocky Mountains in the Continental Divide. Dodge met a young ambitious politician named Abraham Lincoln, who had been representing railroads in Illinois. At a political event, Lincoln ws introduced to Dodge, by an assoicate, who told Lincoln, “He knows more about railroads than any two men in the entire country.
• Abraham Lincoln
• Lincoln championed the vison of a Transcontinental Railroad, as the Civl War tore a nation apart. Throughout the war, he led efforts to plan for its construction, believing communication with the west would preclude it from the deep sectional issues in the North and the South that initiated the Civil War. He was instrumental in passing legislation to put the plan into action, signing the Pacific Railway Act on July 1, 1862, providing federal land and loans to the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads to build the first coast-to-coast line across America. 
• Glenville Dodge served as a Union General during the war, afterwards becoming head engineer of the Union Pacific, where he applied his knowledge to locating the best routes. For the most part, the railroad would be built on old established trails used for countless centuries by Native Americans. They knew the best routes to follow through the west.
• Brigham Young & the Mormons
• The great Mormon leader Brigham Young, was a great proponent of the railroad, and eventually owned a significant amount of stock in the Union Pacific. As he lead the Vanguard Party from Illinois through the midwestern plains, Young was constantly thinking of when a railroad would come. His counselor, George A. Smith wrote in his journal, “During this journey they looked out a ropute where they were satisfied a railroad could be built, and were just as zealous in their feelings that a railroad would would follow their track as we are to-day.” Young and the Mormons would later play a prominent role in constructing the railway from Wyoming into Nevada in its final leg.
• Surveys
  After the Pacific Railway Act was passed, several surveys were conducted to establish the best routes. Engineers continued to explore and survey routes and make plans throughout the construction. Plans wwere changed and amended as vital information became available.
• Drilling & Blasting
• Routes were laid out and passageways established in areas, many felt were impossible to lay rail. The Central Pacific, especially, struggled to make their way through the rugged Sierra Nevaada Mountains. Tools available in the beginning were limited mostly to hand tools. Constructing railways meant that sheer mountains of solid granite must be conquered, with numerous tunnels to be dug through solid rock. Progress was painfully slow, as holes had to be drilled into the rock to allow access by their explosives, which were limited to egs of black powder. Progress was measured in inches dug per day, with enormous crews of hard-working workers. Blasting was always dangerous and unpredictable, with countless deaths attributed to the necessary blasts.
• Cut & Fill
• After the rock was blasted, the rubble had to be cleared, and gulleys and ravines filled with backfill and rock fragments. Rock and dirt from the blasting needed to be cleared, hauled by bucket or wheelbarrow and transported to fill in ravines & canyon
• Grading
• Congress authorized grading up to 300 miles in front of actual track
• Railroad Ties
• Laid out along the groomed grade, spaced uniformly each __, rails twenty feet long, weighing 560 pounds, placed upon ties, carefully measured with device to maintain spacing between rails, then spikers drove spikes driven in place- each spike driven three times, then on to the next. Tampers secured any spikes not perfectly in place
• Supply Chains/Logistics
• 8? Rail carloads of materials per mile wooden ties, spikes, fasteners Up to 10,000 workers, through solid rock.
• Social & Ethnic Challenges

Hell on Wheels

• Established: As temporary, portable cities, from 1863 until the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869; the concept continued as subsequent early railroads were constructed across the continent  
• Origin of Name: This general term seemed to accurately depict the largely lawless, existence that existed in railroad camps; murders and other serious crimes were rampant along the rails; virtually every vice seemingly known to man was readily available in the portable “cities-on-wheels,” but always for a price
• Historic Overview:  Construction camp “cities” owned by Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads during the construction of the original transcontinental railroad’ since two to three miles of track were regularly laid each day; during their rush to join the rails, portable cities were established, existing largely on newly-laid tracks to keep up with the rapid pace of new rail construction; sleeping facilities, eating places, saloons, gambling houses, brothels and many more shady operations were aboard rail cars or often in tents and wooden buildings that could be assembled and disassembled in a short time.  
• Location: No permanent locations ever existed for these portable cities; they’d spring up over-night, then travel on to their next location as soon as more track was laid
• No Permanent Population ever existed for “Hell on Wheels,” though they served thousands of laborers for both railroads 

Union Pacific’s Temporary Construction Camps on the First Transcontinental Railroad (east to west)

Laying track through Echo Canyon, then Weber Canyon into well-known settlements in Ogden, Brigham City, and Corinne, which are identified as construction camps on “Rails East to Promontory- The Utah Stations.

Author Frederick M. Kuchel writes, “From Ogden, the Transcontinental railroad tracks of the Union Pacific traveled north to Cecil Junction, 0.9 north of Ogden, to Bonneville siding, located nine miles north of Ogden. It was at Bonneville siding that the Transcontinental Railroad tracks entered Box Elder County, at what are officially called Utah Hot Springs, but simply “Hot Springs” to locals/ The site of Bonneville was on the Weber-Box Elder county line at Utah Hot Springs. Bonneville was 10412 miles west of Omaha and 871 miles east of Sacramento, and the tracks are at 4280 feet elevation.The tracks then proceeded north, west of Willard and Perry. At Perry…the Transcontinental route turned westward, bypassing Brigham City, and crossing the flats in a north-westerly direction to a point about a mile east of the Bear River. The tracks then struck almost a straight line to Corinne Junction. The tracks then turned to follow the route of present-day state highway 13.” The map lists the totality of the line between 1869 and 1942; the first map site west of Corinne is listed as Stokes.

Early Central Pacific Sites near Transcontinental Railroad (west to east)

After conquering seemingly impossible construction demands through the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, the Central Pacific laid track through relatively flat Northern Nevada, east from Reno. “Rails East to Promontory The Utah Stations” lists the following early railroad sites on their comprehensive map.

Lucin Cutoff Overview:
Crossing the Promontory Mountains by rail was always a challenging and dangerous task. The steep and rocky terrain presented an almost never-ending series of problems, both during its construction and for the years the line was in service afterwards. Grades to summits peaked at 2.2%. Helper engines were necesssary to boost heavy trains up over many summits. Wooden trestles over crevices and canyons were often precarious and succeptible to timber rot, requiring nearly constant maintenance. As ever-larger construction projects were completed across the country, it became clear that a less hazardous, more direct route, heading south of Lucin would boost the safety and profitability of the railroad; it did however, present an incredible challenge in laying a railroad across the Great Salt Lake.

Central Pacific’s engineering team originally planned for the first Transcontinental Railroad to cross the Great Salt Lake, but that plan was shelved during the late 1860s, as decision-makers opted to build the less costly route, since it was quicker to construct through the Promontory Mountains. In 1885 the CP became a part of the growing Southern Pacific system, as the original rail system operated from Ogden to Lucin. Since construction techniques were not able to stabilize the right-of-way from sinking into the lake, long, earthen structures built of stone-fill would support the wooden trestle in its center.

Technology and advanced techniques made the gigantic project more practical and by 1902, the decision was made to begin construction on the project. By then Union Pacific, under the guidance of railroad magnate E.H., Harriman controlled the Southern Pacific, and began construction of the 102-mile railway in February of that year under the direction of SP Chief Engineer William Hood, with his team of 3,000 workers. They worked in three shifts, round the clock, seven days a week till the job was completed. Completed in March 1904, the new system shortened the journey by 44 miles, with great increases in efficiency.

The resources to complete this massive project were enormous. It is almost impossible today to fathom the scope of the project, especially considering the resources available in the era in which the project was constructed. Using mostly hand labor. horsepower and explosives, a mountain was literally repositioned to build the structure. Twenty-five steam engines drove 12″ square piles into the lake bed, after forty feet of the lake bottom was removed by dredging. Nearly 1,000 railcars, including 400 side-dump cars, made specially for the job were utilized, with a capacity of 55-tons each. Final costs have been stated as being $4.5- $8 million, Over twelve miles of wooden trestle, were constructed from 30 million board feet of timber, which came over two square miles of dense timber. Douglas fir was mostly used in pilings and trestles and decks were constructed of cedar shipped from Northern California’s redwood forests. Tens of thousands of piles were used, with estimates as high as 38,000 used by the 1950s. In all, the original project used timber from 38,256 trees for the trestle’s piles.

Wives and children were allowed to accompany workmen, but liquor was not allowed, and the ban strongly enforced, since imbibing resulted in poor work quality and faulty decisions. Accidents were common and a surgeon-staffed hospital was located near the work site. On March 24, 1903. a train atttempted to cross the Old Bear River bed. But without a warning, the embankment settled, and the engine, still on its rails under two feet of water had to be pulled out by a cable.

Several stops operated on the narrow berm in the lake, until it was finally replaced in the late 1950s by a more modern earthern causeway. Workmen lived in boarding houses, built on piles high above the storm waves. The railstop of Midlake was aptly named; built and maintained literally in the middle of a thirty-mile span of water. Earthern dykes were constructted on both sides of the lake, totally over thirteen miles of rail, laid upon the shifting foundations constructed to support these massive trains. The route accommodated two tracks and by 1902 seven freight trains and five passenger trains passed over the structure daily.

Davis, in “”The Lucin Cut-Off,” stated that the cut off’s benefits were immediate. (While it) “took three locomotived to handle nine nundred and fifty tons, and often required from thirty to thirty-six hours (over the previous route.) Over the cut-off a single engine has hauled two thousand three hundred and sixty tons in less that nine hours.” Passenger trains were able to run fourteen to eighteen cars with a single engine, instead of two or three sections with multiple engines.

In 1955 the Morrison Knutsen Company replaced the old configuration with a new causeway. Completed in 1959, after four years of work, that updated system is still in use today with modifications and upgraded made through the years.

Lucin Cutoff Train Stops– west to east from Lucin

2nd Transcontinental Telegraph

The telegraph revolutionized communications between the coasts. Samuel Morse is credited with inventing the practical electric telegraph in the United States, developing the system that included the telegraph machine and the Morse Code, which uses dots and dashes to represent letters and numbers. He and his partner, Alfred Vail first demonstrated the system in 1837 and sent the first official message in 1844, Others, including Joseph Henry and British inventors Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke also made significant contributions, 

For the first time, companies and individuals on the East and West Coasts had rapid communication. The first transcontinental telegraph, completed in 1861 by the Western Union Telegraph Company, connected the existing eastern network with a new western one in Salt Lake City, Utah. for the first time, communications could be delivered almost instantaneously from vast distances

Wires Above the Trails

“The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 was more than an act to build a transcontinental railroad. It was, officially stated, “An Act to aid in the construction of a Railroad and Telegraph Line from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean.” The act also specifically stated that the telegraph lines were to keep up with the tracks every step of the way across the continent. And the men who made up the telegraph work gangs were determined to see that that happened. So much so that an intense rivalry developed between the telegraph gangs and the railroad gangs.

Like the laying of the rails, the erection of some two thousand miles of telegraph poles and wires was done with military precision.  At the same time that wagons distributed rails along the graded earth, other wagons brought telegraph poles to the graded site. White the poles lay on the ground, one telegraph gang nailed crossarms on them while another dug holes for the poles. Then a third telegraph gang erected the poles. Once this was completed, a wagon carrying a huge reel of wire appeared. As the wagon moved forward, the wire was uncoiled, allowing a wire gang to carry it up the pole and attach it to the insulators.

It was a precise operation but not without challenges. As one reporter observed, “At times lack of wagons made it impossible to keep up with the supply of poles, and the telegraph gangs, who pride themselves on never letting the track get ahead of them, utilize sage brush, barrels, ties- surreptitiously taken from the track–or anything else that would keep the wire off he ground until the supply of poles again equal the demand.”

Throughout the erection of the transcontinental telegraph line, operations were interrupted by Native Americans, who cut the line not only to interrupt the telegraph crews’ progress but to get at the shiny copper wire that they found perfect for making jewelry. An even greater challenge came from another source. As historian John Hoyt Williams wrote, “Even a few dozen (buffalo) could damage the track, and, later, thousands of telegraph poles would go crashing to the ground as the heavy beasts of the treeless plains discovered they made marvelous scratching posts.”

Just as the building of the transcontinental railroad revolutionized transportation in America, the erection of a cross-county telegraph line provided the United States with the greatest long-distance communication system it had ever had. And the telegraph was essential to the building of the great road itself.

The construction trains of both the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific contained a telegraph car in which Jack Casement or James Strobridge or their engineers or foremen could wire for new supplies or for new groups of workers.  And as the UP moved farther and farther from its home base in Omaha and the Central Pacific moved farther from its headquarters in Sacramento, it would be the telegraph that allowed both Strobridge and Casement to end each day by reporting on what progress had been made.”

Source:  Iron Rails, Iron Men and the Race to Link the Nation; The Story of the Transcontinental Railroad by Martin W. Sandler

Mormons and the Railroads

After being organized in upstate New York, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints grew rapidly. Commonly referred to as the Mormon Church, after their Book of Mormon, the saints were persecuted and driven from their homes in Ohio, Missouri and Illinois. Following the murder of their prophet, Joseph Smith, they were forced to relocate across the barren plains to the Great Salt Lake Basin, under the direction of their new leader, Brigham Young.

Tens of thousands traveled over the plains in wagons, drawn by teams of horses or oxen, and some even pulled handcarts. Most walked nearly the entire journey of over 1,250 miles to what became Utah and Salt Lake City- wagon space was for supplies, far too precious for riders. Brigham Young, a powerful and charismatic leader, was a great champion of building a transcontinental railroad. As he and his followers traveled through the treacherous landscape, “We never went through the canyons or worked our way over the dividing ridge, “ he wrote, “without asking where the rails would be laid.” Reporter Samuel Bowles wrote once the great iron road had been completed, “But for the pioneership of the Mormons…all the central region of the great West would now be many years behind in its development, and the railroad, instead of being finished, would hardly be begun.”

As both the Central Pacific and Union Pacific hastened their pace, laying rail towards their inevitable meeting, both entities faced the same dilemma: a shortage of manpower in the remote and barren stretches of what became Utah. Since over 40,000 saints had then migrated to the Great Basin, the obvious answer was to form an alliance with the Mormons. On May 6, 1868, Thomas Durant, of the Union Pacific wired Brigham Young, asking if he could supply a large number of men to work on its construction. Within an hour, Young sent a return telegram, stating he was willing to do so. Unknown to Durant, during the past two growing seasons, the Mormon communities had been devastated by plagues of grasshoppers and crickets. Thousands were out of work and desperate to survive. Durant immediately sent one of his engineers, who knew Young personally, to negotiate an agreement. As part of the agreement, the UP promised Mormons reduced fares for those emigrating to the area. Brigham Young eventually became a large shareholder in the UP- being said to have been the only major stockholder to pay for his shares with cash.

Durant had found his workforce; the Mormons proved to be hard-working, conscientious workers, and more reliable than other groups, since their church taught its members to refrain from smoking, drinking and gambling, which were major problems with the other groups they hired. As a tribute to the Mormons’ work, one historian wrote, “It was acknowledged by all railroad men that nowhere on the line could the grading compare in completeness and finish with the work done by the people of Utah.”

The Central Pacific was not happy that the Mormons were aiding the UP. CP President Leland Stanford traveled by rail, then stagecoach to Salt Lake City, where he convinced Brigham Young to also assist the CP construction as well, grading roadbeds from Nevada’s border to Utah’s Weber Canyon. Mormons were grading for both groups. Young pressured both companies to route the rail south through Salt Lake City, but was over-ruled as engineers from both sides insisted a northern route through Ogden made more sense.

Church leaders enlisted help from their local congregations. Local leaders urged church members to join the ranks, since the prospect of prosperity seemed divinely inspired. But, it must be noted that railroads were not always flush with cash, in fact, their payment records were often far in arrears. Many of their problems were caused by corruption and waste. The Union Pacific had set up a construction company, called Credit Mobilier, which drained the government’s cash into the hands of the construction company’s shareholders.

In December 1868, the Credit Mobilier paid nearly $3 million in dividends to its shareholders, bringing the total paid in 1868 to $12.8 million in cash, plus over $4 million in UP stock, bringing the total of stock distributed since 1867 to $28.8 million. At that time. the UP owed over $10 million in debt. The end result is that creditors’ bills were delayed or just ignored. In fact, the joining of the rails at Promontory was delayed for a day, when UP’s unpaid workers in Piedmont, Wyoming seized UP President Thomas Durant’s private car, on its way to the ceremonies and chained it to a rail. They took him at gunpoint, refusing to release him until they received their back pay. After the money was wired to the camp and turned over to the workers, he was allowed to continue his journey to Promontory. The ownership of the Central Pacific essentially did the same thing, doling out huge payouts among the CP’s Big Four, consisting of Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker.

Brigham Young viewed the situation as outrageous. While Credit Mobilier stockholders received huge dividends, Brigham Young, the church and its contractors were owed huge sums of money for their contract labor. Young paid nearly $50,000 from his own pocket to appease some of the workers, but still nearly three quarters of a million dollars were owed to the Mormons.

After the rail was completed, UP’s financial problems were far from over. President Young continually pressed the UP for payment in full, but the UP had no money, so no progress was made in resolving the matter. However, it did have equipment and supplies left over from the build. Anxious to build a spur from Ogden to Salt Lake City, Young finally settled in September 1869. The UP gave the Mormons four thousand tons of iron rail worth $480,000, 144 tons of spikes worth $20,000, thirty-two tons of bolts worth $5,600, four passenger cars, second-class cars, mail cars, flatcars and boxcars, totaling $599,460 and the debt was finally resolved.

The Mormons went to work on their railroad immediately and had it in service within a few months. This was the start of the church’s ownership of railroads in northern Utah and southeast Idaho. They eventually established a spur from Salt Lake to Utah County, then began work on a spur through Cache Valley, north towards the Montana goldfields.

Sources: Iron Rails, Iron Men and the Race to Link the Nation; The Story of the Transcontinental Railroad by Martin W. Sandler; Nothing Like It In The World, Steven E. Ambrose, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York, NY

The Promontory Trail Auto Tour East

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The Promontory Trail Auto Tour West

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