Great Salt Lake Trestle Dismantled

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Piece of Railroad History Dies With Dismantling of Trestle.

By Jack Fenton

(Salt Lake Tribune, November 29, 1993)

A 21-mile wooden trestle that spanned the Great Salt Lake between Promontory Point and Utah's mountain desert is coming down, a victim of the technology it led 80 years ago.

Today, the "Lucin Cutoff" is about half gone. Salvage rights were bought by T.C. Taylor of Aurora, Ill., for $1.

The span, built across 38,256 pilings, cut almost 42 miles of steep grades and sharp curves from the transcontinental railroad's 146-mile Ogden to Lucin route, saving more than a half-day of travel time.

"If placed end to end, they [the pilings] would stretch out exactly 534.986 miles," author Herbert I. Bennett said. That is roughly a round trip between Salt Lake and Cedar City.

The cutoff, including 11 miles of rock fill and tracks, has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1972. It even had a cluster of housing in the middle of the lake for railroad workers.

R. L. Burton of Ogden, consultant to the salvage operation, said tracks already have been sold as scrap. Pilings are going to sawmills in Oregon and California and to mines where they will be used as timbers.

Pilings are so heavy they will not float, he said. "We don't know what will happen when they dry out. So far, pilings we pulled out and dried are holding up."

Work began in 1991 with track removal. The rest of the structure, once described as "a fine monument" to designer William Hood, should be removed by August 1996.

Mr. Burton, who spent much of his 40-year career with Southern Pacific Railroad as a roadmaster inspecting the cutoff, said it is a good thing Mr. Hood is not here to see his beloved trestle salvaged.

"His heart would be filled with sorrow," he said of the line's chief engineer. "The trestle was like his child."

When it was replaced in the 1950s, the trestle was deteriorating and had outlived its usefulness. Turn-of-the-century rail cars were small, and the locomotives that pulled them were less powerful.

"Speeds had been restricted to 20 mph," a Southern Pacific spokes person said of the trestle.

"You could tell when a train was coming," said Vern Davis of Sacramento. Calif., who lived at Midlake, the tiny colony on the trestle, in 1939 while working as an assistant maintenance foreman. "The whole thing shook from end to end."

Writing in the May 1904 Scientific American Supplement, Mr. Bennett said that besides bringing New York and San Francisco closer together, the two-year, $5 million project's straight track and gentle grades would trim operating costs.

The track settled a bit, he said. But that always happens when embankments are built in water. "The trestle portion of the Ogden-Lucin Cutoff is perfectly treated and the traveler rolling over it will never know — [even] if it be night — when his car runs from solid ground on to the bridge."

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