Salt Lake & Denver Railroad (Fiction)

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This page was last updated on April 14, 2025.

The Salt Lake & Denver Railroad, "The Uinta Basin Route," was organized in 1919 by Simon Bamberger to build from Provo to a connection with the Denver & Salt Lake at Craig. The route was basically south-southwest from Craig to the White River, along the White River to its meeting with the Green River, then up the Duchesne River and the Strawberry River to the Wasatch Mountains. It was then to cross the Wasatch Mountains and head west down Hobble Creek Canyon to Provo. Its major business was to be agricultural and oil, including oil from shale, with a bit of coal and timber, plus taking away the entire Gilsonite traffic from the narrow gauge Uintah Railway. A large portion was also to be bridge traffic between Denver and Salt Lake City.

(View a Google Map of the fictional Salt Lake & Denver)

The line was never built, or even seriously planned, much like the original Denver Northwestern & Pacific (later Denver & Salt Lake) west of Craig, Colorado. In the case of the Salt Lake & Denver, the ICC hearings of July 1925 were unproductive, showing that the line would not make any money. These ICC hearings are interesting in that they are quite detailed about the potential traffic (or lack thereof) for any road operating across the Uinta Basin. The ICC examiner denied the application based on the lack of need, and the anticipated completion of the Dotsero Cutoff, which was seen as taking away the bridge-traffic component of the proposed line's traffic base.

After the ICC filed a negative examiner's report in 1925, the Salt Lake & Denver continued to hang on as a proposed road, hoping to take advantage of the shorter route to Denver by using the Moffat tunnel. Officers of the Salt Lake & Denver gave testimony at the hearings for the Moffat tunnel, in favor of the tunnel being open to all railroads, especially after the tunnel opened in 1927. The idea for a railroad across the Uinta Basin continued in the newspapers until 1930, with the Bamberger interests continuing to promote the road. The idea finally slipped away when the Dotsero Cut-Off became a serious proposal connecting the Denver & Salt Lake with the Denver & Rio Grande Western, and the idea for the Salt Lake & Denver died completely when the Dotsero line was completed in 1934.

But a fiction version of the proposed Salt Lake & Denver has attracted the attention of a few people.

Suppose the ICC decision had been more of a decision to promote railroad service to an under-served region, rather than the politcal decision that it was, with the ICC not so focused on keeping competition away from the big carriers. Suppose the potential agricultural traffic was a bit more, and the coal traffic was better, with a coal mine or two actually in the basin itself, and the oil traffic was more developed. The line was completed in 1925, but only to the western edge of the Unita Basin due to the difficulty of building to the west. But ast least the basin had the railroad service it needed, with service growing with the completion of the Moffat Tunnel. To add to the fiction, the Dotsero Cutoff was never built because D&RGW was still deep in receivership.

Although the fictional route mostly follows to the proposed 1923 route eastward from the Unita Basin into Colorado, the actual construction west of the Strawberry Valley, crossing the Strawberry Ridge, was found to be much more challenging. The route west from Duchesne avoided following the Strawberry River. The route followed was along Current Creek and Deep Creek, crossing what was known as Windy Ridge (at 7800 feet elevation) into Strawberry Valley. On the west side of Strawberry Valley, the new tunnel was located at Chaplain Point, where the existing Strawberry irrigation tunnel also had its east portal. The new combined railroad and water tunnel then made a straight 7.3-mile line to the head of Sixth Water canyon. After exiting the west portal, the rail line traveled downgrade along Sixth Water Canyon to its junction with Diamond Fork, then down Diamond Fork to its junction with Utah Railway at the mouth of Diamond Fork, a distance of about 12.75 miles. The elevation of the west portal was at 6400 feet, and the Diamond Fork Junction was at 5000 feet elevation, drop of 1400 feet, or an average of 2 percent. The east portal was at 7600 feet elevation, which resulted in an essentially flat line from Windy Ridge, at 7800 Feet, dropping down to the east portal at 7600 feet while circumventing Strawberry Reservoir and its Rainbow Bay, around Haws Point to the east portal area, including a bridge across Rainbow Bay. When full, the level of Strawberry Resivoir is just below 7600 feet, with the spillway at 7558 feet elevation.

(This was essentially the route of the Syar Tunnel of the Central Utah Project when it was first proposed in the early 1960s. Work finally started on the 5.7-mile, 8-feet-diameter tunnel in April 1989. It was "holed-through" in April 1990, and was completed in June 1992. When completed it replaced the original 1913 Strawberry water-only tunnel. Both the original Strawberry Tunnel and the much later Syar Tunnel had their east intake portals just below the surface of Strawberry Reservoir so that water was flowing through the tunnels as long as the level of the reservoir was at or near the level of the spillway.)

The fictional Salt Lake & Denver would mesh nicely with the real Denver & Salt Lake, successful now with the Moffat tunnel completed, and the two roads successfully compete head-to-head with the D&RGW, and its Pueblo-Tennessee Pass Route. Throw in some legal entanglements from the Uintah-Ouray tribe over some improper right-of-way across its reservation. After settling with the tribal fathers, the Salt lake & Denver is financially exhausted and is completely reorganized as the Uintah-Utah Transportation Company, with the tribal council in complete control. They contract with a protectionist consortium of competing and connecting railroads to run the line, similar to the way Union Pacific and Northern Pacific ran the Camas Prairie line in western Idaho. By the late 1950s, the Uintah-Utah is running with a mixture of UP, SP, WP, and D&RGW equipment. It's a nice trick to ensure that I can operate prototype models of first generation power for all of my favorite roads.

Throw in some more fiction that has United States Fuel Company (until the 1990s, the real world operator of many of Utah's big coal mines, and owner of the real Utah Railway) building a couple coal mines in the Basin where real-world studies have shown large coal deposits that have not been developed due to the lack of good transportation. This allows the fictional railroad to run coal loads east via the Uintah-Utah and Denver & Salt Lake connection.

Strawberry Tunnel

A major change for the fictional Uintah-Utah railroad came in 1937 with the completion of Strawberry Tunnel, a combined railroad and water tunnel that brings water from the Colorado River drainage into the Great Basin-Great Salt Lake drainage (similar to the Moffat Tunnel-Denver City water arrangement).

An interested observer might notice that Strawberry Ridge, between the Unita Basin and the Wasatch Front, was the top of a horseshoe that faced east. It was the obstacle that prevented an exit from the west end of the Unita Basin for Moffat's Denver Northwestern & Pacific, and later Denver & Salt Lake when they did their preliminary planning to extend the railroad west from Craig, Colorado.

In the early 1920s, with the political success that created the Moffat Tunnel for both trains and Denver's water supply, there was a similar proposal for a combined rail/water Strawberry Tunnel between the Uinta Basin and the Wasatch Front. The combined railroad and water tunnel would be used by the trains of a proposed later version of Simon Bamberger's Salt Lake & Denver ("The Unita Basin Route"), and to move Green River/Colorado River water from the Unita Basin, and under the Strawberry Ridge, to the Wasatch Front.

This was in response to the recently signed Colorado River Compact of 1922. The tunnel, with its east portal near today's Strawberry Reservoir, would have exited on the west side into the head of Diamond Fork Creek, then into the Spanish Fork River and into Utah Lake, bringing Colorado River water into the the rapidly growing Utah and Salt Lake valleys.

There wasn't the political will in Utah or Washington DC for the combined rail and water tunnel in Utah, but the water portion would later be built as part of the much larger Central Utah Project, with the planning and politics beginning in 1928-1929, with final funding approval coming in 1956. The actual tunnel, to replace the original pioneering and much smaller Strawberry Tunnel of the 1900-1910 era for irrigation purposes, wasn't started until the late 1960s and was completed in 1998.

(Read more about the real Strawberry Tunnel) (research is incomplete)

The fictional combined railroad/water Strawberry Tunnel, completed in 1937, runs for five miles under the top of the Wasatch Range from Strawberry Reservoir to the top of one of the tributaries of Diamond Fork. The accompanying rail line runs west down Diamond Fork to a connection with Utah Railway in Spanish Fork Canyon. A new fictional Strawberry Yard was built in 1943 at Duchesne as a central marshalling point for eastbound coal and oil, and westbound coal, oil, and phosphate ore, and to serve as a central blocking terminal for all bridge traffic. Now this is railroading!

Rule No. 1

Rule Number 1: This is my railroad.

Rule Number 2: While illuminating discussion of prototype history, equipment and operating practices is always welcome, in the event of perceived anachronisms, detail discrepancies or operating errors, see Rule Number 1.

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