Grand Junction: Where Two Lines Raced to Drive the Last Spike in Transcontinental Track

Beginning of article

IF YOU WERE ASKED TO name pivotal meetings in American history, the linking of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads might not immediately come to mind. But it was perhaps the most important. Before the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, it took months to get from coast to coast, and more than $1,000. After these two lines met at Promontory Summit in northern Utah, a New Yorker could travel to California in a week for as little as $70. Freight and mail costs also plummeted, and deliveries became quick and predictable. Earlier in the decade transcontinental telegraph lines had made possible instantaneous communication across incredible distances, and now, with a railroad traversing the continent as well, the movement of people, money, and goods was similarly unhindered by space and time. A proto-Internet was born, and modern America rapidly took shape.

Less than a year after the tracks were linked, the terminus was moved from Promontory Summit (a slapdash cluster of tents and shacks) 60 miles southwest to Ogden, a small but established town at the foot of Utah's Wasatch mountains in what is now Weber County. This would remain the nerve center of Western migration until the Great Depression.

But as air travel outpaced rail travel, Ogden was increasingly overlooked in …