The tale of the second “Golden Spike”

                        -From the book, History of Ogden, Utah in Old Post Cards," by D. Boyd Crawford.

EVER hear the story about the second “Golden Spike”?

Well, it is just one of those intriguing things that was proposed and “might have been,” but didn’t actually happen. It is also one of those fascinating historical footnotes, most of which are usually absent from the history books.

“Last spike will be a golden one” was a Nov. 21, 1903 headline in the Ogden Standard-Examiner.

For the landmark completion of the wooden trestle shortcut across the Great Salt Lake, the Lucin Cutoff, big plans were proposed early.

The draft plan was that after driving the Golden Spike, it would be withdrawn and given to Union Pacific railroad baron E.H. (Edward) Harriman as a souvenir.

In fact, it was speculated that Harriman himself might wield the sledge himself for the golden spike, on Thanksgiving Day, noon, on the “Midlake” point of the trestle itself.

Being Thanksgiving, it was also suggested that a traditional holiday feast be prepared at one of the railroad camps along the Lucin Cutoff.

However, six days later on Nov. 27, at the actual event: “There was no golden spike driven, or no ceremony of any kind , other than a few congratulations showered upon Mr. Harriman by many of the large number of railroad men from throughout the United States,” the Standard reported on that date.

Notwithstanding the lack of fanfare, the Lucin Cutoff was an engineering marvel for its day. It shaved 43.77 miles and 1,515 feet of climb off the original route out to Promontory.

Despite the completion observance on that Thanksgiving Day, the Lucin Cutoff didn’t actually open to passenger trains and general traffic until almost 10 months later, on Sept. 16, 1904.

-The construction of the Lucin Cutoff was said to feature a safety record superior to most other railroad projects, yet there were still some accidents.

“Engine overturns and kills a fireman” was a March 25, 1903 Standard headline. A portion of the trestle sinking was reported to have caused this accident at Lakeside, where Robert W. Watson was fatally crushed.

Some other Utah newspapers reported a “Quagmire without a bottom,” as portions of the lakebed seemed bottomless.

It was in that March of 1903 that railroad builders battled what was almost a quicksand in the Great Salt Lake. At one point in the building process, several hundred yards of earth were gulped down in the lake and caused a settling of some five feet.

-Years later after the Lucin Cutoff had been open, “Severe storm injures Cut-off” was an April 3, 1910 headline in the Standard. “Eighty-mile gale lashes waves to fury and damage done,” the subhead stated.

Fortunately, on that particular day, strangely no trains were scheduled to use the Lucin Cutoff . Still, the Southern Pacific reported that it had been strengthening the fill on the trestle for some time, anticipating possible damage such as this.
-EXTRA INFORMATION: Technically, if a golden spike had been driven on the Lucin Cutoff it would have been the second in Utah, but at least the THIRD golden spike used in the U.S.
The Northern Pacific Railway did use a golden spike on Sept. 8, 1883 to commemorate completion of railroad track in Montana that served many nearby states.
Former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant drove in that final golden spike to mark the completion of a railroad line from the Great Lakes to the Pacific. 

 (-Originally published on-line and in print on Feb. 19-20, 2015 by Lynn Arave in the Ogden Standard-Examiner.) 

-NOTE: The author, Lynn Arave, is available to speak to groups, clubs, classes or other organizations about Utah history at no charge. He can be contacted by email at: lynnarave@comcast.net  

Utah’s worst ever train wreck happened New Year's Eve of 1944

- From the book, "History of Ogden, Utah  in Old Postcards," by D. Boyd Crawford.

By Lynn Arave

SEVENTY years ago it was the holiday season with high hopes for an impending end to World War II. However, there was also Utah’s worst-ever train disaster that closed out 1944 with an unexpected calamity.

“Pacific limited crash claims 48 lives,” was a Jan. 1, 1945 headline in the Standard-Examiner.

“Reporter finds tragic horror at wreck scene” and “Wreck reminded me of war, says train crash victim” and “Screams, moans rend the air at wreck scene” were threw other somber headlines in the Standard that day.

A pair of westbound trains crashed shortly after 6 a.m. on Dec. 31, 1944, near Promontory Point, or about 18 miles west of Ogden, on the Lucin Cutoff.

Besides the 48 fatalities, another 79 were reported injured in the crash. Among the fatalities were 29 military personnel and nine railroad workers.

This was the worst-ever rail disaster in the Intermountain area and the nation’s worst railroad crash of 1944.

By Jan. 5, 1945, the death toll from the wreck would rise to 50 and disaster would be known as the Bagley Train Wreck or the Great Salt Lake Wreck.

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                    A 1940s train in Ogden at a switching station.

The accident happened in thick fog when a mail express train failed to slow down for a caution signal and smashed full speed at 60 mph into the rear of the Pullman car of a passenger train, slowed down to 18 mph for a freight train ahead with mechanical problems.

(By some other accounts, the engineer of the mail train may have suffered a heart attack and died seconds before the crash happened.)

Seven of the railcars were hurled off the wooden lake trestle and into Great Salt Lake mud and shallow, briny waters. The wreck scene stretched for half-a-mile.

Fortunately there were two medical cars in the passenger train and so Medical Corps members helped the inured, as otherwise help had to wait until arrival by rail from Ogden.

--Switching subjects, here’s a cost comparison from seven decades ago, when obviously prices were a lot lower for most goods, according to Standard-Examiner ads of late 1944:

Ground beef, 25 cents a pound; oranges, 8 cents a pound; apples eight cents a pound; corn flakes, 8 cents; peanut butter 39 cents for two pounds; potato chip bag 22 cents; milk (1.5 pints each) four cans for 37 cents; men’s suits $18.88.

-In two other historical tidbits, “Snow Basin is ready to accommodate thousands of ski enthusiasts,” was a Jan. 17, 1945 Standard headline.

Apparently there was no Christmas, or holiday skiing in Snow Basin’s earliest of seasons.

-“Milk law takes effect Friday” was a Jan. 10, 1945 headline in the Standard, as raw milk could no longer be sold in the Ogden City limits.

(-Published on-line and in print on Dec. 25-26, 2014, by Lynn Arave in the Ogden Standard-Examiner.)

-NOTE: The author, Lynn Arave, is available to speak to groups, clubs, classes or other organizations about Utah history at no charge. He can be contacted by email at: lynnarave@comcast.net  

Lucin Cutoff -- Still Needed as a Railroad Shortcut

                                            Railroads love straight tracks.

TALES of a mysterious monster lurking in the briny waters of the Great Salt Lake have been around since 1877. But if a century plus of running trains across the north end of the lake proves anything, it's that the real monster there is simply the lake itself.

When the Golden Spike was driven at Promontory on May 10, 1869, it heralded an unprecedented era of transcontinental railroad transportation. However, it was apparent a few years later that the Promontory Mountains created the worst railroad bottleneck in the entire nation.

Something had to be done. More than a century ago, work started on the Lucin Cutoff, a revolutionary railroad causeway and trestle that spans nearly 20 miles of Great Salt Lake water and mud flat and creates a much-needed shortcut, even today.

But during those 110-plus years of rails across the lake, its monstrous, heavy waters have consistently battered the man-made shortcut. Salt has coated workers, equipment and machines white, sometimes shorting out electric signals and even halting locomotives with its unusual mineral water.

There had been occasional problems with the soft and hungry lake bottom swallowing up Paul-Bunyan-size posts and 20-ton rocks when the original trestle was built in 1902, but there were also significant sinkage problems in the 1920s, the late 1950s and even as recently as 2000.

The wet years of the mid-1980s forced the railroad to sometimes dump several trainloads of rock a day along the tracks to protect them from record-high lake waters.

In short, the Lucin Cutoff has been a maintenance nightmare. It ended up cutting almost 50 miles off most freight train trips through the area. The former trestle was also considered to be the longest, straightest, most level stretch of track ever built. The cutoff was named after the town of Lucin, west of the Great Salt Lake.

In addition to eliminating 2.2 percent grades to Promontory, 1,500 feet higher than the lake, all the curves in the Promontory route that could turn a train 11 times were avoided.

Lee Witten, librarian/archivist for Ogden's Union Station, said this Southern Pacific trestle was an engineering marvel of its age and was at one time the longest such span in the world.

Even conductors had a problem at times, if they had to get out of the train and the wind was blowing and making waves.

"Your uniform would quickly turn white," Richard L. Couturier, 63, of Kaysville, a retired Union Pacific conductor of 42 years, said.

He said if enough lake spray was hitting the tracks, sometimes the locomotive engine would even fizzle out.

"You'd have to wait until it dried out," he said.

Another danger along the trestle was the possibility of fire. One in November 1957 destroyed a 600-foot portion of the trestle and it had to be replaced. Two trains collided along the trestle in 1904, killing 26 people. But the most famous accident on the trestle came on New Year's Eve 1944, when two trains collided, killing 48 people and injuring 79 others.

Couturier said almost three dozen trains a day traversed the Lucin Cutoff in the 1960s. Today, the traffic is about six freight trains a day in each direction. Passengers trains have bypassed Lucin since the mid-1980s, going through Salt Lake City and along the south side of the lake shore.

Speed limits were 20 mph for freight and 30 mph for passenger trains on the trestle, taking 15 to 20 minutes to cross the lake. For the causeway, speed limits are 40 to 60 mph, traversing the lake in as little as 12 minutes.

"The sunsets and sunrises were out of this world," Couturier said of his numerous Lucin crossings. He also said Hill Air Force's bombing range is southwest of the causeway and that would produce its own great show at times.

Couturier said the trestle decking was rotted out by the early 1970s. Its era had ended.

Today a dirt-and-rock causeway has replaced the trestle. In fact, the trestle's wood has now almost all been salvaged by a wood company, Trestlewood.

Daniel B. Kuhn, rail planner and historian for UDOT, said passengers across the Lucin Cutoff at night felt they were riding across the ocean and could not see very many city lights. He also recalls an experience riding Amtrakacross the cutoff eastbound in 1983 when rising lake waters had just washed out a portion of the causeway. The train had to back up all the way to Nevada and divert passengers by bus from there.

The Lucin Cutoff history clearly illustrates how man has 

failed to tame the Great Salt Lake completely, even in the 

21st century.

SOURCESL www.trestlewood.com; "Tale of the Lucin," by David Peterson and Utahrails.net, by Don Strack.

(-Originally published in the Deseret News, by Lynn Arave, on Dec. 26, 2002.)

Utah Railroad Wreck Shattered New Year's Eve in '44

  The view of Promontory Point from the north tip of Fremont Island. The horrific New Year's 1944     railroad crash happened below and near Promontory.


THE new year traditionally brings new expectations and new beginnings. About 70 years ago, 1945 brought a hope for the end of World War II, but it also arrived with the worst train wreck the West had ever seen.

It happened near Utah's Promontory Point on the Lucin Cutoff shortly after 6 a.m. on Dec. 31, 1944. Two westbound trains crashed, about 18 miles west of Ogden, between Little Mountain and Promontory Point, killing 48 people - including 29 U.S. Army and Navy personnel and nine railroad employees - and injuring another 83 persons, including 44 military personnel. 

"Train wreck toll set at 48" and "Camera highlights of the worst train wreck in the West" were the Deseret News headlines for Jan. 1, 1945. The wreck ironically produced a bloody carnage at home only rivaled by World War II overseas.

Even today, the tragedy ranks as Utah's all-time worst train wreck. In transportation disasters in Utah, it's second only to the United Airlines DC-6 crash in Bryce Canyon National Park on Oct. 24, 1947, which killed 52 people.

George W. Ford was the Deseret News reporter who traveled to the scene of the disaster. Ford, who retired as the newspaper's managing editor in 1976, is 83 now and still lives in Salt Lake City.

His recollections of that calamity are still very vivid. "It was a cold day. It was a terrible thing," Ford said.

The train engineer of an express mail train traveling about 60 mph had a heart attack, dying a few seconds before his train slammed into the rear of a passenger and freight train going about 18 mph.

Ford said the train wreck was one of the worst disasters he saw during his long newspaper career. Only a Bryce Canyon plane crash and another in the Grand Canyon rival that disaster.

Jack E. Jarrard, a reporter at the time for the Salt Lake Telegram, covered the wreck for the city's competing afternoon paper. He and Ford are likely the only two newsmen still alive who covered the train disaster.

       Another view of the Great Salt Lake, east of PromontoryPoint and west of Little Mountain.


Jarrard was eventually hired by the Deseret News and retired in 1981. He said the train wreck was the worst disaster he ever covered in his long newspaper career, which spanned more than four decades.

He went along with "Scoop Williams," another reporter, and Junius Nielson, a photographer, to the scene, driving as fast as they could to get there.

Jarrard said he remembers seeing stacks of bodies. He also saw one soldier who had died sitting upright while looking out the window.

Ford's Deseret News story described a massive wreckage strewn for more than a half mile along the tracks. Seven train cars were tossed off the tracks onto the bank dropping into the Great Salt Lake.

Four other cars were telescoped together at the section station of Bagley on the railroad's main line to San Francisco. Rescue workers had to use torches in recovering the bodies from those crushed cars.

Fortunately, some of the intact railroad cars were Army hospital cars. Three trains were also dispatched from Ogden to carry the dead and wounded out.

An Ogden physician, Dr. L.S. Sycamore, was one of the first on the scene, and he described it as a bloody carnage.

"Heads, legs and arms of dozens of victims were scattered about," he told the Deseret News 50 years ago. "The wooden cars were smashed to pulp - or reduced to matches, so to speak."

David H. Mann, Deseret News photographer, also described his observations in a separate story. He spoke of heaps of bloody clothing, torn Army and Navy uniforms, scattered mail, Christmas cards and smashed suitcases and travel bags.

"Blood dripping from the side of a Pullman onto a rail where a body smashed beyond recognition was crushed into a bloody pulp the moment of the wreck," Mann wrote.

Veteran railroad men described the wreck as the worst in the history of their profession. Some of the dead and injured were veterans of the continuing world war in Europe and had been returning to their homes on the West Coast.

Several thousand people crowded the Ogden Union Station, awaiting news of the dead and injured.

Thick fog also blanketed the edge of the lake, making it difficult to see in the area. All of the wreckage and bodies were cleared away by Jan. 2. Identification of mangled bodies took longer.

One Salt Lake teen, Robert Errickson Seaman, 15, was among the local dead in the train crash. His mother, Elizabeth, was seriously injured.

(-Distilled from a Deseret News Article by Lynn Arave on Jan. 1, 1995.)