The Deep Creek Railroad is a defunct railroad company that constructed and operated a line between

Wendover Wendover is a market town and civil parish at the foot of the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire, England. It is situated at the point where the main road across the Chilterns between London and Aylesbury intersects with the once important road a ...

and

Gold Hill Gold Hill may refer to: Canada * Gold Hill, British Columbia United Kingdom * Gold Hill, Shaftesbury, Dorset, a steep street used in Hovis commercial United States ;Alabama * Gold Hill, Alabama ;California * Gold Hill, El Dorado County, C ...

Utah Utah ( , ) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. Utah is a landlocked U.S. state bordered to its east by Colorado, to its northeast by Wyoming, to its north by Idaho, to its south by Arizona, and to it ...

, a distance of about 45 miles. It was constructed in 1917 to serve a mining district in the Gold Hill vicinity and existed for 22 years before succumbing to perennially weak traffic levels.

History

Beginning in the late 1800s, prospectors began exploring the remote

Deep Creek Mountains The Deep Creek Range, (often refereed to as the Deep Creek Mountains (Goshute: Pi'a-roi-ya-bi), are a mountain range in the Great Basin located in extreme western Tooele and Juab counties in Utah, United States. The range trends north-south (wit ...

of far west-central Utah, and a brief

gold Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile me ...

-mining boom resulted in the establishment of the small town of Gold Hill in 1892. The town's initial period of prosperity was relatively short-lived, but the promise of a second boom surfaced in the 1910s with the development of

copper Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu (from la, cuprum) and atomic number 29. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. A freshly exposed surface of pure copper has a pinkis ...

-mining properties in the Gold HIll area. The rapid growth in the use of

electricity Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as describ ...

during the period created a strong demand for copper, and nearby mining districts near

Ely, Nevada Ely (, ) is the largest city and county seat of White Pine County, Nevada, United States. Ely was founded as a stagecoach station along the Pony Express and Central Overland Route. In 1906 copper was discovered. Ely's mining boom came later tha ...

and

Bingham Canyon, Utah Bingham Canyon was a city formerly located in southwestern Salt Lake County, Utah, United States, in a narrow canyon on the eastern face of the Oquirrh Mountains. The Bingham Canyon area boomed during the first years of the twentieth century, as ...

were highly successful copper producers; Gold Hill's promoters hoped that its mines would fall into the same league. The need for a reliable and inexpensive method of shipping ore from these mines was the impetus for construction of the Deep Creek Railroad. Supported by a group of investors that included Utah Senator

Reed Smoot Reed Smoot (January 10, 1862February 9, 1941) was an American politician, businessman, and apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). First elected by the Utah State Legislature to the U.S. Senate in 1902, he serv ...

and the president of the

Western Pacific Railroad The Western Pacific Railroad was a Class I railroad in the United States. It was formed in 1903 as an attempt to break the near-monopoly the Southern Pacific Railroad had on rail service into northern California. WP's Feather River Route dire ...

, planning for the new railway began in 1916, and it was constructed the following year. The new line began at the small town of

, on the Utah/Nevada border, where a connection was made with the Western Pacific. From Wendover, the railroad headed straight south through the salt desert, the right-of-way only 30 feet east of the Nevada state line. The tangent was broken only by the need to bypass a small hill, causing the railroad to dip into Nevada for approximately one-half mile. From there, the railroad angled southeast, following the edge of the desert into the Gold Hill area. The railroad's main line terminated in Gold Hill, although a short branch accessed the mines just to the east. The Deep Creek Railroad was rapidly and inexpensively built, with minimal earthworks and a small roster of used equipment. The railroad owned only two steam locomotives, both of which came second-hand from the

Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad The Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad , often shortened to ''Rio Grande'', D&RG or D&RGW, formerly the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, was an American Class I railroad company. The railroad started as a narrow-gauge line running south from D ...

. A single passenger car and one boxcar completed the roster. Ore from the mines was carried in freight cars belonging to connecting railroads. By 1918, the railroad had become a subsidiary of the Western Pacific, which financially supported the line due to the connecting freight traffic it generated. Unfortunately for the new railroad, the mines in the Gold Hill area enjoyed only a short productive life. Usable copper deposits began to diminish by 1920, and although the railroad also carried

tungsten Tungsten, or wolfram, is a chemical element with the symbol W and atomic number 74. Tungsten is a rare metal found naturally on Earth almost exclusively as compounds with other elements. It was identified as a new element in 1781 and first isol ...

and

arsenic Arsenic is a chemical element with the symbol As and atomic number 33. Arsenic occurs in many minerals, usually in combination with sulfur and metals, but also as a pure elemental crystal. Arsenic is a metalloid. It has various allotropes, ...

produced near Gold Hill, mineral production in the area began declining rapidly about 1925. This cost the railroad nearly its entire traffic base, and eventually train service was reduced to a single weekly roundtrip, operating each Friday. Eventually the lack of traffic and prospects inevitably doomed the railroad, and it was finally abandoned in 1939. Most of the railroad's former

grade Grade most commonly refers to: * Grade (education), a measurement of a student's performance * Grade, the number of the year a student has reached in a given educational stage * Grade (slope), the steepness of a slope Grade or grading may also ref ...

remains visible today.

External links

Deep Creek Railroad at UtahRails.net

References

* Carr, Stephen L. and Robert W. Edwards. ''Utah Ghost Rails''. Salt Lake City: Western Epics, 1989. . {{DEFAULTSORT:Deep Creek Railroad Defunct Nevada railroads Defunct Utah railroads Predecessors of the Western Pacific Railroad Railway companies established in 1916 Railway companies disestablished in 1939 1916 establishments in Utah 1939 disestablishments in Utah American companies established in 1916