Making tracks for the West

Sunset, March, 1998 by Lora J. Finnegan

Like the threads of a boldly patterned Navajo rug, railroad lines weave through the Western landscape and this magazine's own past. In May of 1898, Sunset Magazine was launched by the Southern Pacific Railroad to herald the glories of the West and its crack train, the Sunset Limited. That first 16-page issue promoted the beauty of Yosemite in an article directed at the "pleasure traveler."

This month, we look back on the history of the railroad and its lasting impact on the West, look ahead to the future of rail travel in our region, provide a guide to riding Amtrak, and present the West's best train rides.

What was it the Engines said, Pilots touching, head to head, Facing on the single track, Half a world behind each back?

- Bret Harte

It's May 10, Golden Spike Day at the Promontory National Historic Site in Utah, and history's about to repeat itself.

The Central Pacific railroad's balloon-stacked Jupiter steam engine edges in from the west, its tiny American flags snapping in the breeze. The Union Pacific's burgundy-and-gold engine No. 119 puffs in from the east. Soon the locomotives face cowcatcher-to-cowcatcher on the treeless Utah plain, each panting as if alive, exhaling steam and smoke.

At last, two men - Central Pacific president Leland Stanford and Union Pacific vice president Thomas C. Durant - step into the space between the two engines to drive the rail line's final ceremonial spikes. Under a cloudless sky, the crowd braves the heat to watch the culmination of the largest, most daring engineering feat the country has ever undertaken: an iron road built entirely by hand across 1,776 miles of rivers, mountains, plains, and desert; six years of backbreaking work and engineering ingenuity. Sweltering in black wool frock coats and tall silk hats, each man takes a mighty swing.

Both men miss.

A crewman finally pounds in the spikes as steam whistles blow and bells clang. Champagne bottles appear, and men scramble up on the puffing engines to pose for the photograph.

Looking cool in her straw hat and 1860s-style brown plaid cotton dress, Golden Spike Association president Delone Bradford-Glover is pleased by the turnout for this year's re-creation of the historic day in 1869. "This land looks much as it did then," Bradford-Glover says, gazing past the small museum here and across the green swale of Promontory Hollow. "You can still see the parallel scars where the crews raced side by side to lay tracks. You get a sense of the vastness out here and imagine what those men accomplished." It marked the beginning of the railroads' impact on the West.

RAILROADS SHAPE THE WEST

"Nationally, the spirit at that time was 'We're going to invent our way past any obstacles which will confront us,'" says historian Walter P. Gray, director of the California State Railroad Museum. "And we did, surmounting the seemingly insurmountable with that first transcontinental line."

In the 24 years after the golden spike was struck, route after route pushed across the continent. Along the railroad lines, farms and industries sprang up "like winter wheat in a Kansas spring," as one source put it. The Northern Pacific connected the Great Lakes and Duluth, Minnesota, with the Pacific and Portland, helping to extend the reach of the lumber industry. Southern Pacific linked New Orleans to Houston, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, making possible steamship connections and port trade with Latin America, Europe, and Asia.

Running from St. Paul to Seattle, the Great Northern eventually created a prosperous swath of farms, mines, ranches, and lumber camps. To the south, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe pushed into the desert and to Los Angeles, making irrigated vegetable farms feasible in New Mexico and establishing the roots for vast orange empires in Southern California.

When the Southern Pacific stretched into the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys, farmers began tapping the rich soils for tomatoes, rice, and cotton. Railroad lines made Denver a transportation hub, then the Queen City of the Plains.

"No region was more transformed by the rails than the West," says Bill Withuhn, curator of transportation for the Smithsonian Institution. "All the great Western industries - cattle ranching, wheat farming, copper, and coal mining - would have been utterly impossible without the railroads."

The trains spawned yet another industry: tourism. In the early days, comfort was at a premium; most riders traveled humbly, at a penny a mile, packed into glorified boxcars dubbed Emigrant Cars. In 1879, author Robert Louis Stevenson endured a wretched journey on his way west in such a car, describing it as a "long, narrow wooden box, like a flat-roofed Noah's ark." Seating was on benches "too short for anything but a young child ... not space enough for one to lie."

But by the 1890s, train travel had evolved: In three days, you could ride from New Orleans to Los Angeles in the comfort of the Sunset Limited, compared with a crossing on the Oregon Trail of up to six months. Coaches became more comfortable, with gas lights and steam heat.