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    Tooele Valley Railroad
    Tooele Valley Railroad
    Tooele Valley Railroad
    Ebook164 pages1 hour

    Tooele Valley Railroad

    By Emma Louise Penrod

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    About this ebook

    Shortly after the International Smelter offered economic salvation to Tooele s struggling desert community, the Tooele Valley Railroad became the town artery. Though originally built in 1908 to connect the smelter to the Union Pacific and Western Pacific lines west of town, the railroad became central to daily life. Hundreds of local workers rode it to and from work each day. As technology continued to change Tooele, the Tooele Valley Railroad shared Vine Street with the first automobiles safety precautions required that the caboose, with a horn mounted to warn motorists, lead the oncoming train. However, the smelter s decades of prosperity proved short-lived, and by the 1930s, the town had fallen on difficult times once again. The railroad outlived the smelter, but operations ceased in the early 1980s, and the city had the abandoned tracks removed.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 30, 2013
    ISBN9781439644058
    Tooele Valley Railroad
    Author

    Emma Louise Penrod

    Emma Louise Penrod, an award-winning contributor to the Tooele Transcript-Bulletin, curates photographs from the railroad�s past. Together, the narrative and photographs harken back to a time of growth, hope, change, and turmoil, illustrating the contributions of an industry that would change the town forever.

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      Book preview

      Tooele Valley Railroad - Emma Louise Penrod

      me.

      INTRODUCTION

      Stories about the Tooele Valley Railroad begin with its sister company, International Smelting. Utah Consolidated Mining, a conglomerate of mines pursuing wealth in the ore-laden Oquirrh Mountains, founded these sibling companies on the same day in 1908. For the mines, this was a matter of strict self-interest: smoke litigation in the Salt Lake Valley had cost the company its primary smelter. To turn a profit, the mines needed an immediate, cost-effective smelting solution.

      While seeking an escape from the mounting tide of litigation that came with Utah’s agrarian and urban centers, the mining executives discovered Tooele. This desert town, settled in a choice canyon on the western slopes of the Oquirrhs, presented Utah Consolidated with exactly the location it desired. Some 32 miles of scrubby wasteland, a salty lake, and the Oquirrh Mountains separated Tooele from the majority of nearby population centers. But industrialization had not left the town untouched. Mining booms had swelled nearby communities, such as Mercur, to populations near 10,000 in the recent past. The modern conveniences that came with a wealth of silver and gold—electricity, communications, and railroads—remained in place next door. Most importantly, vacant land in Pine Canyon could be found just opposite Utah Consolidated’s mines in Bingham Canyon. Several mountain peaks stood in the way, but this obstacle seemed readily surmountable when compared to the costly pollution controls Salt Lake City now required.

      Utah Consolidated found Tooele in something of an adolescent state—a developing city of 1,200 at odds with itself. Mormon pioneers originally settled the valley in 1849, hoping to establish a self-sustaining agricultural community after the pattern of older Mormon colonies. But the area’s soil proved too saline and the climate too dry for substantial crop production. Ranching became the industry of choice, but the population’s limited success with its herds sustained little growth and left locals impoverished. Mining came to the valley in 1864 thanks to prospecting by the US army, but Tooele City’s Mormon majority initially rejected this development. By 1900, with the population divided by political and economic ideals, a perpetual identity crisis embroiled the community.

      The tipping point came in 1908. After fighting judicial law in Salt Lake City for two years, seeking peace with lifelong competitors, and attempting to pacify litigious farmers with out-of-court financial settlements, Utah Consolidated ran out of alternatives. Company administrators scrambled to set up shop in Pine Canyon, knowing that every day of construction meant decreased productivity and lost profit. They still faced a number of problems not solved by the Pine Canyon location, including the absence of an obvious route for transporting ores to the new smelter. The nearest railroad station, called the Tooele or Warner station, serviced the Western Pacific, the Rio Grande Western, and the Union Pacific, but it was about six miles southwest of the smelter site. Utah Consolidated solved this problem with the creation of the Tooele Valley Railway.

      The mines company conceived a short-line railroad that was essentially the shortest distance between two points: the International smelter and the station at Warner. The line spanned 6.235 miles, beginning at Warner, turning east to follow Vine Street through downtown Tooele, then angling gradually northward to meet the International rail yard. A railroad depot constructed at 35 North Broadway—the intersection of Vine Street and Broadway—would serve as a third station and as the Tooele Valley Railway’s company headquarters.

      What political wrangling occurred in the fall of 1908 remains untold, but Utah Consolidated procured a right-of-way down the middle of Vine Street, one of the busiest roads in town, in relatively short order. In November, a little over a month after Utah Consolidated made the decision to move smelting operations to Pine Canyon, it incorporated two spinoff companies: the International Smelting Company, which later came to be known as International Smelting and Refining; and the Tooele Valley Railway Company, which many locals call the Tooele Valley Railroad, though it conducted official business under the railway name.

      One final barrier stood between Utah Consolidated and the realization of its plans: Tooele’s population. For the company to maintain its ambitious construction schedule, it planned to hire 600 workers at the smelter, 70 for the railroad, and another 200 to build a 20,000-foot-long aerial tram that would connect International directly to the mines in Bingham. The three projects could have employed 72 percent of the entire population living in Tooele City at the time.

      A swarm of surveyors and company officials descended on Tooele that November to prepare the town for its overnight transformation. In December, E.P. Mathewson, the newly installed general manager of International Smelting, met with city officials to request the construction of 2,000 new homes.

      Limited railroad services came online four months after construction began, and official operations commenced on October 15, 1909. The International smelter—which cost more than $2 million, paid in full by Utah Consolidated—took another year to finish, opening in the summer of 1910. Gov. William Spry lit the first furnace during a ceremony in July.

      After more than doubling Tooele’s population in a matter of months, business at the smelter quickly took a turn for the worse. Coincidently, ore supplies

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