Deep Creek Railroad

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Route 1931 Deep Creek Railroad.jpg
Route 1931

The Deep Creek Railroad is a defunct railroad company that constructed and operated a line between Wendover and Gold Hill, Utah, 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.

Wendover, Utah City in Utah, United States

Wendover is a city in Tooele County, Utah, United States. The population was 1,537 at the 2000 census, with a 2010 population of 1,400.

Gold Hill, Utah Unincorporated community in Utah, United States

Gold Hill is a small, unincorporated community in far western Tooele County, Utah, United States, near the Nevada state line.

Utah A state of the United States of America

Utah is a state in the western United States. It became the 45th state admitted to the U.S. on January 4, 1896. Utah is the 13th-largest by area, 31st-most-populous, and 10th-least-densely populated of the 50 United States. Utah has a population of more than 3 million according to the Census estimate for July 1, 2016. Urban development is mostly concentrated in two areas: the Wasatch Front in the north-central part of the state, which contains approximately 2.5 million people; and Washington County in Southern Utah, with over 160,000 residents. Utah is bordered by Colorado to the east, Wyoming to the northeast, Idaho to the north, Arizona to the south, and Nevada to the west. It also touches a corner of New Mexico in the southeast.

Contents

History

Beginning in the late 1800s, prospectors began exploring the remote Deep Creek Mountains of far west-central Utah, and a brief gold-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-mining properties in the Gold HIll area. The rapid growth in the use of electricity during the period created a strong demand for copper, and nearby mining districts near Ely, Nevada and Bingham Canyon, Utah were highly successful copper producers; Gold Hill's promoters hoped that its mines would fall into the same league.

Deep Creek Mountains

The Deep Creek Mountains, officially the Deep Creek Range, are a mountain range in the Great Basin located in extreme western Tooele County and Juab County, Utah, in the western United States. The range trends north-south,, and is composed of granite in its central highest portion. The valley to the east is Snake Valley and to the west is Deep Creek Valley. Nearby communities include Callao, Utah to the east and the community of Ibapah and the lands of the Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation to the west.

Copper Chemical element with atomic number 29

Copper is a chemical element with symbol Cu 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 pinkish-orange color. Copper is used as a conductor of heat and electricity, as a building material, and as a constituent of various metal alloys, such as sterling silver used in jewelry, cupronickel used to make marine hardware and coins, and constantan used in strain gauges and thermocouples for temperature measurement.

Electricity Physical phenomena associated with the presence and flow of electric charge

Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. In early days, electricity was considered as being not related to magnetism. Later on, many experimental results and the development of Maxwell's equations indicated that both electricity and magnetism are from a single phenomenon: electromagnetism. Various common phenomena are related to electricity, including lightning, static electricity, electric heating, electric discharges and many others.

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

Western Pacific Railroad defunct American railroad (1916–1982)

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 directly competed with SP's portion of the Overland Route for rail traffic between Salt Lake City/Ogden, Utah, and Oakland, California, for nearly 80 years. In 1983, the Western Pacific was acquired by the Union Pacific Corporation and it was soon merged into their Union Pacific Railroad. The Western Pacific was one of the original operators of the California Zephyr.

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. 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.

Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad transport company

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 3 ft narrow-gauge line running south from Denver, Colorado in 1870. It served mainly as a transcontinental bridge line between Denver, and Salt Lake City, Utah. The Rio Grande was also a major origin of coal and mineral traffic.

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 and arsenic 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 remains visible today.

Tungsten Chemical element with atomic number 74

Tungsten, or wolfram, is a chemical element with symbol W and atomic number 74. The name tungsten comes from the former Swedish name for the tungstate mineral scheelite, tung sten or "heavy stone". Tungsten is a rare metal found naturally on Earth almost exclusively combined with other elements in chemical compounds rather than alone. It was identified as a new element in 1781 and first isolated as a metal in 1783. Its important ores include wolframite and scheelite.

Arsenic Chemical element with atomic number 33

Arsenic is a chemical element with 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, but only the gray form, which has a metallic appearance, is important to industry.

Grade (slope) tangent of the angle of a surface to the horizontal

The grade of a physical feature, landform or constructed line refers to the tangent of the angle of that surface to the horizontal. It is a special case of the slope, where zero indicates horizontality. A larger number indicates higher or steeper degree of "tilt". Often slope is calculated as a ratio of "rise" to "run", or as a fraction in which run is the horizontal distance and rise is the vertical distance.

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