A railroad survey that violated every rule in the book was built anyway in eastern Utah more than a century ago, and one hand-built wooden trestle from that line still stands today. The Uinta Railway opened in 1904, climbing Baxter Pass in the Book Cliffs of eastern Utah. In under six miles, the line gained more than 2,000 feet of elevation. The grade held at 7.
5 percent for five unbroken miles, and at a place called Moro Castle, the track bent through a curve so sharp that early accounts put it at 75 degrees before surveyors later measured it at a still-unprecedented 66 degrees. It was the sharpest curve on any common carrier railroad in the United States. Railroad engineers who studied the survey said it could not be done. The company built it anyway, mostly out of timber, by hand, with picks, shovels, horses, and black powder.
The man who ordered the railroad built was John M. Mack, president of the Eastern Asphalt Company. He was chasing a mineral called gilsonite, a black, brittle rock that broke in a shiny fracture, would not burn in a stove, and melted into paint, varnish, waterproofing, and printing ink. By the 1880s, factories back east wanted every pound they could buy.
The problem was location: the only deposits worth mining sat in the Uinta Basin, some of the most cut-off country in the American West. The mineral took its name from Samuel Henry Gilson, a Utah prospector born in Illinois in 1836 who had left for the California goldfields before he turned 15. He raised horses for the Pony Express, ranched in Nevada, prospected, and served as a United States Marshal at the execution of John D. Lee.
From 1886 on, he promoted the black rock so aggressively that it took his name. Before any mining could begin, the ground had to be pried open. The richest deposits sat on the Uinta and Ouray reservation, land belonging to the Ute people, where outside mining was not permitted. Gilson’s partner, promoter Burt Seabolt, went to Washington in 1887 and again in 1888 to press Congress.
In 1888, over the objection of the federal Indian office, Congress detached a strip of about 7,000 acres from the reservation and opened it to mining. Only then could the first claims go in. The railroad that would climb Baxter Pass was still 16 years in the future, and the fight to reach the mineral had already reached the floor of Congress. Mack’s company controlled the deposits and faced a fortune in mineral stranded behind a wall of cliffs.
He made the decision to build a railroad to reach a single surface seam the miners called the Black Dragon, which ran along open ground for four miles and averaged six feet wide. Standard railroad practice held that a 2 percent grade was steep and a 10-degree curve was sharp. Steel wheels on steel rail have almost no grip, and on a hill that smoothness turns lethal. The great American main lines were surveyed to hold 1 or 2 percent wherever possible.
The climb to Baxter Pass held 7. 5 percent for five miles without a break, with the sharpest curve in the nation in the middle of the steepest grade. The builders could have tunneled the ridge or taken a long, gentle way around. The reason they did not was money.
A standard-gauge line built to normal grades would have cost a fortune the company was never going to spend on a mineral spur in the desert. So the engineers threw out the rule book on purpose. They built to 3-foot narrow gauge, which let the track wrap around tight curves a wider railroad could never take, and they accepted that the line would have to be run slow, careful, and on nerve. The company’s engineers located the line on foot with a transit, a steel chain, and a level, running up the West Salt Wash and over the pass one stake at a time.
The surviving company papers kept the grade, the curve, and the elevation to the foot. They never recorded the name of the man who ran the survey. He located the impossible line and then vanished out of his own records. The route began at Mack, where the narrow-gauge Uinta met the standard-gauge Denver and Rio Grande Western.
Every sack of gilsonite coming off the mountain had to be lifted out of the little cars and reloaded into full-size ones for the trip east. The line then worked its way 28 miles up the West Salt Wash just to reach Atchee at the foot of the real grade. That first stretch alone accounted for 36 of the railroad’s 73 bridges. The roadbed was cut by men with picks and shovels, by horse teams dragging slip scrapers, and by black powder set into the rock by hand.
Crews hung on slopes that fell away beneath them and carved a bench just wide enough for a narrow-gauge track. There was not a single machine anywhere on that mountain. Wood was a deliberate choice. Stone viaducts and steel spans cost money and time the company did not want to pay.
Timber was cheap, fast, and a framing crew could raise a trestle far quicker than a mason could lay an arch. Crews drove piles with a simple and punishing machine, an iron weight hauled up a wooden frame and dropped over and over until the pile would not move another inch. Out at Whiskey Creek, a pile-driven trestle from this railroad is the last piece of the Uinta left remotely intact generations after the final train. The steep line doubled back on itself constantly to gain height, running up a side canyon just to turn around and come back down the far wall a little higher.
Railroaders gave these hairpins names, including a mule shoe curve and a horseshoe at Moro Castle. The reversals earned the line a nickname up and down the Western railroads: the crookedest railroad in the West. For all its reputation as a mineral railroad, the Uintah was a common carrier. It hauled mail, express freight, sheep, and wool, and for a while it carried people.
Passenger service started in 1905, usually a small tank engine pulling a single combination car, part coach and part baggage room, up and over the pass. The passenger train stopped running in 1921. For those years, if you needed to cross that country, this steep little line was how you did it. On the steep mountain end, the Uinta used Shay locomotives, geared machines with a row of gears down one side turning every wheel, trading speed for raw pulling grip.
At Atchee, the shop town at the foot of the hard grade, crews swapped power, putting geared engines on for the mountain. Going up was a hard, grinding fight. Coming back down, a loaded train easing down a 7. 5 percent grade was a runaway looking for an excuse, and the crew’s entire job was to keep it from finding one.
The cargo made the stakes worse. Gilsonite burns. The mineral came down the mountain packed in burlap sacks of 150 to 200 pounds each, stacked on open flat cars, behind a steam engine that threw sparks. Winter turned the line into a different kind of problem.
High on Baxter Pass, drifts could stand as tall as the windows of a passenger car. In 1929, a huge slide buried part of the line. Every winter, the railroad’s survival came down to crews out in the cold clearing a path across a mountain that was actively trying to close it. The mountain collected its worst debt on the night of February 10, 1909.
In a snowstorm near the top of the pass, Shay engine number three went off the rails. The engineer, Joseph E. Lane, known to the crews as Doc, was killed, along with a Greek laborer whose name the record never wrote down. The company kept the engine number, the date, and the name of the engineer.
The immigrant who died on the same mountain, on the same night, in the same wreck, went into the ground unnamed in the ledger. By the 1920s, the railroad was in trouble. Labor cost more, the equipment was aging, and the geared engines were wearing out against the grade. Lucian Sprague, the man running the line, ordered more power.
In 1926, the Baldwin Locomotive Works delivered engine number 50, an articulated narrow-gauge machine weighing 236,000 pounds. Two years later, its sister, number 51, arrived 10,000 pounds heavier, the largest and heaviest narrow-gauge steam locomotive ever built anywhere in the world. The engines were hinged in the middle, with two separate sets of driving wheels under one long boiler, so the front half could swing sideways to follow the bend. They were also tank engines, carrying their own water and fuel in tanks around the boiler.
A monster that could bend in the middle was the only kind of monster this railroad could use. The line was so hard that keeping it alive required a machine nobody else on Earth needed. The Uinta Basin was turning out on the order of 50,000 tons of gilsonite a year in this era, and this railroad carried most of it to the outside world. The mineral was dug out by hand long before it reached a railcar.
Gilsonite sits in tall, near-vertical veins, so men went into narrow cuts and shafts along the Black Dragon, broke the brittle mineral loose, and hauled it up in heat and dust. Then it was sacked in burlap and stacked in the open to wait for the train. Gilsonite dust hangs in the close air of a working mine, and it burns, so a spark in the wrong place was a constant fear down in the cuts. The railroad even grew for a while.
In 1911, the company pushed the line 9. 5 miles onto a place called Watson, and then another four miles to reach a second gilsonite mine at Rainbow. Little towns grew up wherever the rails and the mines met. Dragon and Watson were company towns that existed for one reason: to dig the mineral and load it onto the trains.
Today, both are ghost towns, with almost nothing left of either one. Atchee, the shop town at the foot of the grade, was named for a peaceful Ute chief and sat in country so remote that the railroad was the town’s one real lifeline. The crews who kept the line open lived there, maintained the engines there, and fought the mountain from there in every season. The grade never beat the Uinta.
The truck did. By the 1930s, gasoline trucks on improving roads could carry gilsonite out of the basin without the cost of maintaining 73 timber bridges and a mountain grade that tried to kill somebody every winter. A truck needed no pile-driven trestle, did not care how sharp the curve was, and did not ask a crew to risk the descent every day. On May 16, 1939, the last train ran on the Uinta Railway.
Roy Eno had the throttle as engineer, George Loman was fireman, and John Beasley was conductor. Superintendent E. V. Erp, hired onto the line 27 years before, saw it end.
They took the last train down the mountain, and then the railroad that everyone said could not be built was quietly taken apart. The rails were pulled up and carried off. The engines were scattered to other lines and to scrappers. Most of the Uinta today is a set of scars in the ground: the grade cut into the side of the Book Cliffs, the stubs of trestle bents, the empty bench where Atchee stood.
Out at Whiskey Creek, the timber trestle still stands, holding up a track that is no longer there. The numbers are still in the record: 7. 5 percent, 66 degrees, 2,000 feet of climb in under six miles, 73 bridges. What the papers did not keep is most of the men.
The surveyor who located the impossible grade is a blank. The Greek laborer who died near the top of the pass is a blank. The ledger kept the grade.
It did not keep them.