Ogden's Union Station

Prologue: I serve on the Supervisory Committee of the Goldenwest Credit Union, an institution that was organized to serve railroad employees in Ogden's Union Station. I wrote the following history to celebrate the Union Station's hundredth anniversary, which is occurring this year.  

I don't know if they'll use my essay at the Annual Meeting, but I find this history interesting, so I thought that I would share it here.

By the way, I should add that, except in my limited official capacity, I do not speak for the Goldenwest Credit Union. The opinions and commentary expressed here are my own, and have not been vetted by nor approved Goldenwest Credit Union.

OGDEN UNION STATION

 

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Ogden’s Union Station. That depot building is special to those of us here at Goldenwest because it is our birthplace. Our credit union was founded in that very station only a dozen years after it opened.

Union Station welcomed its first trainload of passengers in November 1924, and instantly became a bustling hub in downtown Ogden. Not long after, seven employees who worked at the depot pooled their resources to form a financial institution -- a new type of institution called a credit union. And the Ogden Railway Employees Federal Credit Union was born, right there in Ogden’s Union Station, on May 13, 1936.

Photo from Utah Historical Society

Within a decade, the depot had entered its heyday; our nation was at war, and Union Station answered the call to service. Every day, 120 trains from four different railroads called on Union Station, sometimes with a frequency approaching one train every five minutes. The station had thirteen platforms on seventeen tracks, and they were all connected by underground passages to keep people off the tracks. Soldiers on their way to and from west coast induction bases and shipyards switched trains here. Union Station was buzzing like never before: A cross-country trip required a change of trains, and in a significant number of those trips, the transfer occurred right here in Ogden.

But how did it come to be that everyone had to change trains in Ogden?

For that answer, we have to look back first to one of the most important dates in Utah’s history, May 10, 1869. It was on that date that Union Pacific crews building the new railroad westward across the continent met up with other crews who had been building eastward for the Central Pacific. The Golden Spike was driven, the Transcontinental Railroad was completed, and the United States was at last connected by railroad coast to coast.

But, despite its name, the Transcontinental Railroad was not one railroad, it was two. Two different competing railroad companies had built the line from opposite ends, and two railroads carried passengers to their meeting location. At that point passengers had to get off a train operated by one company, and then board another train, owned by the other.

This point where the rails met and where the passengers had to change trains was not in Ogden; it was in a lonely outpost on top of a mountain some 75 miles away to the west. A place called Promontory Summit.

As an aside, a lot of people think that the Transcontinental Railroad was completed at Promontory Point, and this incorrect datum is included in a lot of books and histories, even today. However, it was not Promontory Point; it was Promontory Summit. Promontory Point is located at the tip of the Promontory peninsula which juts southward into the Great Salt Lake and is located some thirty miles away from the actual meeting location, Promontory Summit.

If you remember nothing else from this article, remember that the Transcontinental Railroad was completed at Promontory Summit and not Promontory Point. You just might win a bar bet someday.  

But back to Promontory Summit. It was there that westbound passengers would be forced to get off the Union Pacific train and then climb aboard a Central Pacific train to continue their westward journey. Eastbound passengers did the opposite.

Switching trains was not so unusual, no more than switching planes is for travelers today. The issue was that Promontory Summit was completely isolated and far from civilization, just like it still is today. Union Pacific crews had reached Ogden, which was already an established city, in March of 1869, but they kept going, building further west. Congress had picked the meeting spot, and it wasn’t Ogden.

If you’ve ever been up to Golden Spike, you know that it is a long way from anything. It’s on top of a mountain, and there are no services of any kind. Even today, to reach Promontory Summit, you’ll drive a half hour or more past the last town. In 1869, a tent city sprang up at Promontory Summit, as the two railroads and other entrepreneurs attempted to create a town to service the transferring passengers. Remember, everyone who was crossing the country had to get off the train here. Did I mention that Congress picked the spot?

Almost immediately after beginning service, the two railroads recognized that Promontory Summit was a lousy spot to transfer passengers, so the companies began negotiations to establish a better transfer location. Corinne, a town in Box Elder County about ten miles west of Brigham City, lobbied hard to persuade the companies to move the transfer point to their town.

Corinne was the last town along the Union Pacific before Promontory, but Corinne had the advantage of being located on the Wasatch Front, closer to established population centers rather than isolation. And Corinne is located at the lower elevations of the Wasatch Front, rather than up on top of a mountain pass. Corinne seemed to be a great candidate to relocate the transfer station.

However, Brigham Young, who previously had been the governor of the Utah territory and who was still the spiritual leader for most of Utah’s residents, had other ideas. Corinne was not a typical pioneer town – Corinne was a railroad town. Corinne wasn’t founded by farmers and ranchers; it was founded by the Union Pacific. And Corinne was filled with the sorts of establishments that tend to cater to men who are building a railroad far from home: saloons, casinos, and houses of ill repute. Brigham Young was concerned about the impact that Corrinne would have on the impressions of Utah by cross-country travelers.

Brigham Young knew that cross country travelers would have only one stop in their journey to form any opinions of Utah, and he wanted to do all he could to make sure that the one impression wouldn’t be from Corinne.

So while the railroads were negotiating the new transfer location, Young interceded with a carrot to tip the scales. He would donate land for them to build a transfer station in Ogden. That was all it took.  By December, only a half year after driving the Golden Spike at Promontory Point, er…. Summit, Union Pacific sold its trackage between Ogden and Promontory Summit to the Central Pacific, and the transfer point was moved to Ogden.

Of course, having the meeting point in Ogden had a profound impact on the growth and development of that city. The 1870 census counted only 3,000 residents in Ogden, but, spurred on by the economic impetus from the railroads, Ogden’s population exploded to ten times that number by 1920!  Just as modern-day travelers joke that any trip involves a change of planes in Atlanta, so, too, did travelers of an earlier generation regard Ogden. Ogden became known as the transfer point, and earned the moniker, the Crossroads of the West, demonstrating its importance to the nation’s transportation system.

Disaster struck Ogden’s railway operations in 1923, when the train station burned down. This was the depot that had been constructed in 1889, and which was itself an architectural beauty built in Romanesque Revival Style and featuring an iconic clock tower. Ogden needed a new train station, sixty trains per day were still arriving there, so a new building was erected in the same spot.

The replacement depot, the same one which is now celebrating its centenary, was constructed in a Spanish Revival Style conceived by the same architects who designed the picturesque historic depots in Caliente, Nevada, and Kelso, California; the latter is now cared for by the National Park Service. Union Station boasts a vaulted ceiling, towering 56 feet above the spacious passenger waiting room below and is completed with twenty-foot murals at each end which fete the Transcontinental Railroad.  The building was dedicated on November 22, 1924, and it was almost as if it never missed a beat. Passengers thronged the depot, and trains rolled up to the station’s platforms around the clock. Activity slowed during the Great Depression, but traffic returned and set new records during the years of the Second World War.                                                                                                                                                                                                        

After the war, railroads lost their footing quickly. Passengers opted for trips in automobiles or airplanes. Railroads eliminated routes, reduced frequencies, and cut services. Ogden’s Union Station felt this sharp decline. Where only a few years earlier there had been trains every five minutes, now there might have been only five trains per day. In the 1970s, the private railroad companies dumped their profitless passenger services onto Amtrak, the new government-owned railroad, and soon thereafter Amtrak moved the mainline transcontinental services southward to Salt Lake City. Ogden was left with one Amtrak route, a train called the Pioneer which ran northwest to Boise and Portland. In 1997, Amtrak cut that route, too, and Union Station’s time serving passengers was done.

Today, Union Station is a showpiece for what railroading used to look like. The bright murals still adorn both the north and south walls in the station. The Spanish Revival design with the checkerboard floors and arched windows bequeathed by the building’s architects, proclaim to visitors that this is a special place. The Utah Railroad Museum houses a collection of locomotives and carriages at the south end of the depot. And the station still celebrates life by providing a refined space for events large and small in Ogden. Goldenwest is proud to have been a part of that history.

Oh, and those underground passageways? They were filled in and sealed off in the early 1970s.