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 by 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.
