Nevada State Railroad Museum

We love trains, so we were very happy to go to the Nevada State Railroad Museum on our recent fall break. We actually went twice, as the first time was at the end of the day so we needed more time to see it all and to go for a train ride.

 They had out the special McKeen Motor Car to celebrate Nevada Day. They've done a beautiful job restoring it.

 Our friend Dave also loves trains and came with us.

The train went three times around the tracks on the property. It wasn't long, but it was fun!

The back of the car was especially beautiful.

Then we went over and operated the hand car. Twice. It was great. Inside the museum they had beautiful engines and interesting displays. The kids' favorite part inside was the HO model train and the Thomas the Train toy table, but the part they remember the best was the hand car.

Desert Destination: Utah State Railroad Museum and a Real Train Ride

Desert Boy still loves trains, so we decided to make the Utah State Railroad Museum in Ogden, Utah one of our destinations on Memorial Day weekend. 

 The museum is part of Union Station, a beautiful building with an impressive main hall. We stopped briefly in the train store and then got our tickets for the museum.

 For the entrance, we walked under trestles from the very long Lucin cutoff, which was built in 1903 across the Great Salt Lake to shorten the train route. It was quite an engineering feat. In the 1950s the trestle was replaced with a causeway, which separates the lake into a northern and southern section with very different salinities, which support different lifeforms and thus cause the lake to be different colors.


I spotted a golden spike in a vault--the golden spike used for the bicentennial celebration of the meeting of the Transcontinental Railroad (coming soon to a Desert Survivor blog near you!).


I was excited to see this Gandy Dancer handcar, as I recently read Frank Wendall Call's book Gandydancer's Children: A Railroad Memoir. It talks about life on the railroad in rural Nevada and Utah during the Great Depression and is fascinating.

We got up on the handcar for a family photo. We still have troubles getting everyone to smile at the same time, but at least we're all looking in the same direction!

 Desert Boy found toy wooden trains in a corner and happily played for a few minutes. To my surprise, he didn't protest much when I said it was time to keep going.

 Maybe because he could go into a real train car and pretend to drive it.

 Then we went out in the hallway and found the model trains. The kids kept running to figure out where it had gone once it had entered a tunnel. The train was running towards us, against traffic flow, so we spent quite a bit of time in the hallway.

 All the detail that went into the scenery surrounding the model trains was amazing.

 Union Station not only houses the Utah State Railroad Museum, it also holds the John M. Brown Firearms Museum, which my husband found fascinating. The kid weren't too excited, so I took them to the next museum.

 We went right next door to the Browning-Kimball Classic Car Museum. All three museums are included in the ticket price, so we had to check them out! The classic cars were stunning. I particularly liked the hood ornaments--much more elaborate than today's!

We still had a little time, so the kids wanted to go back to the train museum. Desert Girl was so excited that she could climb up and down to the cupola in the old caboose.

 She also had a turn "driving" a train.

 The trains outside were quite a sight, with the massive machines exuding power.

We really enjoyed looking at the trains. While we were there, a FrontRunner commuter train passed by. I had picked up a schedule inside and glanced at it. Then I looked at it a little more carefully. An idea was forming--perhaps we could actually ride a real train. The commuter train doesn't run on Sundays or big holidays, like Memorial Day, so if we were going to ride it, we had to ride it that day. We made a plan: we could take the 5:16 train from Ogden to three stops away, at Layton. We would get off, wait 15 minutes, then get back on. Total time: about one hour.

So we bought our tickets ($7.40 each for the older three, Desert Girl was free, so this wasn't the cheapest diversion around, but the kids really wanted to do it). We boarded the train and the kids got to pick where they wanted to sit.

 Desert Boy was all ready for this grand adventure.

 Desert Girl didn't look so sure.

 The Front Runner is relatively new. It's clean, shiny, and has double-decker cars.

 The weather was perfect for a short wait at the station. Plus the kids then had the anticipation of waiting for the returning train. I'm a big fan of making them wait--it's a good life skill!

We got back to Ogden just fine. A twenty minute ride each direction was just the right amount of time for them.

So if you're in the Salt Lake area, you could easily make a trip up to Ogden, walk two blocks to Union Station and see three museums. There's also a great cafe nearby, Karen's Cafe on 25th Street, just a couple blocks from Union Station. A nice lady on the train had suggested it, and we were very glad--great food, reasonably priced, and a great way to finish our train adventures for the day.

In Search of Newhouse

 On Saturday on the way to town (town meaning any place with more than 200 people), I decided I wanted to go find Newhouse, a ghost town. I knew that some of the first settlers in the area where I live had gotten off the train at Newhouse and continued by wagon over the mountain ranges and basins. I was recently reminded of Newhouse when I discovered the book Utah Ghost Rails by Stephen Carr and Robert Edwards. I found it at the Utah DNR Bookstore, one of my favorite places to browse for local publications. In the book, I found information about the railroad tracks extending from Frisco, a rowdy ghost town near Milford, Utah, to Newhouse. I had seen remnants of those tracks from Highway 21, but hadn't thought much about them. With Desert Boy's love of trains, I figured it was time to make the journey.

 I thought I knew which road led to Newhouse. When we saw the above mining remains, I figured we were on the right track. The hole in the ground intrigued me, so I got out and found that it went deeper than I could see. Scary!

The good road continued, but we didn't see more old mining structures. Instead, we saw this:

 Modern equipment and fresh piles of rock. Had someone started reworking the old mines near Newhouse? Or were these new ones?

The road was gated and no one was around, so we didn't have our questions answered. We turned around and headed up a little two-track road.

We didn't get far. We found another gate and a sign saying that the area was owned by Horn Silver Mines, Inc. I recognized the name from the Frisco side.

I saw a couple of adits on the hillside.

We still didn't know where Newhouse was, and the roads were a little too rocky for the van, so we parked and started hiking.

Desert Girl wanted me to take a picture of her.

We hiked for a bit, but the kids quickly decide that wasn't what they really wanted to do. They wanted to go back to the van. On the way, though, they found a distraction.

It was time to rock climb!

Desert Boy made it to the top and was happy. We headed back to the highway, with a detour down another two track road. We encountered some other people who were also looking for Newhouse but couldn't find it.

So we headed to Milford and got directions at the tourist information in the caboose. We needed to go back down in the valley more. So after running a bunch of errands and enjoying the Minersville swimming pool, we headed back towards Newhouse. This time we found it, with a turnoff from Highway 21 near mile marker 57. (One book says the road used to be marked, but it certainly isn't now. However, if you look off into the distance, you can see some of the buildings from the highway--something I had never noticed before.)

Out among the cactus and cheatgrass, we found some old buildings.

We found quite a few old foundations.

The kids had a great time looking for lizards.

The Cactus Mine was started in 1870, before the mine in Frisco. But it didn't have many investors and little was mined until 1900, when Samuel Newhouse came from Salt Lake City. He had previously invested in the copper mines up Bingham Canyon, which proved quite successful. With his capital, plus investments from England and France, the Cactus Mine was worked more and proved to be profitable. A town developed on Newhouse's land around the mine, called Tent-town due to the temporary nature of the "buildings".

A few years later, the mine was still going strong, and some permanent buildings were erected. The town became known as Newhouse and included a cafe, library, livery stable, hospital, several stores, and a hotel. It even had an opera house and dance hall. Water was not available right there, so it was piped in from Wah Wah Springs five miles west, and an electrical system was installed. Water not used for mining and culinary purposes irrigated the city park. The saloon and red light district were relegated to a mile outside of town, off of Newhouse's property. The town was orderly in contrast to Frisco around the hill, which at its heydey had 23 saloons and was known as the wildest town in the Great Basin (from Stephen Carr's Utah Ghost Towns).

Hmm...opera house vs. 23 saloons...

The Utah Southern Extension Railroad built a depot at the end of the Frisco Branch.  In addition to the Frisco Branch, a separate standard gauge railroad named the Newhouse, Copper Gulch & Sevier Lake was built between the Cactus Mine and the Cactus Mill.

The ore didn't last forever, though. It didn't even last for long. About five years after the town was settled, the Cactus Mine gave out, after producing $3.5 million worth of ore.  Other mines in the area weren't big producers, so the town, like most mining towns, quickly quieted. Many buildings were moved into Milford. The cafe continued, serving sheep and cattlemen and a few miner, until 1921 when it burned down. The tracks were pulled up to Frisco in 1927, and then the track from Frisco to Milford was taken up by August 1943.

Although most of the town had disappeared, I was surprised by how many remnants we could still see.

We were short on time, so only got a quick glimpse of some of the structures and foundations.

We found that the road followed part of the old railroad bed. It started getting a little too rocky for our van so we had to turn around. But we'll be back to explore more of this neat old ghost town.

Desert Destination: Nevada Northern Railway

A couple months ago, we took Desert Boy to look at trains at the Nevada Northern Railway depot in Ely, Nevada. Last weekend we had the chance to actually go on one of the trains. Desert Boy was so excited, talking nonstop about the choo-choo. 

They have two different kinds of engines, a steam locomotive and a diesel engine. On our trip, the diesel was going to be powering us.

We had to hang on tight to Desert Boy, because he couldn't wait to get on board.

Finally the conductor called "All Aboard," and we gave Desert Boy his ticket to hand to the conductor. 

The train had the locomotive, two passenger cars, an outdoor viewing car, and a caboose. We could sit anywhere we wanted.

There weren't a whole lot of passengers on the first weekend of operation, so there were plenty of good choices of where to sit.

There weren't too many people in Ely, either, with no one waiting on the highway as the train went past. We were kind of disappointed because we really wanted to wave to people! Our route was taking us to the north of Ely, towards McGill.

The Nevada Northern Railway follows two main routes, one to Keystone, near the giant mines at Ruth, and the other towards McGill, where the smelters were. The track from Ruth to McGill was used by Kennecott mine to ship ore, and they used what was called the highline. A separate set of train tracks went down in the valley more and was used to bring freight and passengers into Ely beginning in 1906. Passenger service ended in 1941, and the train we were on was the first one scheduled since that time to go on the mainline. Last year, volunteers replaced 2500 railroad ties and helped clean up the tracks so that a portion of the mainline could be reopened. Along with feeling like we were a part of history, we also felt adventurous--who knew what we would find?

It was a beautiful spring day, so people migrated back to the open-air car. Because we were usually going less than 30 mph, there wasn't too much wind, and it was a perfect day to admire the high-desert scenery.

Eventually we got to the point where it was time to prepare to turn around. The tracks didn't make a big circle--instead the engine had to be moved from the front of the train to the back of the train. A little side spur provided the opportunity to do that. We could tell they were telling the truth about not going on this mainline before, because there were twigs and dirt piles on the little side track that we got to watch the diesel engine squish.

The crisp, high-elevation air provided for some excellent photo shots. In the winter, the railway even runs a polar express train for those interested in railroad photography--the contrast of the train against the snow-covered landscape is nothing short of beautiful.

Engine 109 was built in 1950 as one of nine engines used by Kennecott mine. The passenger cars we were riding in were 1928 Pullman cars that had been retired in 1978 and then restored. About 60 people can be seated in each car, and for some of the specialty train rides that include meals, they can install tables.

One of the best things about the trip  was how relaxing it was. No one was in a hurry, and I started wishing we had more opportunities to go places by railroad. It's so nice to be able to visit with other people instead of racing down the highway to go from place to place.

Desert Boy enjoyed watching the scenery go by, too.

On the way back to the East Ely Depot, there were a few more cars on the highway, so we got to have our fun waving.

And then up ahead, we saw a puff of smoke. The number 93 locomotive was out of the shop for a private rental. But we overheard on the radio that it had derailed. Everyone crowded outside to catch a glimpse of what was happening.

As we got closer we saw that there were a lot of people standing around the beautiful black locomotive. It wasn't apparent at first that it was derailed, but as we chugged past we saw one of the big back tires was off the track. 

This was the track we were supposed to be on, so we had to take a detour on other tracks to get back to the depot. At each switch, our train slowed down, a guy in front jumped off and switched the tracks, the train pulled forward, and then a guy in back jumped off and switched the tracks back to their original position.

Engine 93 is steam powered, meaning it needs lots of coal to make it go, so it carries its own coal car right behind it.

And then we were back. We had such a good time we are really looking forward to returning and taking the train again on one of the other routes. They also have a walking tour of the shop area that we'd like to take. If you're interested in learning more, visit the Nevada Northern Railway website. All aboard!