Archives West Finding Aid

"THE WISE AND THRIFTY RIDE OUR CARS": HISTORY OF UTAH INTERURBAN RAILROADS

The opening of the new TRAX railroad line by the Utah Transit Authority on December 5, 1999, was hailed as one of the major events of the decade for Salt Lake City and the growing communities along Utah's Wasatch Front. Planners and UTA officials believe that the fifteen miles of railroad from downtown Salt Lake City to Sandy will ease traffic congestion in Utah's most populous areas and usher in a new age of socially conscious transportation. The construction of the new line aroused passions in people of all political persuasions, and while it might seemed at the time like today's hottest news, it was not the first time that Utahn's have gone through major light rail line construction. Salt Lake City and the Wasatch Front have a long tradition of interurban railroads, stretching back over a hundred years. A horse-drawn trolley system was in place in Salt Lake City by the early1870s, and the first electric trolley cars ran on Salt Lake City's streets in 1890, six years before Utah even became a state. For more than fifty years, residents all along the Wasatch Front could hop on a red car of the Bamberger Line, or one of the other interurban railroads, and go almost anywhere from Preston, Idaho, to Provo, Utah. The modern TRAX is fifteen miles long; at the peak of the interurban railways in northern Utah there were 150 miles of trolley lines in Salt Lake alone, with another 30 miles in Ogden, Logan, and Provo. They carried thousands of passengers every year, and were a major factor in the development of Salt Lake City from a big western town to the major urban center that it has become.

The following detailed history of northern Utah's interurban railways is adapted from the entry for "Railroads," by Don Strack, [in] UTAH HISTORY ENCYCLOPEDIA, edited by Allan Kent Powell. (Salt Lake City : University of Utah Press, c1994.)

Between 1890 and 1920 Utah's population more than doubled, from 210,779 to 449,396. Most of that growth was in the urban areas and nearby farming communities along the Wasatch Front. By the turn of the century, the steam railroads were straining to provide the local populace with transportation to local destinations. To fill this need for additional local passenger transportation, several local electric interurban railroads were organized between 1900 and 1910. This group of companies developed into what became one of the largest electric railroad systems in the nation.

Between 1910 and 1920 four separate railroads completed either the electrification of their lines or the actual construction of their lines as electric railroads. The Salt Lake and Utah Railroad was begun in 1914 as an electric line south from Salt Lake City to Provo, and was completed to Payson in 1916.

The Salt Lake, Garfield and Western began in 1891 as the Saltair Beach Railway, running from Salt Lake City west to the new Saltair Resort. Construction began in 1892, at which time the name of the line was changed to the Salt Lake and Los Angeles Railway to show that the company had larger plans. In 1916 the company was reorganized as the Salt Lake, Garfield and Western Railway and made the announcement that the line would be electrified, a process completed in 1919.

The Utah Idaho Central railroad began as the Ogden, Logan and Idaho Railroad. The earlier road had taken over the streetcar lines of both the Ogden Rapid Transit and the Logan Rapid Transit and completed a connection between the two by way of Brigham City in 1915. The Logan Rapid Transit had completed their line north to Preston, Idaho, in 1912. Preston remained as the northern end of a network of electric interurban railroads that spread along the Wasatch Front from Cache Valley south to Payson, at the southern end of Utah Valley. In 1910 the Salt Lake and Ogden Railroad electrified its line between those two cities. The railroad was built by Simon Bamberger and had been completed to Ogden in 1905. In 1917 the company became the Bamberger Electric Railroad.

Simon Bamberger was elected governor in 1917, as the Progressive candidate. And ironically it was the improved road and highway system that he promoted while he was in office which led to the eventual demise of the interurban railroad system in Utah. As people were better able to get around in their own cars, they were less inclined to take the electric powered trains into and between Utah's major cities. The improved road system also allowed trucking companies to become more competitive, and they gradually took the lucrative package express business away from the interurban lines. The interurban railroad companies were able to gain back some of the lost traffic by offering their own trucking services between the cities that they also served with electrified railroad service.

Two of Utah's interurban companies the Utah Idaho Central in the north and the Salt Lake and Utah in the south were able to hold on only until the late 1940s. The Bamberger ceased passenger train service in 1952, using diesel locomotives to remain in the freight business until 1958. Utah's last interurban line, the Salt Lake, Garfield and Western, is still in business today, having converted to using diesel locomotives in 1951. The line stopped running passenger trains during the early 1960s, however.

The Emigration Canyon Railroad was built in 1907 to move sandstone from quarries located in Emigration Canyon down to Salt Lake City for use as building stone. Unfortunately, the company's timing coincided with the availability of cement within the state. Since concrete is a much better building material, the market for building stone (the railroad's traffic base) virtually disappeared within a three year period between 1909 and 1912.

Streetcar lines were built in Salt Lake City, Provo, Ogden, and Logan. The line in Provo consisted of only a single line and was abandoned after being in operation for only six years from 1913 to 1919. There were six lines in Ogden, with a total length of about twenty four miles. In Logan there were three lines, totaling just over eight miles, with the longest being from the Oregon Short Line depot to the Utah State Agricultural College.

After the 1915 merger of the Ogden and Logan lines, the new Ogden, Logan and Idaho Company continued streetcar service until the respective cities began paving their streets. At that time many of its lines were removed because the company couldn't pay its share of the paving costs. The Ogden lines were sold to a separate company in 1920, and by the mid 1930s the streetcars in Ogden had been replaced by buses.

The streetcar lines in Salt Lake City were by far the most extensive in the state, beginning with those of the Salt Lake City Railroad in 1872 and the Salt Lake Rapid Transit Company in 1890. These two companies built a large network of streetcar lines throughout the city and outlying area. Other companies also were organized in the 1890s and built lines into other parts of the city. All of the lines were merged in 1901 as the Utah Light and Railway Company and again in 1914 as the Utah Light and Traction Company.

The streetcar system in Salt Lake City reached its peak in 1918 with over 146 miles of tracks, including a line south of Holladay and another line north to Centerville. Beginning in the late 1920s buses began to replace the streetcars, and slowly over the next twenty years the individual lines were abandoned. The last streetcar ran in Salt Lake City in 1946.