Another newspaper clipping from my Grandfather, Milo Ross. There is likely a story behind this for him, but I do not know what it is. You can see Grandpa’s handwriting and signature on it. It provides the date of 28 November 2003 from the Ogden Standard Examiner. It marked the 100th anniversary of the dedication of the Lucin Cutoff, the railroad engineering triumph that sliced across the Great Salt Lake and rewrote the map of transportation in the American West.

Milo was eighty-two years old when he clipped it. He wrote three things on it in his careful hand: his name, the date, and a small commentary on the photograph. The photograph was a reproduction of an old postcard — a locomotive steaming across open water on a trestle of wooden piles, captioned “Lucin Cut-off, Great Salt Lake, on line of Southern Pacific R.R.” Beside it Milo wrote: “The change of life. Today. Land filled.”

He had lived through both eras — the trestle and the causeway that replaced it. For Milo, this was not history. It was a landscape he had watched transform within his own lifetime.

The Engineering Miracle of Its Time

The article Milo clipped was written by Antone Clark for the Standard-Examiner. It opened this way:

It was the modern miracle of its time.

This month marks the 100-year anniversary of the dedication of the Lucin Cutoff, a railroad route that changed the face of transportation in early Utah. It was a shortcut that traversed the Great Salt Lake and spawned one of the engineering wonders of the era.

On Nov. 26, 1903, the first major rail line across the lake was dedicated, completing an epic project that took 3,000 men more than three years to complete. Historians differ on the cost of the project but estimates range from $4.5 million to $8 million.

Regardless of the cost, it was a massive undertaking. The project involved laying 103 miles of new track between Ogden and Lucin (on the Utah/Nevada border), including more than 11 miles of wooden trestle across the Great Salt Lake. The project also involved building up miles of rock and gravel through shallow lake brine in what would become a precursor to the causeway that now connects Davis County to Antelope Island.

Started in February 1902, the cutoff chopped 43 hard miles off a difficult route through the Top of Utah, taking railroad cars across the lake instead of through tough mountain passes. It officially signaled the end of rail through Promontory Summit, site of the driving of the golden spike in 1869.

“It was significant in that it was one of the incredible engineering marvels of the world,” author David Peterson said of the cutoff. Peterson spent seven years researching the cutoff for his book “Tale of the Lucin, A Boat, A Railroad, and the Great Salt Lake.”

“The reason it didn’t go down in history as more of a feat is that the railroad was going to great lengths to quiet it down,” Peterson said. Safety concerns prompted that, he said.

The article continued on an inside page:

The trestle was built of what was described as a “perfect forest of piles,” amounting to millions of timbers, most of them from Oregon. The immensity of effort resulted in an army of workers, an almost endless parade of dump rail cars and the use of 25 huge pile drivers.

Engineering challenges were compounded by trying to get fill in the lake’s bottom to settle. It was common for engineers to dump fill, only to see it sink below the water’s surface later. At one spot along the cutoff alone, more than 70,000 train-car loads of fill were used. That led to use of the trestle through a portion of the cutoff.

Even when it was completed, the problems of a sinking lake bottom did not quickly go away. In some cases, Peterson said it was not uncommon to see the trestle sink as much as 10 feet in an hour. That problem was one reason the railroad did not more widely publicize its engineering marvel. It also delayed its heavy use. The Lucin Cutoff wasn’t officially opened until Jan. 1, 1905.

Crossing the lake was an idea that early railroad engineers had considered, but cast aside as too far-fetched.

“The idea then was almost chimerical. There was neither the genius in finance bold enough to undertake such a stupendous work, nor the traffic to warrant such expenditure. It may be doubted, too, if there was engineering faith equal to the task,” the late Oscar King Davis wrote of the idea of crossing the Great Salt Lake by rail.

Time and circumstances gave more than pause to the possibility. At the beginning of the 20th century, an increasing bottleneck in rail service in the Top of Utah made the project a possibility worth the money and the undertaking.

Keyed by the vision of William Hood, Southern Pacific’s chief engineer, and the money of Edward Harriman, the project became a reality in almost warp speed for the time.

Peterson said a couple of factors changed at the turn of the century, opening the way for the project. First, improved technology brought the steam shovel into use and the attitude of railroad officials had changed.

“The engineers of that time were real aggressive. They were looking to make a name for themselves and do incredible things. It was fun,” Peterson said of the time.

Don Strack, a Utah rail historian, said the cutoff helped save an average 24 hours of transit time for Southern Pacific [and] eliminated the need for helper locomotives to traverse Utah’s mountains, increasing efficiency and profit.

The trestle remained a fixture in the lake until the 1950s when Southern Pacific decided to replace the trestle with a solid fill causeway. The causeway, built parallel to the trestle, was started in 1955 and ready for use in 1959.

The trestle’s lumber found life long after the span was out of use. Salvage of the trestle resulted in lumber being sold to numerous ventures. Several Utah businesses boast of Douglas fir from the span as part of their structures, including the Lodge at Soldier Hollow and the Desert Pearl Inn in Zion National Park. One furniture maker, ironically named Trestlewood Furniture, also claims to have used the salvage lumber in building outdoor furniture.

What It Replaced

To understand the Cutoff, you have to understand what it displaced.

The First Transcontinental Railroad had been completed at Promontory Summit on 10 May 1869 with the driving of the golden spike. The route celebrated followed a circuitous path around the north end of the lake — steep, winding, and punishing on equipment. The original alignment from Ogden to Lucin stretched 146 miles and climbed to an elevation of 700 feet above the lake.

When Edward H. Harriman took control of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1901, he initiated an improvement campaign that included the construction of the Lucin Cutoff. The existing run between the two northern Utah cities was among the least efficient parts of the First Transcontinental Railroad, involving a 1,515-foot winding climb over Promontory Point north of the Great Salt Lake.

The Lucin Cutoff made that route obsolete. Trains that had once gone north through Promontory Summit simply stopped going there. The human cost of that rerouting fell on the communities along the old alignment — Kelton, Terrace, Watercress, and the other small settlements that had grown up along the original transcontinental corridor. Without through traffic, they withered.

The savings in time and operating cost for Southern Pacific were immediate and measurable. The Cutoff reduced transit time by an average of 24 hours and eliminated the need for helper locomotives over the mountain grades entirely.

The construction itself was a logistical achievement of the first order. Frederick M. Huchel, writing in the History of Box Elder County, described the scale of it: a 127-foot long, 22-foot wide steamer, The Promontory, carried supplies and assisted with construction work on the lake. Construction occurred simultaneously at both sides of the lake and both sides of Promontory Point in the middle. Workers drove five piles every fifteen feet, in bents of five piles each for the main roadway. A good day’s work for a pile driver crew was seventy-five piles — five bents. Men worked in ten-hour shifts, day and night, Sundays and holidays, housed in boarding-houses built on platforms raised on piles above the water. They paid four dollars a week for their board. No liquor was allowed; packages coming out to workers were searched, and anything found was confiscated.

In all, 38,256 trees were cut down to make piles for the great trestle — a forest of two square miles transplanted into Great Salt Lake. Two million board feet of redwood decking were used for the actual railbed. Just the portion of the trestle above the waterline contained enough wood to lay a boardwalk four feet wide from Boston to Buffalo.

The lakebed offered no easy foundation. It ranged in hardness from gypsum-crusted sections so hard that pile-drivers could not force a timber through, to places where the bottom was more than fifty feet of soft mud where single piles disappeared out of sight and had to be spliced, lashed, and braced together. On 24 March 1903 a trial run ended with a locomotive sitting in two feet of water, still on its rails, after an embankment settled beneath it.

Freight trains began using the cutoff on 6 March 1904 and passenger trains began crossing six months later on 18 September 1904. But the Cutoff did not officially open for full service until 1 January 1905.

The Change of Life

Milo Ross was born on 4 February 1921, seventeen years after the trestle opened. As a young man he worked the winter salt harvest at Promontory with his uncle Ed Sharp — shoveling in ten-hour shifts at the edge of the lake, in the country the Cutoff had transformed. He knew the trestle world, or its near memory. The trains of his youth crossed the lake on wood and water.

Then, in the 1950s, it changed. Southern Pacific decided to replace the trestle with a solid fill causeway. The causeway was built parallel to the old trestle, started in 1955 and ready for use in 1959, at a cost of $50 million. The earthen causeway, nearly 12 miles long, effectively divided the lake in two — a consequence that would reshape the ecology of the Great Salt Lake for generations. The two original culverts were closed by Union Pacific in 2012 and 2013 due to concerns over the sinking of the causeway into the lakebed, and a new 180-foot culvert and bridge were opened on 1 December 2016.

The trestle’s lumber did not go to waste. Trestlewood Furniture — named with some irony — salvaged and marketed the old Douglas fir. In 1993 an Idaho construction firm purchased rights to the Cutoff and has been salvaging, remanufacturing, and marketing the wood ever since. Pieces of that forest of piles, hauled from Oregon and driven into the bed of the Great Salt Lake at the turn of the twentieth century, ended up in a lodge at Soldier Hollow and a hotel in Zion National Park.

Milo clipped the centennial article in the autumn of 2003. He wrote his name at the top. He wrote the date. And beside the old postcard of the locomotive on the trestle, he wrote: “The change of life. Today. Land filled.”

Three phrases. The trestle he had known. The causeway that replaced it. The landscape, permanently altered. He had watched it all happen.

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The Standard-Examiner articles from 28 November 2003 were written by Antone Clark and are reproduced here for family historical purposes. Additional historical context drawn from Frederick M. Huchel’s essay in the History of Box Elder County (published at historytogo.utah.gov) and other public sources.