On the drive into the Site, we stopped at the first marker, where Jo cranked up her camera, you can see that there is not much in this area of Utah,the mountains are the North Promontory Mountains. Congress declared the meeting place to be Promontory Summit, on May 10,1869, two locomotives - Central Pacific's Jupiter and Union Pacific's No. 119 - pulled up to the one-rail gap left in the track. After a golden spike was symbolically tapped, a final iron spike was driven to connect the railroads. Central Pacific had laid 690 miles of track, Union Pacific 1,086.
Just wanted to show some more of rugged terrain.
The drive in from the main road to the visitors center was beautiful in a rugged sense.
In the background you can see some of the rock formations the crews had to blast or go around.
As you can see we had a beautiful clear day, we were climbing in elevation so we could see for miles
The railroad companies were restricted to no more than a two percent grade, which crossing mountains can be a real challenge, to work that the survey crews were 200 miles out front of the crews laying the tracks. The joining of the two tracks was a pretty amazing feat for that era.
We drove along one of the old railroad beds, again we could see a long ways.
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