#Rusty lake hotel red wine not there free#
Previously, the open structure of the trestle allowed for the free mixing of brine water between the north and south arms of the lake. By the early 1950s, when maintenance costs became too high for the railroad company, the trestle was dismantled and replaced by a solid rock-fill causeway.
Maintaining the trestle proved to be just as costly. Just the portion of the trestle above the waterline contained enough wood to lay a board-walk four feet wide from Boston to Buffalo. In addition, 2 million board feet of redwood decking were used for the actual railbed. Altogether, more than 38,000 trees were cut down to make piles for the trestle. Not only a huge mountain of earth and rock have to be blasted, excavated, and hauled, along the twenty-two mile length of the causeway, a huge forest of trees - two square miles in area - had to leveled. Building this thing was a herculean project. The railroad causeway consisted of two earth and rock-fill embankments, one extending eastward into the lake from Lakeside and the other extending westward from Promontory Point, with a 12-mile open, wooden trestle in between. Satellite photo of the Great Salt Lake shows the difference in colors between the Northern and Southern portions of the lake, the result of a railroad causeway. Called the Lucin Cutoff, it reduced the distance of the railway by 42 miles (68 km). Thirty five years later, in 1904, the Southern Pacific Railroad created a shorter route of lesser grade and curvature directly across the lake. This route, called the Central Pacific Railroad, traversed the difficult mountain from Lucin, around the north end of the lake to Brigham City, and then southward to Ogden. Initially, the railroad tracks were laid around the lake over the Promontory Mountains on the north, where on May 10, 1869, a golden spike was driven to mark completion of the first transcontinental railroad. When the North American transcontinental railroad was being laid down during the 1860s, the engineers faced a big obstacle in the state of Utah – a great body of water, 4,400 square km in area, called the Great Salt Lake.