My great grandfather Robert Leonard Hunter liked trains from the time he was a little boy. In his hometown, there was a single train that ran once a week from Oakley, Idaho. When it was due, he would run out and climb on top of his family’s icehouse. There he would watch the train travel by on the rails west of their house, heralded by powerful blasts of the train’s whistle. From then on he dreamed of working on the railroad. After a short stint in the military, he worked as a fireman, shoveling coal on the old steam engines. Most of his assignments were close to home; he often moved train cars around the railway yard when he later became an engineer.
Now, over 100 years since my great grandfather’s youth, the railroad culture that he grew up with and later made a career in is slowly fading. Railroad lines fall out of use in favor of faster transportation options. Eventually, these abandoned railroad tracks will be totally reclaimed by the wilderness railways once claimed to conquer. This book is an exploration of the first thing that truly brought America together—the powerful links of work-hardened iron and steel.
The total mileage of rail networks in the United States peaked at around 254,000 miles in 1916, a little before my grandfather's childhood. It was also around this time that other modes of transportation (such as automobiles, trucks, and planes) begin to become serious competitors for railroads. By the 1970s, excessive regulations forced many railroad corporations to file for bankruptcy. These regulations were loosened by the Staggers Rail Act in the 1980s, which essentially restructured the industry and stimulated technological advancements, although the railways never returned to its previous levels of performance. Now, the railroads have declined to about 56% of the its original infrastructure. Still, the U.S. freight rail network is considered one of the most efficient railways in the world, and continues to transport coal, agricultural products, and other goods across America.
Similarly, in Utah, where the majority of these photos are taken, the peak railroad mileage was in the 1920s and has since declined to about 68% of the original infrastructure. From the initial completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 at Promontory Summit to the Great Depression in the 1930s, the railroad played a huge role in Utah’s economic development, especially with transporting coal, silver, and copper. However, as the network of highways and freeways developed across the state, the need for railroads reduced in a similar trend as with the whole United States.
