The curves which have been thus saved by the new line would be sufficient to turn a train around eleven times. The power saved in moving an average freight train because of less grades would lift an average man eight thousand five hundred miles. The power saved in moving such a train because of the shorter distance would be sufficient to carry a man two hundred round trips between New York and San Francisco. The heart of Great Salt Lake is crossed by the Overland Limited by daylight. The lake covers two thousand square miles, is eighty-three miles long and fifty-one miles wide; its greatest depth is thirty feet. In every five pounds of water there is one of salt of which thirteen ounces is common salt, a density exceeded only by the Dead Sea.
Twenty-seven and a half miles of the cut-off are over the water, with roadway sixteen feet wide at the bottom and seventeen feet above the lake’s surface. The work began in June, 1902, and on November 13, 1903, the track was completed across the lake. During that time in supplying piles for trestles and subsequent fills a forest of two square miles—thirty-eight thousand two hundred and fifty-six trees—was transplanted into the waters of Great Salt Lake. Each day hundreds of carloads of gravel were poured in between the piles to make a solid pathway—sometimes more than four hundred cars in one day. The roadway is on the surface of a foot of rock ballast and beneath that a coat of asphalt upon a plank floor three inches thick, resting upon a practically indestructible substructure. For thirty-six miles there is no grade at all. The steepest grade in the one hundred and three miles is five inches to the hundred feet. The saving in the vertical feet in grades compared with the old route is fifteen hundred and fifteen feet; in degrees of curvature 3.919.
THE “OVERLAND LIMITED” CROSSING HAM’S FORK, NEAR GRANGER, WYOMING
There is something fascinating about Great Salt Lake—something in its weird, silent waters that draws you to it irresistibly. There are no words to describe the impression made when first you see it lying out there in the desert, its dense green waters reaching away to the dusky mountains that mark its farther shore. Other waters, alive, break with white crested riffles at the touch of the breeze; but these waters seem dead, and naught but the fury of a storm can break their placidity. No craft ply upon their surface, and nothing lives within them save a queer shrimp, a third of an inch long, and small flies before their wing stage; and but for the gulls, herons, and pelicans that came to the lake some time in the misty past, there would be no show of life upon its broad expanse. These same birds fly twenty miles for fresh water and food.
Over this strange sea, with no counterpart on the continent, the travelers of the world now pass. East and west the scenes of the two most majestic ranges of America spread before their eyes; but the enchantment of this ride across the lake of mystery will linger in the memory long after the beauty of mountain peak and grandeur of mountain wall shall have passed to the realm of things forgotten.
Westward from Lucin the route follows the old overland trail to the eastern base of the Sierra, across a region for half a century described in geographies as the Great American Desert.
This one-time desert is now proved to be possessed of mineral riches beyond dreams—gold, silver, copper, iron, soda, borax, sulphur, and other minerals in abundance. Agriculturally, too, the Carson Valley within the “Desert,” under Uncle Sam’s nine million dollar irrigation enterprise, is proving the worth of Nevada soil and water properly associated.
In 1833 Kit Carson and Jim Beckwith, with a few Crow Indians, crossed Nevada, and in 1846 Carson guided Fremont across it, but the Mormons were the first settlers.
