1/19/2024 0 Comments Golden spike 1869![]() ![]() If you arrive during one of those summer Saturday Golden Spike reenactments, you'll probably get a good seat.A Few Good Points About the Golden Spike Close The National Park Service warns visitors of "unique weather-related inconveniences" at the site, as well as "high winds, insects, heat, cold, and encounters with wildlife." And the small parking lot - only a few dozen spaces - suggests that tourist demand is rarely overwhelming. You can visit the engines in their shed, and the exhibits in the Visitor Center, and tourists sometimes lay across the empty tracks for gag photos, like silent movie damsels in distress.Īnd what of the whispers that Promontory Summit wasn't the site of America's first Transcontinental Railroad? Julie acknowledged that visitors sometimes raise that awkward subject, but "it doesn't come up very often."Īlthough the Golden Spike National Historical Park is a must-see destination for railroad and history buffs, it's still an out-of-the-way and empty place, a destination you really have to want to visit. ![]() If you arrive off-season, the site is still open - every day - although there's not much to see outdoors except for a replica of the Last Tie (and the pole). The flag-topped pole you see in the center of every tourist photo of the Golden Spike site is another replica: the hallowed Terminal Pole, whose telegraph wires alerted the world that the Golden Spike ceremony had taken place. ![]() On summer Saturdays, costumed volunteers reenact the Last Spike ceremony at around 12:47, the time that the real ceremony concluded. From May 1 to mid-October the engines chug out of their shed every morning at 10:30, take up their famous positions, then chug back indoors at four. "Some people come here thinking we actually have a rideable train," said Julie, but it's just the two locomotives and their tenders rides aren't permitted, and there's nowhere to go anyway. The plywood locomotives were demolished after the real ones arrived in 1979, although even the real ones are modern replicas the original 1869 engines were sold for scrap during the site's long years of obscurity. The real one burned up over 100 years ago. It would take a lot for our small visitor center to make sure it was protected. "Honestly," said Julie of the real Golden Spike, "we don't want it here. Meanwhile, the Transcontinental Railroad was completed with normal spikes, lumber, and sledgehammers.Ī glass case in the Visitor Center displays a "Golden Spike," but not the famous one it's a replica that flew on the Space Shuttle in 1990 (Visitors can purchase similar replicas in the gift shop). Some found their way into New York and California museums, others were lost to fires and earthquakes, and the Golden Spike itself had parts carved off and fashioned into tiny spike watch fobs for wealthy railroad men (The Visitor Center displays one, framed on a wall). Symbolic accessories were part of the "Wedding of the Rails" ceremony in 1869, including not one, but two gold spikes, a sliver spike, a gold-and-silver spike, a sliver sledgehammer, and a special "Last Tie." They shared a moment of glory on that one afternoon, then they were immediately whisked away, back to civilization. Visitor Center display of tracks and tools. "Visitors seem surprised how far out there we are," she said. "We're 32 miles from the nearest sizable town," said Supervisory Park Ranger Julie Blanchard - and the National Park Service cautions tourists to fill their tanks: it's a 55 mile round-trip between the last gas station and the Spike site. Since that brief burst of energy, the Golden Spike National Historical Park has resumed its sleepy isolation. Ten years after that, a short section of track was returned to the original rail bed and two old-fashioned steam locomotives arrived. In 1969, the government was finally shamed into paving the road and opening a Visitor Center at the site. Aside from a single, squat, cement monument, there was nothing to see except sagebrush. Few people bothered to drive the dirt road out to the Spike site. Tourists could pose with full-size plywood replicas of the two famous Golden Spike locomotives. In the late 1950s a tourist attraction, the Golden Spike Railroad Museum, opened many miles away from the Spike site, but close to the nearest highway. By 1943 even the train tracks were gone - torn up for their useful steel during World War II. (The rails actually met on May 8th 1869, the date engraved into the Spike, but the ceremony didn't join them until May 10 one of the dignitaries was delayed two days by rail workers demanding their back pay.)įor the next hundred years the Golden Spike site, despite its revered place in U.S. Locomotives with nowhere to go at Golden Spike National Historical Park. ![]()
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