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Bridge: A Railroading Community on the Great Salt Lake
The telegrapher's shack at Bridge, Utah, which featured an outhouse that hung over the water. Note semaphore to signal trains. Also note dead pelicans on shore in foreground. Undernourished birds were too weak to fly when they became crusted with salt. —
USHS
Bridge: A Railroading Community on the Great Salt Lake
BY DORIS R. DANT
The community of Bridge was built not where people would clamor to live but where it was needed—atop the eastern end of the fill forming part of the bed for the train tracks traversing the Great Salt Lake. On top of huge twenty-ton boulders sloping down on two sides to the water there was room for two tracks, a telegraph station on their north side, an old boxcar on one side of it, one or two thrown-together shacks on the other side of it in good years, a water cistern, and a semaphore signal. Actually there was not even that much room, as the shacks hung out over the sides and had to be supported by pilings, and the community outhouse rested upon pilings right in the lake. There were no trees and no flowers and only occasional bands of marauding mice. If you walked along the tracks inland to the shore, there was still little sign of life—just glittering salt and, in season, dead or dying pelicans.
As Bridge was one-fourth of a mile to a mile away from the shore and (if you could bump across the rough terrain in a car) fifty to eighty miles from the nearest city of Odgen, accessibility was ordinarily limited to train traffic. 1 Even on a train you would have to travel about thirty miles.
Bridge was home to various telegraphers for fifteen years. One of them, a Mr. Pratt, applied in 1941 at Southern Pacific in Ogden for a telegrapher’s position. A typical boomer, or railroader who frequently changed both jobs and locale, Pratt traveled lightly, even more so because he had always worked in eastern railroad stations that were adjoined by towns with hotels. Nothing in his experience had prepared him for Bridge, his new assignment, and no one in Ogden warned him. Carrying no food and no bedding, Pratt arrived in Bridge only to learn that there were no hotels, no restaurants, no stores, and no immediate means of reaching those in Ogden. The kindness of the other two inhabitants saved him from cold and hunger, 2 but he could not escape the stark isolation, poor accommodations, and total dependency on the railroad that formed much of the life at Bridge.
The foundation of Bridge was literally built during the construction of the Lucin Cutoff. In 1901 a general revamping of the Southern Pacific lines was begun. One of the major projects discussed was rerouting the lines that ran from Ogden up through Promontory, around the north shore of the Great Salt Lake, and over to Lucin. William Hood, chief engineer for SP, had always dreamed of routing the lines straight across the lake. When he proposed that his dream become reality, several objections were raised, the most relevant being that the severe storms on the lake would wash away part of the fill and damage the structural integrity of the trestle and that the lake, which was at its lowest level since 1873, would rise again and engulf both fill and trestle. 3
Nevertheless, a change was badly needed. The proposed cutoff would shorten the distance by forty-three miles and thus save time. (After the cutoff was built, it saved twenty-one to twenty-seven hours per trip.) Even more important, it would eliminate sharp curves and steep grades of up to 2.2 percent, which required three locomotives for freight trains and two for just one-half or one-third of a passenger train. 4
Hood’s proposal was adopted and construction began in March 1902. The cutoff was designed to use fill as much as possible and then a trestle in the deeper part of the lake. In the area where Bridge was eventually built, a temporary trestle was constructed to support a track for the trains that transported fill material to the dump site. This trestle (and the other temporary trestles) were constructed by establishing stations at each mile end of the route and setting two pile-drivers to work back to back. The workmen were quartered right on the site “well out of the way of storm-waves” in a boarding house resting on a platform supported by piles. For this privilege the men paid four dollars a week each, but supplies and cooks were free. (Two camps, Camp 10, later renamed Colin, and Camp 20, situated on the permanent trestle and later known as Midlake, will be referred to again.) 5
Working in ten-hour shifts around the clock and with no days off, the men would drive four seventy-foot piles, then move down the route fifteen feet to drive four more. A total of twenty-five piles was considered a good day’s work. The progress would be much slower either at this side of the western arm of the lake or at the other side when the 3,200-pound hammers could drive a pile only a few inches. Sometimes, when the pile was already thirty to forty feet deep, it would rebound two or three feet after being struck. Then a hole had to be steamblasted. 6
The men had to live at their stations until their work was completed. There was no store available and no bar. In fact, liquor was strictly forbidden. Even the packages from home and the supplies were searched for contraband, and any found was forfeited. Thus even the excitement provided by drunken brawls was largely missing. 7
After the piles were driven, capped with a heavy beam, and connected by the stringers (big timbers laid parallel to the track), and the temporary track built, trains started backing out to the dumpsite with the fill materials. At first, gravel and dirt were used, but the lake floated those materials away; so huge multi-ton rocks were used that in turn were “swallowed up.” Dumping continued, however, until the fill started building up; then the finer materials were resorted to again. When the fill was completed, it was twenty feet wide at the top and sixteen or seventeen feet above the water. 8
The Lucin Cutoff with its twelve miles of permanent trestle, 2.5 miles of fill at the Promontory Point end, and 5.1 miles of fill at the opposite end, was opened to freight traffic on March 8, 1904, despite continuing problems with the fill sinking. Passenger traffic began on September 18, 1904. Across the lake, the trains traveled on a straight track boasted of as “more nearly level than an ordinary floor.” 9
Two-directional traffic was handled safely on the single track through the implementation of telegraph stations to direct a train to one of the frequent, mile-long sidings, two of which were at Colin and Midlake. The three telegraph stations primarily responsible for handling traffic over the trestle were Promontory Point on the east, Midlake, and Lakeside on the west. 10
Due to the demands placed on the railroads during World War I and the resulting congestion, the government took over control of Southern Pacific and the other railroads in December 1917 and did not return them to private control until March 1920. In that same year Ernest L. King was sent to supervise the Odgen Division. By then the lake had risen and continued to rise until in 1924 it was nine feet above the level of 1902. King found that storms would damage the fill on both ends of the trestle, just as had been feared in 1901. High winds would create waves up to eight feet high and dash the heavy water (seventy-six pounds per cubic foot) against the fill and roll away large rocks, sometimes enough of them that the track on the north side could not be used. He had rocks averaging twenty tons dumped over the sides, starting thirty feet from the track, and gradually sloped the fill upwards—thus the huge boulders found at Bridge. Also several major repairs were made to the trestle during 1920–27. 11
In 1929 the double tracks were extended west from the station of Promontory Point to the beginning of the trestle. That change meant that the controlling telegraph station should also be moved further west. Accordingly, in June 1930 a new station was built on the fill about one-half mile east of the trestle. The station was named Bridge because it was near the end of the trestle, which was usually called The Bridge. Bridge became the only station between Ogden and Lakeside; Promontory Point, which had had an agent and two telegraphers, and Midlake were both abolished. 12
Two of the men at Promontory Point chose to transfer to Bridge, one of them, the agent Al Holiday, because his family was in Ogden. He moved to an outfit car (a boxcar fixed up as living quarters) on a spur at Saline, where his family visited him on weekends. The other man, one of the telegraphers (a Mr. Compton), briefly worked first trick (the 8 A.M. to 4 P.M. shift) at Bridge, then became ill. He was replaced by Jack Dockter. Jack, who had started working for Southern Pacific in 1929, was sent to Bridge because he was still on extra board. The extra board was composed of men who lacked the seniority to bid into a regular job; they were moved around the various stations either to fill in for operators who were ill or on vacation or to open up new or closed areas. Jack, too, lived at Saline until an outfit car and a cistern (for the domestic water supply) were moved to Bridge later in the summer. Then, because he was on first trick, he had first choice of housing. The third trick (midnight to 8 A.M.) was manned by L. P. Affleck, who also lived at Saline. 13
Of the first summer at Bridge, Jack remembered primarily the “big ballast rocks and the big black spiders in the office.” He remembered, too, that the water was almost up to Saline (the lake was at 4,200 feet that year) and that big storms would push the waves up the fill and over the tracks. When things dried off, the rails would be white and the office windows so coated with salt he could hardly see out of them. 14
The operators at Bridge were kept busy not only with the usual volume of passenger and freight traffic but also with trains pulling “reefers,” refrigerator cars shipped from California to the Chicago markets by Pacific Fruit Express, a subsidiary jointly owned by Southern Pacific and Union Pacific. When the harvest was over, the remaining volume of train traffic did not justify keeping telegraphers at Bridge, so it was closed the first of November. The pattern of heaviest traffic being from August to November held for much of the 1930s, because before the war, agricultural products were “one of the largest items in Southern Pacific traffic.” 15
Jack returned to Bridge in the winter of 1932. This time he worked second trick and lived at Saline with the signal maintainer for Promontory Point. The other tricks were manned by Carl Reynolds and Eric Wilson, the latter being one of the telegraphers at Promontory Point before that station was abolished. Wilson lived at Camp 10 in an outfit car. 16
By 1937 when Jack returned to Bridge, passenger traffic had so diminished that although Southern Pacific had restored all the “popular pre-depression trains,” the freight and passenger totals still did not reach the 1929 totals. Therefore, only the first two tricks were manned, John Reid sharing the duties. 17
This summer was more “exciting.” At Saline lived Louie Gabrielli and Bob Goodnell, both bridge inspectors, whose duties included traveling in a motor launch up the south side of the trestle to Lakeside and back via the north side. Louie had Jack shoot cottontails for them and reciprocated by cooking the rabbits and Italian food. By then the lake had receded to or below the 1902 level, so the shore was not as far away. Jack found, however, that he could not walk there too long, for the brilliant salty ground would blind him. The station closed as usual in November, so Jack, who was still on extra board, was sent off to do relief work; but he returned again to man the station alone during the harvest season in 1939.
That August and September Jack witnessed a phenomenon that had been noted since at least 1935—pelicans coated with salt sitting upon the shoreline too weak to fly. Because Utah Lake and Great Salt Lake were very low and supported too few fish, the birds were undernourished. When they landed on the supersaturated waters of the Great Salt Lake, an “immense weight of salt” crystallized on them. The birds helplessly floated on the lake until death or were washed upon the shore. Somehow Ward Armstrong, who owned a sporting goods store in Ogden and was affiliated with the fish and game department, heard about the pelicans and told Jack to bang them over the head with a baseball bat. (A couple who lived at Bridge in August 1941 were amazed by the great number of “dead ducks and other birds or their bones on the shore.”) 18
Dead pelicans were a common sight in the late 1930s when the level of the Great Salt Lake was low. Examining a dead bird in September 1939 were, left to right, Ward Armstrong, Gordon Campbell, an unidentified man, and Jack Dockter. —
USHS
Jack was able to bid into the job at Bridge in May 1940. He had married; his wife was living in Ogden and he wanted to be close by. This year the station did not close down in November as usual. Because of the war in Europe and the resulting bulge in defense shipping “in the closing months of that year, traffic began increasing so rapidly that the ton-miles of freight carried in 1940 were the greatest in its [Southern Pacific’s] history up to that time.” Jack stayed on alone over the winter, working a shift that went from 5:25 to 10:25 A.M. and from 11:25 A.M. to 3:25 P.M. Before he left at the end of June he was joined for a time by Sy Napper. 19
Sy had already been on the railroad at that time one or two years, so he was able to bid into the job at Bridge. He was there a short while before he was joined by his wife Lydia. A new man, Farrel Ross, arrived August 10. Farrel had taken a telegrapher class offered by Southern Pacific at Weber College but was not offered a job on the extra board until two months later, when he was sent to the San Joaquin Division. He worked three days at one job, ten at another in a different location, and three at still another. Then some boomers came who were hired because they had more experience. Out of work and out of money, Farrel called his former instructor, Mr. Beasley, who was a telegrapher at Ogden. Beasley told him to return, as the Salt Lake Division was now hiring. Farrel was sent to open up another trick at Bridge and a railroad shack was moved to Bridge to house him. His wife Delia stayed with her parents in Pleasant Grove until there was enough money for her to join him (ten days later). The Nappers left before she arrived and were replaced by Earl Wood, who had bid into the job and brought his wife Jean; he was in turn replaced by the boomer Pratt, who did not stay long. 20
The type of recreation and the degree of socializing at Bridge were obviously influenced by the level of the lake and the amount of train traffic. However, the tenor of life there was influenced in other ways, one of them being, of course, the nature of the telegraphers’ duties.
The duties were shaped by the demands the single track across the trestle placed upon traffic control. When both an eastbound train and a westbound train approached the trestle, they were issued either a “meet” or a “wait.” When the dispatcher in Ogden, who already knew what speed the trains would be traveling, also knew exactly where the trains were, he would “put out a meet.” If, for example, the operator at Lakeside was “copying orders” for train #576 and the one at Bridge was copying orders for #3769, the order might read: “Extra #3769 take siding and meet #576 at Midlake.” Probably neither train would be five minutes off schedule. If, however, the movement of the trains was more uncertain, a wait would be issued: “Extra #3769 wait at Colin until 5:30 P.M. for #576.” Sometimes the westbound train might wait fifteen to thirty minutes for the other train to come by. Most of the orders issued were meets and waits. 21
The trains classified as “inferior” were the ones that had to do the waiting. The “drags,” or trains pulling empty cars, had no right of way over any other train. Next up the scale of importance was usually the westbound freight train when paired with an eastbound freight. Even more superior was the fruit (a generic term for agricultural produce) train or a “hotshot manifest” (a train carrying a very wide variety of manufactured goods). The most superior were passenger trains, and of them the streamliner was at the top of the list. 22
Usually action was initiated by the dispatcher, who would telephone (unless the phone lines were down, in which case he would telegraph) a train’s orders to the telegrapher. The telegrapher would copy them, repeat them back to the dispatcher, and never change a word after doing so. Then when he sighted the train (or sometimes when he was certain the train was due), he called the dispatcher for a “clearance.” (The clearance gave the train permission to pass the station; without it the train would have to stop.) Sometimes the dispatcher would then have another order; then the operator had to work more rapidly than usual to fasten one copy each of both the orders and the clearance to two “hoops.” (The hoop was a bamboo pole with four and a half feet of its length used as a handle and its other end bent into an eighteen-inch circle. The papers were held in place by a clothespin-type clip.) Then the operator would take his lantern or turn on the floodlight if it was dark and stand about four and a half feet from the track to wait for the fireman to run his arm through the hoop, take off the papers, and throw the hoop down by the track. The procedure was repeated for the conductor at the end of the train. 23
Although the trains passing Bridge had slowed down—speeds of 30 mph for passenger trains and 20 for freight trains were the maximum on the trestle—passing the hoop was still challenging. The train would blow dust and steam all over the operator, a strong wind would make him feel he was about to be blown over, he had to hold the hoop tight enough so the wind would not blow it away or twist it but loose enough so that he would not pull the receiver off the train, and he had to release it at just the right moment. The sight and logistics would awe visitors from the salt mines at Saline. 24
As both ends of the train had to receive a clearance so each would know what was happening, if either man missed the hoop, he would have to stop the train and come back to the office for another one. The stop would ruin all the schedules. No such occurrences were reported for Bridge, but one of the operators, Sy Napper, did receive demerits at another station for such a mishap. 25
After the train passed, the operator had to “O. S. the train.” That means that he had to call the dispatcher to report that the train had passed at such and such a time. O. S. stood for “on the sheet,” referring to the sheet on which the dispatcher noted the information. Then, his duties over, the telegrapher could “go back to sleep.” One informant made the latter comment half jokingly. Actually, he received ten demerits at another station for falling asleep and not clearing the board before the train stopped. 26
If the train had no orders, the procedure was simpler but carried its own challenge. During the hours the office was open, the semaphore was kept in the “stop” position (both arms were in a horizontal position or the red light was on). A train could not proceed unless it saw the semaphore changed to the “proceed” position (the right arm dropped to a 45° angle or the green light was turned on) or unless it received a clearance from the telegrapher. Thus when the train was where it could see the signal, the operator “cleared the board” (dropped the arm), and the train would continue, knowing that it had nothing to pick up. The challenge was to pull the lever on the control board neither so soon that the train was too far away to see the change nor so late that the train stopped. The air at Bridge was so clear that, until an operator became used to it, a train’s headlights looked much closer than they actually were and the operator might change the semaphore too soon. Such a misjudgment was made by Farrel Ross, who, when the train stopped, had to call his dispatcher to report he needed a clearance for a train he had stopped. Fortunately he was not given any demerits, probably because the train was not an important one. 27
The experienced operator felt no pressure in carrying out these responsibilities, unless it was to stay awake during those frequent times when there was nothing to do. Everything was routine to him. But the inexperienced operators, such as Sy and Farrel, did feel the pressure of doing the job properly so that they would not receive demerits from stopping a train. Receiving too many demerits meant that an operator would be fired; in those days jobs were considered too precious to risk. At first, Farrel would wake up from a sound sleep in bed and “reach for the board,” afraid that he had not given the proceed signal to an approaching train. 28
The most dramatic example of what the pressure did to those at Bridge was recorded by Delia Ross:
The equipment provided at the Bridge office was minimal and old-fashioned. Ordinarily, when the number of messages did not warrant a teletype, a typewriter was provided. Such was not the case here. Southern Pacific just tested the operators for legible handwriting. Furthermore, although keys had been available for decades that allowed messages to be sent simultaneously on the same wire in each direction, only the standard single-use key was furnished. Thus if Bridge opened its key, Lakeside could not send until that key was closed. Also all the operators down the line could hear any message sent out. A key, called the bug, which allowed more rapid transmission of messages, was in use at other locations in the country but not at Bridge. Jack Dockter did add his own improvement—a tobacco can placed so that it touched the brass of the key’s sounder and made the sound clearer and louder. 30
Farrel L. Ross taking a break from his telegrapher duties at Bridge. Swimming, walking, and watching the sunsets were other leisure activities. —
USHS
The wages of those at Bridge were considered quite satisfactory. Jack Dockter, for instance, was paid in 1930 at 63¾ cents an hour, or $5.50 a day with only one monthly deduction—50 cents for the company hospital in San Francisco. By 1940 he was making 75 cents an hour. Farrel Ross started out at Bridge with 73 cents an hour. Both men belonged to the Order of Railroad Telegraphers, and that union negotiated their raises. The main perquisite offered was a pass for the family on some of the company passenger trains; exactly which trains a person could ride depended upon the operator’s seniority. 31
These were the compensations for working eight hours a day seven days a week at straight time. Overtime was paid only when no one was on duty when a train was late and another train was coming from Lakeside or for some other reason an order was needed. Then the dispatcher phoned an operator at his quarters, sometimes at three or four in the morning. To pass the orders, the operator received time and a half for one hour’s work even though he actually worked only fifteen minutes. No vacations were given until sufficient seniority had built up, and an operator had to remain on the job unless he arranged for a relief operator in advance, which is what Jack had to do when his first daughter was born. If an operator had a wife in Ogden, as Jack did, he could visit her only by catching a train and riding in a boxcar or whatever was available when his shift was over, visiting her for the next few hours, and returning in time to start working again. The same practice had to be followed for any type of necessary excursion. 32
Such an occasion arose when Farrel wore holes through the soles of his shoes. After finishing his night shift, he walked to the beginning of the trestle and gave the engineer of a freight train the pickup sign. The train, which was already traveling slowly, slowed even more to allow Farrel to jump into a gondola. In such style he rode into Ogden to make the necessary purchases. Pratt, whom they called Chillicothe Ohio, figured out which train Farrel would return on, and left the semaphore in the stop position. Farrel got out of the train right in front of his house. Unlike the others, Pratt did not worry about being fired. He was a boomer. 33
Push-pull type handcars were available for shorter trips. Sy Napper would transport his wife on one to Saline once a week. There she would catch a train and travel to Ogden to do her wash, pick up the mail, and buy supplies. She would ride back on a passenger train that would stop at Saline, and Sy would meet her with the handcar. After his wife gave Farrel a butch haircut which stuck up two inches all around, he would ride the handcar to the shore for a cut from one of the men working there. Other times the handcar would be used just for fun. 34
As the U. S. Postal Service did not service Bridge, mail was sent with the conductor of any train that had stopped, frequently the “local” (see below), or sent with the signal maintainer who had his own track-riding motorcar. Mail sent to Bridge was bundled together with the company mail and thrown off at the station as the train passed. 35
The local was a short supply train sent weekly from Ogden to pick up empty cars, deliver freight, do some switching, and pull a water tank for filling the cisterns of Bridge and other stations that did not have a local water supply. The residents of Bridge would order supplies from an Ogden grocery store (the Nicholas Grocery on 25th Street and the American Food Store were two such stores), and the local would deliver them free of charge. (Bridge residents had free billing on any freight that came out.) The local also provided the fuel for the community’s stoves. 36
Of course this arrangement, coupled with the fact that those on extra board were limited to six pieces of luggage for carrying all their belongings—bedding, clothes, food, dishes, cooking utensils, and any luxury items such as radios—and that they might be transferred at any time with little notice, meant that they had to calculate their food supply so that it stretched through the week with little left over.
If they ran out, they had no food until the local returned. 37
Two other limitations on their food supply arose from the lack of refrigerators (or even ice boxes) and of cooking stoves at Bridge. Ice was kept in an ice cellar at Saline. Either the section gang would bring fifty pound blocks of it to Bridge or an operator would use the handcar to get the ice. The ice was kept in a covered box, and there they stored perishables; but the fresh items still had to be eaten the first couple of days, and the bread soon turned moldy. Thus they ate food that did not spoil quickly, the type depending on their budget. Being limited to pot-bellied stoves, which had no ovens and had the source of heat far from the top, meant that only foods that could be slowly boiled or fried could be cooked. 38
As already noted, housing was of two types, outfit cars and shacks (that was a common name for them). The outfit car was partially divided into two rooms—the kitchen in front and the bedroom in back. Lydia Napper recalled that the boxcar’s condition was such that “I would start sweeping the floor and by the time I got across the floor, there wasn’t any dirt left because it would all go down between the cracks.” 39 It was a “yucky” green inside and red outside (standard colors for outfit cars) and sparsely furnished, “just makeshift,” with a built-in counter on one side, a bed, a table, and a bench to sit on. 40 When Sy Napper arrived, there was not even a bed. He had to pull the springs of an old iron bed out of the lake and make a mattress out of an old rug. Orange crates served as cupboards. 41
The shack was described as
Living in a house that hung over the lake was somewhat scary, according to Delia, when the wind would blow so hard that the waves almost reached the tracks — and the house. 43
The wind also caused a problem when the outhouse was used. The outhouse was a twoseater located behind the station on a platform placed right over the lake and up quite a distance from the water. The outhouse of course had no bottom. More than one resident noticed that “using that facility was a real chore sometimes if the wind blew very hard because of the terrific updraft.” 44
Life at Bridge was not all trial and tribulation, however. There were several sources of recreation. The conductors of passenger trains would bundle up all the discarded newspapers and magazines and throw them off at Bridge almost daily. Such contact with the outside world was much appreciated. The residents could swim in the lake by the side of the fill opposite that of the outhouse, then shower off under the tap on the cistern. They took walks in both directions of the fill. Jack Dockter said that on some of his long walks, “I used to talk to myself quite a lot. And a lot of times I’d answer myself, too.” The sunsets and their reflections on the lake were striking. There was socializing with each other and with the section gang or the signal maintainer, who stopped by occasionally for a few minutes. Sometimes there were visitors from Saline, and the conductors always waved; among the railroaders there was a special camaraderie. 45
Sy Napper, left, and an unidentified man on a handcar at Bridge, Utah. —
USHS
Obviously those at Bridge were very dependent upon the railroad, which had to supply literally all of Bridge’s needs. As Farrel Ross put it, “You were totally at the mercy of the railroad.” 46 Nevertheless, not one of those interviewed expressed bitterness or resentment. Instead, gratitude was the common sentiment, as shown in the following comments from the interviews.
Arlene Dockter: “We were glad to have a job.”
Jack Dockter: We were comfortable. We were happy with what we had because when we had to move we didn’t have a lot of stuff to move.”
Lydia Napper: “Just being married it was kind of like a vacation. With the swimming it was like a picnic.
Delia Ross: “We were just married. It was just like a honeymoon. It was nice just to be the two of you together. . . . Because this time followed the depression, we had to take things as they were, and we weren’t used to a lot.”
Farrel Ross: “We were pretty happy to have a job. . . . I was paid twice what my father ever made.”
When it came, the transfer was done in typical railroad fashion. Use of the telephone was allowed for orders only, never for personal calls or messages (anything that did not pertain to train movement). Thus Ogden would tap “B” (for Bridge) over and over on the telegraph until “B” answered. Then the orders for an employee to catch a certain train and report to a particular shift elsewhere were given. 47
The amount of notice depended upon when the operator finished his current shift, when the new shift began, and when a connecting train would be available. Usually only a few hours were allowed for packing. When asked how much notice was usually given, Jack Dockter erupted, “No notice!” Close to the end of one shift, he would receive the transfer from the dispatcher. There would be just enough time to roll up his bedroll, throw a few things into a cardboard box and catch a train. He would arrive at the new site with maybe three hours left before the new shift and use the time to lie on a “hard bench” and “get a few naps.” The Rosses were given four hours’ notice to leave Bridge when they were transferred at end of September 1941. 48
With the war and the abandonment of the Panama Canal for shipping came a tremendous increase in the tonnage carried by Southern Pacific, up from almost 53 million in 1940 to over 66 million in 1941 and almost 70 million in 1942. More traffic meant more trains, which meant that more meets and waits had to be issued. Stations were brought up to full coverage, and 700 new stations were added to the Southern Pacific system. One of those was at Midlake. A third trick was added to Bridge in the fall of 1941. 49
Bridge’s days, in fact the days of the telegrapher, were numbered, however. “Twilight for Men of Morse” proclaimed one article in 1943. The FCC required radio service on all railroads by December 31, 1945, for communications train to train, conductor to engineer, and dispatcher to train. 50
Also in 1945 central traffic control was installed in Ogden to handle traffic from Bridge to Lucin. This system used coded electrical pulses that were sent along the tracks and interrupted when a train was on the rails. This information was shown by lights on the big control board in Ogden and by pens that automatically charted the progress of the trains and recorded the times they passed each siding. Furthermore, with the CTC board the dispatcher could send coded impulses to change signals and to switch trains to sidings. Lights would tell him if the change had been made.
A telegrapher was no longer needed to change the semaphore and to pass hand-written orders and messages to the engineer and the conductor. Thus toward the end of 1945, Bridge was abandoned, and its buildings moved. 51
Postscript: Bridge, an Extreme Example of Railroad Control
By Doris R. Dant
As a child, I relished the stories my parents told about their time on the railroad in the early 1940s. “Their time” is an odd phrase, now that I think about it. My father was the only railroad employee of the two, but that is how they described those years, perhaps because the railroad set much of the bounds and content of life for both of them—where they lived, how much they could keep, how their homes were furnished, when they moved, who they associated with, when they could sleep, how they traveled, how they communicated with the world, and why my father was not overseas fighting the Axis powers.
This degree of corporate control engendered a level of privation and confinement that was totally alien to me, a child from a nice home who was free to roam. It was this inconceivable nature of my parents’ railroad life that so captivated me. And of all their stories, those about their time living on the Great Salt Lake in Bridge seemed the most improbable.
In high school I drew upon my parents’ railroad stories as subject matter for short essays. But I never wrote about Bridge. It loomed too fantastic to capture in two to three pages. Plus, a typewriter was too constraining. Not until I purchased my first computer in 1984 did I feel free to write—and edit—at greater length. An aunt told me about the Utah State Historical Society conference that summer. Believing I should interview my parents before they grew any older, I submitted a proposal that was accepted, and I embarked on a whirlwind of research. “Bridge: A Railroading Community on the Great Salt Lake” is the result.
Rereading “Bridge” immerses me yet again in the issues of control and fear. The railroad’s control over its extra board hires—those men lacking sufficient seniority to have any say over their working conditions—was so pervasive and invasive that I can comprehend a man’s gratitude for such work only by placing it in the context of the Depression. Coming out of a period of deprivation, high unemployment, and financial fear, men like Farrel Ross, Jack Dockter, and Sy Napper, who are featured in this article, were accustomed to hardship and long hours of demanding physical labor. A telegrapher job in an office at an hourly wage instead of one dollar a day was indeed a blessing on multiple fronts. But the Depression fears also explain why these men and their wives would sacrifice whatever was necessary—living together, for instance—or silently endure injuries so that the men could keep their jobs. I wish I could return to my informants and explore the issue of fear.
If I were to rewrite this article, I would not only mention the Depression but would also place this control in the larger social context of the long-standing struggle for better treatment of workers. The men belonged to the Order of Railroad Telegraphers, which apparently limited its negotiations to better wages and eight-hour workdays. The railroads could still transfer extra board employees with at most only a few hours’ notice, expect them to work immediately after a transfer even if they had little time to sleep, require seven-day work weeks with no vacations, provide very primitive living conditions, and limit one’s total belongings to six pieces of luggage, including bedding, food, and cooking and cleaning utensils. In the case of Bridge and other isolated posts, the railroad also controlled access to food, fuel, water, and mail.
Although the extra board workers were moved around, their circumstances in isolated Western telegraph stations nevertheless beg a comparison with miners in a company mining town. The extra board did not risk debt bondage, as did miners in some towns, and they had the expectation of their situation improving once they had built up sufficient seniority, but the restrictions on living and work conditions bear some similarities. They are telling examples of the continuing tension between company and worker over what is withheld, what is provided, and what is demanded and of how isolation and dependency can worsen the conditions in which a worker functions.
Now for the rest of the story. Not only does Bridge no longer exist, but the trestle on the Lucin Cutoff that Bridge served is also gone. A dirt and rock causeway for train traffic crossing the Great Salt Lake was completed in 1959, making the trestle superfluous. Since the 1990s, the trestle itself has been systematically dismantled by Trestlewood, a Utah company that sells the salt-impregnated wood.
Lakeside, on the western end of the cutoff, is now a military restricted area. Lucin, basically a ghost town, has one inhabitant, Ivo Zdarsky, famed for flying over the Iron Curtain to freedom in a homemade aircraft. The fates of these towns and of Bridge are similar to those of other former isolated telegraph stations in the West. Parren, Nevada, a prime example, consists of just scattered refuse and a few foundations in Nevada’s forty-mile desert. With the passing of these stations, railroad workers have been freed of the necessity of being so completely at the mercy of their company.
—Notes
1 Interviews with Farrel Ross, Oakland, California, July 12 and August 14, 1984; interviews with Jack Dockter, Ogden, Utah, August 8–10, 1984.
2 Ross interview.
3 Oscar King Davis, “The Lucin Cut-off: A Remarkable Feat of Engineering across the Great Salt Lake on Embankment and Trestle,” Century 71 (January 1906): 460– 65; Deon C. Greer, et al., Atlas of Utah (Odgen and Provo, UT: Weber State College and Brigham Young University Press, 1981), 45. All the references to specific lake levels are to this page.
4 Davis, “The Lucin Cut-off,” 460, 468; J. E. Newby, “Great Salt Lake Railroad Crossing,” Great Salt Lake: A Scientific, Historical and Economic Overview, ed. J. Wallace Gwynn, Utah Department of Natural Resources Bulletin 116, June 1980, 393.
5 Davis, “The Lucin Cut-off,” 462–63; Dockter interviews; Neill C. Wilson and Frank J. Taylor, Southern Pacific: The Roaring History of a Fighting Railroad (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1952), 111.
6 Davis, “The Lucin Cut-off,” 464–66.
7 Ibid., 465.
8 Charles S. Fee, Great Salt Lake Cut-off: Going to Sea by Rail (San Francisco: Southern Pacific, 1920), 26–27; Davis, “The Lucin Cut-off,” 463, 466–67.
9 Newby, “Great Salt Lake Railroad Crossing,” 393; Davis, “The Lucin Cut-off,” 468; Fee, Great Salt Lake Cut-off, 27.
10 Davis, “The Lucin Cut-off,” 461, 466; The Official Guide of the Railways and Steam Navigation Lines of the United States, Porto [sic ]Rico, Canada, Mexico and Cuba, 86 vols. (New York: National Railway Publication Company, October 1920), 53:721; Dockter interviews.
11 Ernest L. King and Robert E. Mahaffay, Main Line: Fifty Years of Railroading with the Southern Pacific (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1948), 181–82; Newby, “Great Salt Lake Railroad Crossing,” 394, 398.
12 Dockter interviews; Ross interviews.
13 Dockter interviews.
14 Ibid.
15 Ross interviews; Dockter interviews; S. Kip Farrington, Jr., Railroads at War (New York: Samuel Curl, 1944), 27.
16 Dockter interviews.
17 Ibid.; Southern Pacific’s First Century (n. p.: n. d.), 66; Farrington, Railroads at War, 26.
18 Dockter interviews; Dale L. Morgan, The Great Salt Lake (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., [1947]), 374–75; Delia Ross, “House at Bridge,” undated holograph, author’s possession.
19 Dockter interviews; Farrington, Railroads at War, 37; interview with Lydia Napper, Martinez, California, August 4, 1984.
20 Napper interview; Ross holograph.
21 Dockter interviews.
22 Ibid.
23 Ross interviews.
24 “Speeding Gravel from Hills to Lake Roadbed: Causeway across Great Salt Lake,” Business Week (January 5, 1957): 69; Dockter interviews; Ross interviews.
25 Ross interviews; Napper interviews.
26 Ross interviews; Dockter interviews.
27 Ross interviews.
28 Dockter interviews; Napper interviews; Ross interviews.
29 Ross holograph.
30 Charles L. Buckingham, “The Telegraph of To-day,” in The Electric Telegraph: An Historical Anthology, ed. George Shiers (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 147–50; Ross interviews; Dockter interviews. Coordinating time between the telegraphers and the dispatcher apparently was done differently at different times. Farrel Ross states that a beep was sent over the telegraph at precisely 9 A.M. every day for him to set his watch by. Dockter’s dispatcher called around midnight and asked for the weather and the time; the two men then coordinated their watches. Having accurate watches was sufficiently important that the telegraphers were required to wear regulation watches and submit them for inspection. Again the inspection was done by different men, either annually by a certified jeweler or monthly by the watch inspector, who traveled the lines on a motor car to perform the inspections and kept a careful record of his findings on each telegrapher’s watch card.
31 Ross interviews; Dockter interviews.
32 Ibid.
33 Ross holograph; interview with Delia Ross, Sparks, Nevada, 1974.
34 Dockter interviews; Napper interview; Farrel Ross interviews.
35 Farrel Ross interviews; Dockter interviews.
36 Ibid.
37 Ross holograph. The imposed restriction on how much a railroading family could transport (and, in essence, possess) did not disturb everyone. When a bachelor, Jack Dockter carrried a bedroll, a suitcase with clothes and a few cans of food, and a box that held a few kitchen utensils, a double boiler, a frying pan, and one knife, fork and spoon. He comments, “If I had any company, why they’d have to wait until I got through eating. Then we’d wash up.”
38 Dockter interviews; Ross holograph.
39 Napper interview.
40 Interview with Arlene Dockter, Ogden, Utah, August 8, 1984; Dockter interviews.
41 Napper interview.
42 Ross holograph.
43 Interview with Delia Ross, August 4, 1984.
44 Ross holograph.
45 Napper interview; Ross holograph; Jack Dockter interviews.
46 Farrel Ross interviews.
47 Ibid.
48 Delia Ross 1974 interview.
49 Farrington, Railroads at War, 26–27, 34; Farrel Ross interviews.
50 Science Digest 14 (December 1943): 66–68; New York Times, November 16, 1945.
51 Interview with Dave Larkin, Ogden, Utah, August 8, 1984. Midlake was also abandoned.
