![]() ![]() None of the Salt Lake City/Ogden–Butte trains were particularly fast. 7869, a 4-8-2 Mountain type, is pulling the train. Train #31, the Butte Express, is seen leaving Salt Lake City in July, 1940. After the branch lines off UP’s Butte main line were constructed, mainline trains could make connections with branchline runs, some of which were mixed trains-that is, freight trains also providing limited passenger accommodations. In the operation’s first decades, UP’s through trains between Salt Lake City, Ogden, and Butte were pretty much the conventional passenger trains of the era: locomotive, baggage, express, mail, and passenger cars. Technically, the new Short Line was not fully absorbed into UP until the end of 1987-nearly a century after the two subsidiaries were merged! Passenger operations in the early years It was referred to as the Oregon Short Line or simply the “Short Line.” Complete conversion of former U&N trackage to standard gauge did not occur until 1890. In 1897 the OSL&UN became the Oregon Short Line Railroad. In 1888, U&N merged with UP’s Oregon Short Line, the result of which was the Oregon Short Line & Utah Northern Railway. U&N trackage actually ended at Silver Bow, Mont., where trains entered trackage rights on Northern Pacific for the remaining seven miles into Butte. The gap was short-lived, with U&N reaching Butte by the end of 1881. In 1881, even before U&N reached Butte, the railroad advertised a daily express train and two freight trains over the 354 miles between Ogden and Melrose, Mont.-the end of the line at the time and a mere 38 miles short of Butte. From Idaho Falls it was a 200-mile trip through remote countryside to Butte, the end of the line. The next major city on the line to Butte is Idaho Falls, where cars were sometimes interchanged to and from trains plying the Yellowstone Branch. Pocatello thus became an important interchange location for UP. At Pocatello, Idaho, 134 miles north of Ogden, U&N intersected another UP subsidiary, the Oregon Short Line Railway, which built a direct route between UP’s Overland Route at Granger, Wyo., and Huntington, Ore. Established by the Mormons, the railroad initially was a three-foot narrow-gauge operation extending northward from Union Pacific’s transcontinental main line-the Overland Route-at Ogden through the Cache Valley in Utah. UP’s Salt Lake City–Butte line began life in 1871 as the Utah Northern Railroad, later reorganized under the auspices of UP and rail baron Jay Gould as the Utah & Northern Railway. It was one of the few north-south UP passenger trains in UP’s world of numerous east-west services. As a night train, the Butte Special had sleeping cars and coaches and survived until Amtrak began on May 1, 1971, albeit on a tri-weekly schedule. UP provided this passenger service between the two cities for 90 years, operating the trains under a variety of names and numbers. The Butte Special was a Union Pacific passenger train connecting Butte, Mont., and Salt Lake City, Utah, providing a vital service to the sparsely populated area in eastern Idaho and southwestern Montana- an area with poor roads to boot.
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