On a couple of occasions we have driven south out of Idaho toward Salt Lake City and whizzed past the Brown Signs for The Golden Spike National Historical Park. Today we made s point of visiting the location that shortened the trip from the Mississippi to the Pacific from five months to two weeks. It was here on this spot that the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroads met to create the first transcontinental railroad and on May 10, 1869, a Wedding of the Rails Ceremony was performed here at Promontory, Utah. We didn’t get to see the original golden spike, that is housed in a museum at Stanford in Palo Alto, CA but there’s a replica here. And we didn’t get to see the original CPRR steam engine, Jupiter, but they have an amazing replica and we saw a demonstration of its operation by Engineer Tom. Unfortunately for us the replica of the UPRR Engine #119 is undergoing repair but it was still an amazing opportunity to learn about the project that made ocean shipping around Cape Horn all but obsolete.
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