Eastern Express No. 6 on Lucin Cut-off, Great Salt Lake, UT, 1908

About this postcard

A long steam-hauled passenger train, headed by a locomotive trailing smoke, crosses a timber trestle that runs in a low diagonal line across open water and flats. The printed caption identifies it as the Southern Pacific's Eastern Express No. 6 passing over the Lucin Cut-off, the wooden trestle across the Great Salt Lake in Utah opened in 1904. The cutoff shortened the transcontinental route by eliminating the climb over Promontory. The sender calls it the 'wonder trestle' and gives its length as 12 miles, with the lake 29 miles wide at the crossing and the rest of the roadbed built of rock and shale at a cost of $4,500,000. The timber structure was later replaced by a rock-fill causeway in the 1950s.