Golden Spike - a section of fill along the Union Pacific Grade

This view shows a section of fill along the Union Pacific Grade. Today an unmaintained hiking trail follows the old rail bed. The cuts were blasted and cleared, and the material was dumped as fill in the ravines. This was accomplished by the hard work of hundreds of laborers working with hand tools and horse-drawn carts. The rail line was abandoned nearly a century ago when a new railroad route was built to circumvent the steep grade over Promontory Summit (Bain, 1999).