Nevada Northern Railway: Copper Country's Iron Road

The Nevada Northern Railway was born in nineteen oh five because copper needed a road to market. When the Nevada Consolidated Copper Company began pulling ore out of the mountains above Ely, the nearest railhead was a hundred and forty miles north in Wells. Mark Requa, who controlled most of the mines, built the Nevada Northern to close that gap.

Construction crews spiked the last symbolic copper nail in September of nineteen oh six. The line hauled ore, freight, and passengers until ore hauling ended in nineteen seventy-eight and the line shut down entirely in nineteen eighty-three. What survives here at East Ely is one of the best-preserved early twentieth-century railroad yards in the American West, still with its original roundhouse, locomotives, and maintenance shops, frozen at the end of the steam era.