Simon Bamberger's Electric Line
Near Ogden, Utah
For nearly half a century, the fastest way between Ogden and Salt Lake City was not the Union Pacific mainline. It was a privately owned electric interurban railroad that ran on its own right-of-way the entire length of the Wasatch Front, making the fifty-mile trip in exactly one hour.
Simon Bamberger was a German-born Jewish immigrant who had arrived in Utah in the eighteen sixties and made his fortune in coal and real estate. He had a vision for rapid transit on the Wasatch Front and started building northward from Salt Lake City in the early eighteen nineties, reaching Bountiful, then Farmington, grading his right-of-way to high standards: no grade steeper than one point one percent, gentle curves, private land so the line could run at full speed without sharing track with anything else. He reached Ogden in late July of nineteen eight. Passenger service between Salt Lake City and Ogden began on August eighth, nineteen eight.
By nineteen ten the line was fully electrified with overhead wire, powered in part by electricity from Bamberger's own coal mines. The railroad's famous slogan was 'Every Hour, On The Hour, In An Hour.' Its fastest trains were called Flyers. The line carried commuters, shoppers, day-trippers to the Lagoon amusement park, and summer crowds heading to resorts in the Wasatch canyons.
The Bamberger Electric Railroad, officially renamed from the Salt Lake and Ogden Railway in nineteen seventeen, fell into bankruptcy in nineteen thirty-three, a casualty of the Depression and the spreading automobile culture. But it survived the bankruptcy and kept running. The final interurban trip between Salt Lake City and Ogden ran on September sixth, nineteen fifty-two, forty-four years after the first.
No trace of the track remains. The right-of-way is largely developed. But the corridor it established, the spine of the Wasatch Front, is still the axis the region moves on.
