Evanston Roundhouse: Wyoming's Railroad Town

In December of eighteen sixty-eight the first Union Pacific rails reached here, and within weeks nearly six hundred people were living in tents beside the tracks. Evanston was a railroad camp before it was a town. The Union Pacific roundhouse and shop complex opened on July fourth, eighteen seventy-one, and that date locked in the town's purpose: Evanston became the major locomotive maintenance facility for the division between Green River and Ogden, Utah.

By nineteen twelve a new twenty-eight-stall roundhouse went up, one of the largest on the western lines. When diesel engines made steam servicing obsolete, the shops closed and the town contracted. Today a decades-long restoration effort, costing twenty-eight million dollars, has brought the historic roundhouse complex back. It stands as one of the best-preserved railroad facilities of the transcontinental era anywhere in the West.