Idaho's 1st Railroad

Through this canyon the two gauges ran together. When the Oregon Short Line reached McCammon in 1882, it laid about 23 miles of track with a third rail into Pocatello, so standard and narrow-gauge trains could share it. North of Pocatello freight still had to change cars until July 1887, when crews widened 264 miles of Utah and Northern track to Butte in a single day. South of McCammon the narrow gauge lasted until October 1890, when a new standard-gauge line through the Bear River canyon opened between Ogden and Pocatello.

What the plaque says

Idaho's 1st Railroad Through this canyon once puffed the wood-burning locomotives of the narrow-gauge Utah and Northern Railway. Construction, undertaken by a Mormon Co-op, came northward from a junction with the transcontinental line, but stopped in 1874 at Franklin on the Utah-Idaho border. Jay Gould, famous financier of the Union Pacific, took over in 1877; trains were passing here the next summer, and the rails reached Montana in 1880. New life for east Idaho followed the shrieking whistles of those little Utah and Northern trains. 17 Text prepared by the Idaho Historical Society Marker made & installed by Idaho Transportation Department

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shoshone-Bannock Tribal Museum — 17 mi
  Fort Hall told from the other side of the trade counter, by the tribes whose reservation now surrounds the site of the post.
• Lava Hot Springs — 18 mi
  The pools belong to the state because the springs left the Fort Hall Reservation and Congress handed them to Idaho in 1902.

More markers nearby

• Chief Pocatello — 8.7 mi
• Idaho State University — 9.7 mi
• Lava Hot Springs — 18 mi
• Hudspeth's Cutoff — 21 mi