Original Union Pacific Main Line through Papillion

Peter A. Dey did not stay to see this line built. In August 1864 Herbert Hoxie offered to build and equip the first 100 miles of the Union Pacific for $50,000 a mile, and a board committee approved the enlarged contract that September. Dey, whose own estimate was far lower, quit over the price, calling it another of Durant's schemes, and the contract passed to Credit Mobilier. He went home to Iowa City as a bank president, spent fifteen years on Iowa's board of railroad commissioners, and died there on July 12, 1911.

What the plaque says

The Original Union Pacific Main Line Through Papillion Approximately thirty feet south of here in 1865 the Union Pacific Railroad laid its original track extending from the Missouri River in Omaha, south up Mud Creek to Papillion Creek, and northwesterly along West Papillion Creek. Although Chief Engineer Peter A. Dey had proposed a more direct route to reach the Elkhorn Valley, Union Pacific Vice President Dr. Thomas Durant and consulting engineer Silas Seymour instead selected the Papillion Creek alternative, adding nine miles to the line. Durant was accused of making the change to obtain additional government subsidies, but he defended the Papillion route as having gentler grades than the Dey route. When E. H. Harriman gained control of the Union Pacific in 1897 he began modernization, including construction of the Lane Cut-off following Dey's original route. The cut-off opened in 1908, relegating the Durant line to a secondary role. Between 1988 and 1994, 7.3 miles of track on the original Durant line between Gilmore and Millard were removed. Rail customers in Millard are served from the west end of the original main line at Lane Junction in west Omaha. Papillion Area Historical Society Nebraska State Historical Society, 2012

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Joslyn Art Museum — 8.7 mi
  Omaha's free art museum, a 1931 Art Deco memorial with two modern pavilions, and the keeper of Karl Bodmer's watercolors from the upper Missouri in 1833 and 1834.
• The Durham Museum (Omaha Union Station) — 8.8 mi
  Omaha's 1931 Union Station, Gilbert Stanley Underwood's Art Deco depot for the Union Pacific, closed to trains in 1971 and kept as a city museum with its waiting room intact.
• Malcolm X Birthsite — 10 mi
  The North Omaha lot where Malcolm Little was born in May 1925 and his family was driven out by the Klan, saved by Rowena Moore and now planned as a cultural center.
• Winter Quarters and the Mormon Pioneer Cemetery — 13 mi
  The Latter-day Saint camp of 1846 to 1848 on Omaha land in what is now Florence, where hundreds died the first winter, and the cemetery and trail center beside it.

More markers nearby

• Papillion Boy Scouts' Cabin — steps away
• Omaha — 5.7 mi
• Ak-Sar-Ben Field and the U.S. Air Mail — 6.2 mi
• Springfield Community Hall — 7.1 mi