National Parks Traveler Podcast Episode 256 | Golden Spike National Historical Park

By Jess Repanshek - January 7th, 2024

As a young boy growing up in New Jersey, a year-end holiday treat was setting up our model railroad. It gave me and my two brothers hours of fun and an opportunity to learn a little about the steam age of railroads. Our first railroad featured Lionel O gauge locomotives and cars. Later we moved into HO gauge trains, and many years later I had an N gauge layout.

That boyhood love of model railroads drove me to visit Golden Spike National Historical Park in northern Utah not far from the Great Salt Lake. That’s where, on May 10th, 1869, the Transcontinental Railroad was completed when the Jupiter and No. 119 steam locomotives of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads met head-on.

To learn more about those two locomotives, I headed north to Promontory Summit and caught up with Ranger Cole Chisam, who is the engineer who drives the two locomotives at the park.

0:02 National Parks Traveler introduction
0:12 Episode Intro with Kurt Repanshek
1:31 Episode 256 - Golden Spike National Historical Park
12:39 The Road Scholar - Bill Mize - The Spirit of South Dakota
12:50 NPT Promo
13:56 Interior Federal Credit Union
14:23 Great Smoky Mountains Association
14:47 Episode 256 - Golden Spike National Historical Park Continues
26:34 Vista Verde - Tim Heintz - The Sounds of Peaks, Plateaus and Canyons
26:55 Episode Closing
27:12 Orange Tree Productions
27:45 Splitbeard Productions
27:56 National Parks Traveler footer

Golden Spike National Historical Park

National Parks Traveler Podcast

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