09/23/2026
A bit of history.
Evanston's Roundhouse Stopped Repairing Locomotives in 1925. It Stayed Open Another Forty-Six Years.
Union Pacific construction crews reached the spot in November 1868 and Harvey Booth put up a tent saloon, which was the town's first business. Grenville Dodge platted it two years later and named it for a surveyor, James Evans. The first roundhouse - stone, twenty stalls - was finished on the Fourth of July, 1871, and that is what turned Evanston into a division point instead of another tent town that folded when the rails moved on. The brick roundhouse that stands now went up in 1912 and 1913: twenty-eight stalls on twenty-seven acres, with a hundred-foot turntable and a three-hundred-ton coaling station.
Then in 1925 the railroad announced it was done. Bigger locomotives could run Green River to Ogden without stopping to be serviced in between, so Evanston was surplus. A delegation of city officials and businessmen got on a train to Omaha to argue about it.
Whatever they said in that room worked, but not the way anyone expected. The shops reopened in February 1927 as something else entirely - the Union Pacific Reclamation, Repair and Manufacturing Plant. For the next forty-four years the men in that roundhouse poured concrete fence posts and snow fence, rebuilt baggage wagons and hand brakes and air brake parts, and the blacksmiths turned out brake rods, grab irons, stirrup steps and ladders for the whole system. More than two hundred thirty men by mid-1942 and three hundred thirty-one by the end of the war, about twenty of them women hired between 1943 and 1945, in a town of thirty-six hundred people. The plant closed December 31, 1971 with about fifty left.
The passenger trains held on longer than most people think. The San Francisco Zephyr made its last run July 15, 1983 and Evanston was the final Wyoming stop - and then Amtrak came back to the same line on June 17, 1991 with the Pioneer, which stopped there until May 10, 1997. Wyoming has had no Amtrak station since.
What did not stop is the railroad itself. The line through town is Union Pacific's Evanston Subdivision, Green River to Ogden, a hundred seventy-eight miles, topping out at 7,268 feet at Altamont, and it moves something like forty-five to fifty trains a day. Evanston is still a crew-change point. And the 1913 turntable still turns - original electric motor, renovated in 2010, used to swing equipment on tours.
Was there a shop in your town that outlived the work it was built for?
