LAS VEGAS (FOX5) — Las Vegas found itself growing out of luck and good circumstances.
Union Pacific finished construction of its new Los Angeles to Salt Lake City route in 1905. The halfway point landed right in Las Vegas.
“Having a rail connection was literally the life or death of a community,” said Christopher MacMahon, director of the Nevada State Railroad Museum in Boulder City. “Las Vegas wasn’t a destination city. It was a dusty little town.”
Mining activity at the turn of the 20th century led to a cycle of economic boom and bust for the region.
“Vegas is starting to become this little hub of activity in a way that it hadn’t been before and wouldn’t have been had it not been for the railroad,” said MacMahon.
The sale and transport of precious mineral ores created a need for railroads to places like Goldfield, Rhyolite, and Tonopah in the early 1900s.
“Had it not been for the railroad, it’s very likely that Las Vegas would not have grown into the city it is today,” he said.
The start of divorce tourism in the 1920s and the legalization of gambling in 1931 helped diversify the local economy, but the tourism industry had a slow start during these decades.
“And really, the driving blood behind the community continued to be the railroad and its maintenance facilities,” he said. “That’s where most of the work and employment was.”
Union Pacific became one of the major employers in Las Vegas following the completion of its railroad depot in 1905. The growth of the railroad industry in Southern Nevada connected Las Vegas to a unique project southeast of the city, and it came at the right time.
“This project became the largest construction project in the United States during the Depression,” MacMahon said. “People from all over the country flocked to this location.”
While the U.S. economy took a major downturn at this time, it did not stop altogether.
“So the railroad workers here in Las Vegas were very, very lucky to have the jobs they did, and they knew it.”
The Hoover Dam project meant a new source of work that wasn’t readily available elsewhere in the country during the Depression. Everything needed to build the dam was being routed through Las Vegas up to Boulder City and the dam site.
“It’s a really cheap, effective way to move a lot of goods.”
In Nevada’s early decades as a state, much of it consisted of rough terrain. The only way to get goods and people into the state was by rail.
The Los Angeles to Salt Lake line set the foundation for Las Vegas to connect to the country’s major rail hub of Chicago and to the rest of America.
“Most of the goods in your everyday life are moved by rail,” he said.
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