Wyoming '99: Monday
When the railroad moved, the town of Sherman dried up and blew away. All that's left there now is foundations, planks and stones and glass and rusting cans. If you look closely, you'll see that many of the nails in the old wood up there have square heads--they're from the day before mills rolled round nails. Above is the old pivot for the roundhouse at Sherman. The Sherman summit was the highest point on the Union Pacific Transcontinental Railroad. (The summit on the current route, a few miles from here, still is the UP's highest point.) To haul trains up the long Sherman grade, extra engines were stored here. They'd go down to meet a train, help drag it up and over the hill, and then detach when the train was pointed downhill again--ready to meet the next train. So there was a roundhouse filled with locomotives, and a rotating piece of track that could point at whichever stall an engine needed to go into or come out of. The big white stone above sits at the center of what today is just a dimple in the grass. Above it you see the edge of the circle in which the track pivoted.
The rocks in the foreground are all that's left of an old locomotive stall. Beyond them you can see the next stall over, and another one and another one further away, like spokes of a wheel on the grass. The hub is to the right (out of the picture). On the horizon, the rocks in the far distance are Vedauwoo.
This is the view from one locomotive stall back toward the pivot at the center of the roundhouse. The hub is the brown patch in the grass with two bushes in it, up near the right horizon. (It's a depression in the grass, so from here you don't see the white stone at the center.) Monday . . . Tuesday . . . Wednesday . . . Thursday . . . Friday . . . Saturday . . . Miscellaneous |
