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Show Post Article Describes Salt Lake Cutoff Job Construction of the Southern Pacific's new isthmus to carry its trains across the Great Salt Lake has been complicated by an almost al-most microscopic form of animal life, Arthur W. Baum relates in the current issue of the Saturday Evening Post. Baum's article, "Battle Against the Lake," identifies the culprit as the tiny, leaf-footed brine shrimp, the phyllod Artemia, and says it entered seriously into all calculations on the new span, which is due for completion in the next six months. It is reported that the shrimp, the only form of animal life to exist in the lake, have played a dirty trick on the railroad. They have simply lived and died by the billions for thousands of years, thereafter settling on the lake floor with all the egg shells, dead eggs and household dirt. The bottom of the Great Salt Lake, therefore, is a deep mush of ancient shrimp clutter. Soil engineers are said to call this mush organic clay, and they wish the shirmps, in returning to clay, had done so in a less soupy manner. Baum's story says there have been seven cave-ins during the pouring of the 13 miles of earth fill onto the lake's treacherous bottom and in one instance the subsidence happened so fast it carried down a bulldozer. The author says the SP has sunk about $50,000,000 into the project and completion will give the railroad a man made ribbon of earth carrying its main line across 30 miles of Salt Lake, with one short land anchor. The total span is found to be vital to SP because every train on the Overland Route from Chicago to San Francisco must cross here. No alternative exists. The present trestle has been living on borrowed time. At the age of 54 it is years past its calculated cal-culated service period. Freight trains cross it at no more than 20 miles per hour and passenger trains at no more than 30. Baum tells that a slow train is an expensive train and reports that completion of the project will mean they can travel the lake at full speed 79 miles per hour. |
