Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad

The Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad (reporting mark SLR)[1] was a rail company in California, Nevada, and Utah in the United States, that completed and operated a railway line between its namesake cities (Salt Lake City, Utah, and Los Angeles, California), via Las Vegas, Nevada.

Incorporated in Utah in 1901 as the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, the line was largely the brainchild of William Andrews Clark, a Montana mining baron and United States Senator.

Another player entered the scene in 1900, when William Andrews Clark acquired the struggling Los Angeles Terminal Railway with an eye to extending the line northeast to Salt Lake.

The competing Union Pacific Railroad and its formidable leader E. H. Harriman stood in opposition to Clark's plan.

Their agreement called for Clark's railroad to acquire the existing UP trackage south of Salt Lake City.

Traveling southwestward from Salt Lake, the railroad's division point towns were Lynndyl and Milford in Utah; Caliente and Las Vegas in Nevada; and Yermo and San Bernardino in California.

There were no major population centers between the railroad's endpoints until the city of Las Vegas began its rapid growth in the mid-twentieth century.

At least two of the railroad's smaller stations, at Lund and Black Rock in Utah, were designed by the noted architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood.