The Uintah Railway was a small 3 ft (914 mm) narrow gauge railroad company in Utah and Colorado in the United States.

[2] The Uintah Basin includes seams of asphaltum remaining where petroleum from the Green River Formation oil shales seeped into fissures in the overlying sandstone where smaller hydrocarbon molecules were slowly evaporated or digested by aerobic microbes.

The remaining large-molecular-weight hydrocarbons formed a lustrous black solid at ambient temperatures, resembling anthracite coal with a brownish dust.

Twenty-eight miles of track was laid following West Salt Wash Creek upstream to the company town of Atchee, Colorado, named after a chief of the Ute people.

[5] The railroad had operated passenger trains since 1905 consisting of a 0-6-2 tank locomotive pulling a single combine car between Mack and Dragon or Watson.

[8] Through a bureaucratic loophole, the USPS charged in-state rates for shipping between the basin and Salt Lake City, assuming a straight line distance, despite them using the Uintah Railway, and having to route the mail to Colorado first and then back into Utah.

A number of businesses soon discovered this loophole, and when the builders of a bank in the town of Vernal learned this, they shipped 30 tons of bricks, one at a time, by mail.

Today all that remains of the Uintah are the cellar pits of some of the buildings, the shell of the machine shop in Atchee, a few pieces of rolling stock and part of the company hotel in Mack.