Re: Literature on railroads in Utah bought by the D&RGW

There is some irony in the first response to this question is "look at the Colorado historical society." Utah is its own state with its own historical institutions, and this is an example of why practically nothing has been written about the Utah narrow gauge (which a small portion actually lasted into the 1930s, leased to a third party operator but still owned by the Rio Grande) outside of acknowledging that it existed because almost all historiography on the Rio Grande has been conducted from the confines of the Denver area.

We have come very close to getting a good book about the Utah lines twice. Jack Thode collected a large amount of documentation from the company's files, but when he died it was, as far as I can tell, split between his friends and the Colorado Railroad Museum and kind of disappeared into the ether. The late Jim Ozment wrote a manuscript on the subject, apparently using a lot of Thode's material, but Mr. Ozment unfortunately passed away before finishing and I have not heard what happened to the manuscript, if it still exists.

I've been working on a history of the D&RG's predecessor companies in Utah for the past ten years or so, and lately with MatthewM's collaboration we've made great strides, but until that's done the only options are Stephen Carr's Utah Ghost Rails (a good basic source but very outdated); my article in the Prospector about the Wasatch & Jordan Valley, and Don Strack's UtahRails website.