Tooele Valley Railroad and Mining Museum

The museum occupies the 1909 headquarters depot of the Tooele Valley Railway, a short line incorporated on November 18, 1908, by the Utah Consolidated Mining Company to link the International Smelter on the mountain bench east of Tooele with the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad (later Union Pacific) at Warner on the city's west edge. The first train ran on April 1, 1909, and much of the route famously ran straight down Vine Street through town; steam locomotives worked the line until 1963. Owned in later years by Anaconda Copper, the railway outlived the smelter — which operated from 1910 until its early-1970s closure — hauling away scrap from the demolition and serving the Carr Fork mine until that operation shut down; the railroad's last day was August 28, 1982. The depot complex on Broadway was preserved, opening in 1983 as a city-operated museum and joining the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 as the Tooele Valley Railroad Complex. Today the museum and historic park display preserved locomotives, equipment, and artifacts of the Tooele Valley Railway, the International Smelting and Refining Company, and the region's railroad and mining past.