Ghost towns born and killed by the railroad — boomtowns that sprang up along rail lines and were abandoned when the tracks moved on or the trains stopped running.
Promontory Point, Utah: The Lake Station on the Lucin Cutoff UtahRailroadActive railroad · Private industrial land·~11 min read Quick facts What it isThe southern tip of the Promontory peninsula; a Southern Pacific station and quarry site Not the Golden Spike siteThat is Promontory Summit, about 30 miles north Quarry work beganAbout 1901 Lucin Cutoff built1902–1904…
Cisco began in the 1880s as a Denver & Rio Grande water stop in the high desert — then reinvented itself as a livestock-shipping center, an oil town, and a highway stop before diesel locomotives and Interstate 70 stripped away every reason it existed. It never fully vanished: trains still pass, pumpjacks still nod, and an artist residency now restores its ruins. Here’s the documented history, the legends worth checking (including that Johnny Cash song), and how to see it.
Old American Falls wasn’t abandoned – it was condemned, bought, and physically hauled uphill, building by building, before the Snake River was dammed and a reservoir swallowed the old townsite in 1926. Hundreds of structures rode steam tractors and rollers to a new city on higher ground; the rest were razed. Each low-water autumn, the drowned streets reappear. Here’s the documented history, the legends worth checking, and how to see it.
Glenrio is the Route 66 ghost town that lived through three transportation eras and was killed by the last one. Split down the middle by the Texas-New Mexico line, it put its bars in New Mexico and its gas pumps in Texas, boomed on Mother Road traffic, and emptied within two years when Interstate 40 slipped past just to the north. Here’s the documented history, the border lore worth checking, and how to see it today.
California’s only bay ghost town — a railroad-built duck-hunting resort now sinking into the tidal marsh of the southern San Francisco Bay, watched over by a wildlife refuge and closed to the public.
Allensworth, California was the only town in the state founded, financed, and governed entirely by African Americans. A visionary freedom colony undone by water loss and a railroad bypass, it survives today as a California state historic park.
Little Valley was a company town engineered from nothing on the Great Salt Lake shore — a 1,300-person industrial camp that built the causeway carrying the Southern Pacific across the lake, then vanished within months of finishing the job in 1959.
In April 1983, a record snowmelt triggered a massive landslide in Spanish Fork Canyon that dammed the Spanish Fork River and submerged the railroad town of Thistle, Utah — the costliest landslide in U.S. history.
Home › Wyoming Ghost Towns › Piedmont Ghost Town Piedmont Ghost Town, Wyoming: Charcoal Kilns, Butch Cassidy, and the Town That Helped Build a Railroad Wyoming Railroad Free to visit · ~14 min read Quick facts Initial settlement~1867 Formally founded1869 Original nameByrne Founded byMoses Byrne & Charles Guild Primary industriesRailroad helper engines, charcoal production Peak…
Home › West Virginia Ghost Towns › Thurmond Thurmond, West Virginia: The Coal Town That Out-Earned Cincinnati and Died When Steam Did West Virginia Coal Mining Free to visit · ~13 min read Quick facts Founded1873 (land surveyed by Capt. Thurmond) Peak population~500 (early 1900s) Current population3–5 residents Peak freight revenue$4,824,911 (highest on C&O mainline)…