Lucin

Lucin is an abandoned railroad community about 50 miles west of the Great Salt Lake in Box Elder County, Utah. The town was founded in the 1860s during the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad about 10 miles north of its current location. It was then moved to serve as the start of the Lucin Cutoff, built between 1902 and 1904, which connected Lucin to Ogden with 102 miles of track, including a 12-mile trestle spanning the Great Salt Lake.

Abandoned in 1936, Lucin was later resettled by a group of retired railroad workers who were friends with fond memories of their time there. The last retiree moved away in 1972 and the area is now managed for migrating songbirds and other wildlife by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. In 2007, a propeller manufacturer named Ivo Zdarsky moved into an airplane hangar on the outskirts of town. He has been Lucin’s only resident ever since, and, other than his hangar, only a few hints of man-made structures remain.