Promontory Summit, Utah ? This isn’t Oakland, where there is no there. This is Promontory Summit, where there is no here.

Because, in truth, there is no town of Promontory Summit. It’s simply a description of a place. The population is one or two, if you include Rick Wilson’s cat. The closest incorporated community is Brigham City. That’s 32 miles away. The Golden Spike National Historic Site is, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere.

Right here, nowhere, is a place you probably should visit but probably won’t. Hardly anyone does. That’s in part because hardly anyone passes by. But a century and a third ago 133 years history hurried by here. It dropped in, lingered for a day or so, and then, like a locomotive, moved on. Little was left behind little, that is, besides the significance of what happened here on May 10, 1869.

These days you can stand, virtually alone, on a spot where 500 people witnessed the end of one era and the beginning of another, and you can do it in a spot where there are no souvenir hawkers, no commercial billboards, no snack stands, no anything. But it’s still one of the most important places in America. It’s where the final golden spike was driven into the Transcontinental Railroad.

We speak easily of the American Revolution, but this is a country that has had many revolutions. The one that was set in train by the Transcontinental Railroad bound up the nation after a tragic civil war, opened the continent to settlement, opened the eyes of the nation to the challenges of diversity and broadened horizon.

The workers who laid the tracks, built the trestles, pierced the mountains and subdued the snows built more than a railroad. They built an idea of a unified nation that was industrial in its outlook and continental in its reach. Their number included Civil War veterans from both sides. They included Chinese and Irish laborers. Together they gave Americans a new investment in, and obsession with, precision. No longer could each city and town in the country have its own notion of what time it was.

It all ended, or started, here, in arid country that is so beautiful mostly because it is so awful. A set of mobile businesses followed the workers as they worked, setting up what was known as “Hell on Wheels towns” as they progressed and throwing these towns on flat cars when they moved on. But when the Union Pacific, which was moving west from Omaha, and the Central Pacific, which was building east from Sacramento, converged on this spot in the Utah desert, they threw up an instant boom town for a day, loaded with governmental grandees (full of the glory of the event), workers (relieved that the chore was done but worried about where their next pay would come from), reporters (conscious that “the story of the century,” as these sorts of events sometimes are called, seldom occurs more than once a decade), and financiers (their pockets stuffed with cash, much of it ill-gained).

The two rail companies, which were paid by the mile, maximized their revenues by building past each other for 250 miles. But they settled on Promontory Point, at the tip of Promontory Peninsula, a mountainous elbow jutting into the belly of the Great Salt Lake. After the celebratory telegram was sent to President Grant and after the celebrations themselves died down, a few tents remained here along with ticket houses for rail companies and telegraph offices. In other places (Reno, Nev., and Cheyenne, Wyo.), tent towns eventually became settlements. But here, in a place where something big once happened, nothing big ever developed.

The reason is one of the other stubborn themes of the West: water. There was none, or at least none that anyone could drink. Promontory Point shook hands with history because of the railroad, but the important thing was that it was more than a day’s journey by coach from Brigham City. Ogden became the important rail center, and Promontory Point became forgotten, except for 11th-graders worried the name might crop up on the American history final.

In 1869, as Bret Harte wrote, there was “half a world” behind the back of the two engines that touched here. Now about 1.7 miles of track has been re-laid. It’s not much crews laid 10 miles of track on April 28, 1869, alone but it’s something. It’s a symbol of what happened here, amid the grasshoppers and the sand fleas, in a different century and in many ways a different nation. You might think of the joining of the tracks as the creation of the internal combustion engine of modern America a phrase that itself reminds us that even American revolutions like the transcontinental railroad, which produced a poetic 1,776 miles of track, come to an end and are succeeded by new ones.