The Union Pacific's St. Thomas Branch leaves the UP mainline at Moapa, located between the Meadow Valley Wash and Las Vegas, Nevada, and the site of a coal-fired power plant. The branch, originally completed in 1912, once ran from Moapa past Overton to the community of St. Thomas on the Virgin River. With the completion of Boulder (later Hoover) Dam in 1935, the rising waters of the newly-created Lake Mead forced the abandonment of St. Thomas and the track from there to the eventual high-water shoreline at a location called Mead Lake, just south of Overton. Here a local freight is approaching Mead Lake.
