Bullfrog Goldfield railroad station Rhyolite Nevada.

The remote area in which the ores were discovered necessitated the building of railroads to supersede the transport to smelters by mule driven wagons. This created a race from existing railroads north and south. To the north the Carson and Colorado railway was the closest, built in 1888 as a narrow gauge railroad owned as a purchased subsidiary of the Southern Pacific railroad.  To the south lay the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake City railroad (1901), soon to be purchased by Union Pacific. To the west lay the Funeral range and Death Valley, and to the east countless miles of nearly untracked and inhospitable desert.  The five competing railroads developed were the Tonopah & Tidewater,   the Las Vegas & Tonopah,  the Bullfrog Goldfield, the Silver Peak, and the Tonopah & Goldfield.  The city of Las Vegas was established at this time as a rail hub to access the gold and silver ores.  The numerous ghost towns that dot the area today are also a direct result of this short lived mineral bonanza.