Over the San Juans by narrow gauge

It has been 42 years since the Denver & Rio Grande Western sold its magnificent, 64-mile line over Cumbres Pass to the states of Colorado and New Mexico and gotten out of narrow-gauge railroading. And yes, it has taken me that long to get to Antonito, Colo., and savor the successor railroad these states created, the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic — “Pride of the Rockies,” it calls itself, with some justification. The C&TS has had its ups and downs, about once a decade being visited by the economic or managerial Perils of Pauline. But it’s still here, waiting for me to end my procrastination.

I get to Antonito (30 miles south of the larger city of Alamosa) the afternoon before my trip west on No. 215, and wait for the passage of its eastbound counterpart about five miles east of town, in the sagebrush on a right-of-way road. I can hear the exhaust of Mikado 488 before the train comes into view half a mile away. What a gorgeous sight, that dinky little locomotive and its seven trailing cars. I instantly think of a similar pugnacious narrow-gauge train in Patagonia that brought writer Paul Theroux to the end of his rail adventures, from Boston to southern Argentina, more than a third of a century ago.

Amazingly, this railroad still operates by timetable and train order, the timetable setting the meeting point of trains 215 and 216 at Osier, where the trains pause an hour or longer for lunch.

We leave Antonito the next morning two minutes after the scheduled 10 a.m. departure because half a dozen late arrivals run to the station just as the engineer whistles off. “Stop the train,” the conductor sighs over the radio. These folks bring the passenger count to 81. Behind 488 today are a coach with a wheelchair lift, three coaches, a gondola for passengers so desiring, a table car and a first-class car, which is where I occupy chair number five. Like the original cars used by C&TS in 1970, these passenger cars appear to have started life as boxcars; at any rate, they sure don’t come shot welded from Budd Manufacturing Company.

My one regret about this visit is that I forget to reread (or bring with me) the story authored by Philip R. Hastings in the April 1956 issue of Trains, “Into the Freezing Darkness,” his account of riding a D&RGW freight from Alamosa to Chama, N.M., and back in April 1955. Hastings is justly celebrated for his photography, but his haunting account of this journey is a journalistic masterpiece, one of the best narratives ever published by Trains. If you own the DVD “Trains Magazine: The Complete Collection, 1940-2010,” by all means look this one up.

I stand on the rear platform with the uniformed trainman as Antonito fades into the distance below us. “Well, 18 and a half miles an hour,” he said, having timed from mile post 283 to 284. “That’s the best we’ll do today.” A few moments later you feel the train slow as it reaches the start of the grade. We are in high desert country, surrounded by sagebrush and not much else. If there is grass to support livestock grazing, I can’t see it.

The first of many hairpin turns takes us around Lava loop. I snap a photo as the train retreats from the unused water tower. By and by we leave the desert and climb into forested mountains, the heart of the San Juan Range. Our train hugs the high ridges; far below us flows the Rio de Los Pinos, looking tiny and dry. I try many times (it’s hard, actually) to imagine it is 65 years ago, and I am a Colorado businessman heading from Denver overnight by Pullman to Alamosa, then by café-parlor car on D&RGW’s San Juan Express to Durango. Going back ever further, in 1919, Antonito to Chama took three and a half hours. Subtract the time we’ll spent eating today, and it takes five hours. How you could have covered this territory so must faster then eludes me.

I cannot begin to describe how removed from civilization this railroad is today. From the time we leave Antonito until sometime after lunch, I see not a sign of human habitation other than preserved railroad structures once lived in by track workers. At Sublette, population today zero, almost two hours into the trip, we stop so that 488 can top off its water from a standpipe. Then off we go into nowhere again, crossing the Colorado-New Mexico border three more times that morning; if I count correctly, we change states 11 times that day. After Sublette comes Mud Tunnel, Phantom Curve, and Rock Tunnel.

At 1 o’clock, 15 minutes behind the timetable schedule, train 215 rounds a curve and before us stands Osier, eastbound train 216 already there, its locomotive gently sending a curl of steam into the air. Osier has a strange effect on me. It had once been a small community, and a 1919 employee timetable of mine indicates it had a depot and agent. C&TS built a two-story structure there some years ago to serve as a lunch facility for its trains. The building nicely blends into its surroundings. After eating, I photograph the older structures (including what had been a rooming house), climb a hillside and look around the treeless landscape. Nowheresville. Leaving aside the fact that a dirt road allows the kitchen employees to reach this place, the emptiness and isolation of Osier today is overwhelming. The only time I have had a similar feeling is driving the Forest Service road east from Winter Park, Colo., built on the right of way of the original route above Moffat Tunnel, and looking down on Yankee Doodle Lake. At times like these, you leave the world behind. Believe it or not, the emotional experience causes me to tear up.

We’ve been climbing all day. After Osier, the ascent continues, but now below us are grasslands, cattle being grazed, and occupied homes. Right at the summit, 10,015 feet above sea level, we whistle for Colorado Highway 17 (which also goes through Antonito, I might add) and come to a stop at Cumbres, for a brake test and a setup of brake retainers, which maintain a constant braking application no matter what the engineer does. Our grade thus far has been on the order of 2 percent, going up. From Cumbres to Chama, 15 miles, it’s a constant 4 percent descent, and do we ever feel it, hear it, and smell it.

It’s as steep a mountain grade as you’ll find anywhere in the U.S. today (short of a cog railway), but with Highway 17 almost always within sight, it is neither as desolate nor as romantic as it had been, in the middle of Nowheresville. I miss Nowheresville.

At 4:20, about 15 minutes late (but who cares?), we come to a stop in Chama. The feeling I have, rolling slowly through the former Rio Grande yard, is of coming upon a 1930s movie set. Here a coal tipple so old it must predate the railroad. There a string of converted boxcars that probably constituted the initial fleet of C&TS passenger coaches. And everywhere, antique boxcars, refrigerator cars, and cattle cars, looking as if being readied for yet another movie filmed on the premises. Several steam locomotives that appear to be in good working order await their awakening.

Before boarding the bus to take me back to Antonito, I look up at engine 488. Two men are peering out from the cab. I approach them. Which of you is the fireman, I ask? The older man on the left, and the least unkempt and disheveled, says he is. Are you tired by now, I ask (these locomotives are hand fired, mind you)? In about 20 years I’ll be, he replies with a broad grin. I snap a photo of them and greet the bus driver.

I hope I have inspired you. Why make my mistake and waste another 42 years? Get thee there, now. If you can find this blog, you know how to find the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad online, for schedules and reservations. Two inexpensive books I recommend are Saving The Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad (The History Press, 2012), about the post-Rio Grande years and the perils of not-for-profit ownership, and Ticket To Toltec (Western Guideways) a mile-by-mile description of the railroad you will experience. But above all else, before you go, read Phil Hastings’ piece in Trains. It speaks to you through all the decades, better than I ever can. – Fred W. Frailey