The worst that can happen is we'll all enjoy the ride

The Cumbers & Toltec. The Colorado Railroad Museum. The Royal Gorge Route. The San Luis & Rio Grande. 

Railroad enthusiasts speak these names, and the titles of all the other Colorado tourist railroads,  with the utmost of reverence. Many cite these rides as the standard by which all other tourist train trips are judged. The Trains Magazine and 2016 Special Interest Tours’ Rockies by Rail Tour covers all of them in a comprehensive, bucket-list-toppling trip through some of the state’s most breathtakingly scenic locations.
The tour begins in Denver, and the first event scheduled for our twenty-seven guests is a dinner and showing of Richard W. Luckin's dome car documentary.  I have been asked to come prepared to offer our guests a few words of welcome if the opportunity arises, and trying to put a short speech together has provided good entertainment the evening before setting off for Colorado. It’s not difficult to think up phrases to laud the beautiful routes snaking through the Rocky Mountains. The railroads we will be visiting practically compel to flow onto the page, and every one of them has inspired a small library of books and magazine articles praising their history and quality. The challenge is far more in finding a way to condense an appropriate adulation of our itinerary down into a few minute’s speech.

The first few outlines I scribble out begin with the most obvious tactic: praises of the natural beauty of the Colorado railroads and the railroads they preserve. This tactic seems overworn, though, well within what our guests already know.  They have been drawn here in the first place because of recommendations from friends, after all, and from  reviews on websites and advertisements that showcase the unmatched scenery and preserved equipment. Many of these advertisements and personal adulations hint that riders come off of the trains inspired, touched down to the deepest parts of their soul, pressed into the same kind of revelation that one might arrive at in a cathedral or revival.

Last year, I certainly came away from my trips to the Cumbres & Toltec and the Durango & Silverton on an emotional high. I wrote two pieces for Observation Tower before it wore off that did a decent job of capturing the intensity of the experience. Both were well received by readers, but I could not shake the feeling that I had failed to get to the bottom of exactly why the Colorado railroad strike such a chord.  A fundamental part of the experience had eluded identification, and I am determined to put it into words before the tour began.

My house, my surroundings, are uncommonly quiet as I pondered this question and paired ink to paper. Freight traffic on the tracks just behind my yard has slowed considerably in the past week or so. The Union Pacific has seized on the slowdown as a chance to upgrade the tracks and replace aging signals. Trains come only at infrequent intervals, but men and machines go out to do battle against poorly gauged track and crumbling ballast. Thinking about the state of the industry begins as a distraction from the work at hand but,  after a few moments, I begin to parse out a corollary between the state of modern railroading and the picaresque venues up in the Rockies.
It takes work to keep a railroad running, tremendous and vigilant human effort, regardless of whether they haul freight or vacationers. Let the dandelions growing between the ties and the branches hanging low over the tracks go unchallenged, and it won’t be long before the whole line rusts into disrepair. Closer to sea level, stacks of crossties and piles of ballast evidence the Class I’s defenses, but up in the mountain railroads, that work is much less visible.

The lack of visible work on the tracks is a small detail--one so subtle that I'm not surprised I overlooked it in earlier writings--but its effect on the character of the ride is powerful. Without it, there is an unbreakable illusion that the natural and industrial have come together in harmony. The railroads tread lightly on the mountain’s slopes and appear to claim nothing as their own except a track-wide sliver of rock; the mountains, in turn, seem to concede that high trestles enrich their valleys and a throaty steam whistle makes good harmony with their own howling winds.

It is rare to find places like these, where the raw power of the surroundings takes one’s breath away, and yet, every aspect of them seems to be in perfect balance, and when we do find them, they tend get into our blood. Places like this compel us to contemplate and transcend our own circumstances: If such powerful can reach a truce around the shores of the Animas River,  is there not still the  hope of rooting out the disharmony in our own lives?

This aspect of the Colorado railroads experience makes a good reserve of prose for the evening meal, and a good addendum to the parts of the earlier blogs that felt lacking. Appreciating balance is just one of the reasons why the places we are scheduled to visit tend to stick in the soul--the geography is varied and mutable enough that one can find some part of it to mirror almost any aspect of the human experience--but it is certainly one of the most memorable.

Special Interest Tours markets this journey as an efficient way to see all of the tourist railroads located within the state of Colorado. The text is perfectly accurate in that regard, but as we all sit in the dining room, introducing ourselves and brimming with excitement, I begin to appreciate that that we are embarking on a journey of discovery as well. We'll take away something from this experience that, at best, will bring us a rare bit of quietude and broaden our perspective on life. With so many places scheduled on our itinerary, everyone ought to find at least one place that offers them that sort of repose. And if not? 

The very worst that can happen is that we will all enjoy the ride.