Summer Snow, and Other Lucky Contrivances

Ours is one of the quietest train groups to ever depart with Special Interest Tours, our tour guide says, before he  nods to himself and follows with a confident assurance that by the time the tour ends nine days later, we’ll have turned into a loud, raucous group of friends.

We exchange our names and home cities and favorite railroaders at the introductory dinner and during the bus ride from Denver to the Colorado Railroad Museum, but remain somewhat reserved during our first scheduled stop at the Colorado Railroad Museum. The vast scope of the Museum’s collection distracts from socialization and sends us all off into different directions to search out artifacts from our favorite railroads. No one comes away disappointed: There are relics here from almost every road west of the Mississippi, ranging from Mimbreño pottery to  Union Pacific streamlined cars.

We could probably spend many days at the museum, exploring the collection, but we are due to ride the Georgetown Loop in the afternoon and depart. The two cities are about forty five minute apart by road, and the highway offers a compelling preview of the scenery that defines the Colorado tourist railroads. Someone remarks that the tour ought to advertise the breathtaking tour on the drives just as much as they do the railroads--a comment that will be repeated several times during the duration of the trip.

Halfway to Georgetown, a light rain begins to splatter across the windows. It turns to snow by the time we have driven another few thousand feet upwards. It continues through the duration of the drive and by the time we arrive at Georgetown, it is falling like great white hands and begins to pile on the eaves of the depot and the roofs of the coaches.

This sort of weather is not impossible or even uncommon in Georgetown at this time of year, but it is a pleasant surprise for our group, especially those of us who hail from warm climates.  We huddle under the eaves of the station until it is time to board. There is another surprise in store for us:  Our train will be pulled by the Shay # 9, recently returned to service after an extensive period of repairs.

Snow, steam--few other things refine each other to such high levels of perfection. We find our seats and begin a journey that is, in the words of several of our guests, magical. The snow continues to fall thickly, frosting the trees and bleaching the valleys below us. Even #9 amasses  a few little drifts of snow in the crevasses where the warmth of the boiler does not reach.  

Steam condenses easily in cold temperatures like these, and each curve in the tracks give us glimpses of # 9 trying and failing to outpace its own miasmas. The vapor is often thick enough to obscure the wheels, especially on the busy side of the locomotive. It appears to float over the tracks instead of biting down against the steal, and when we roll over the highest trestles,  we can easily believe that we are in flight.

The circumstances we have lucked into make for a magical trip--our guests use that term often, and with conviction. The unexpected pleasures have  lined up so perfectly that it  seems beyond the realm of happenstance. We are transfixed, elated, anticipating a week creating of inimitable and indelible memories.

We do not hold back in voicing how fortunate we are to be on this train, at this specific moment, and once we have given voice to that gratitude a floodgate of discourse is opened. Every bump in the rail shakes out another personal story, every retrenchment of the slack shakes another bit of conversation out of us. We confide whether our interest in railroading is idiopathic, or rooted in a long familial history of livelihoods earned upon the rails. We admit to gaps in our historical or technical knowledge, fill them in for others where we can.  A few are prompted by the sound of the  9’s whistle to relate their personal memories of the time before steam and passenger railroads were culled; for most of us, the Georgetown Loop and the other locations on our journey are the realest experience with steam railroading we’ll ever collect.

The ride on the Georgetown Loop isn’t a long one, as tourist train rides go, but by the end of it, we have  begun to coalesce as a group.  We have offered the prelude to our life stories, given a glimpse into our backgrounds, sympathized as our companions stumble through attempts to elucidate exactly how much these rides means to them. Between the twenty-seven of us, our lives are as varied and verdant as the mountains, but a love of preserved railroading has begun to weld us together into friends. Of all the circumstances that have come together in our favor, this one is by far the most valuable.