The Trains That Dare to Touch the Sky

Leadville, and many of the other small towns nestled high up in the Rocky Mountains, make you think that you must have traveled more than an hour or two to get to them. They have a picaresque, timeless look reminiscent of colorful villages in Austria or Germany. The train station at Leadville is one of the most familiar things about the town, one of the only buildings that could be transferred to a main street in any other city in the United States. Our boarding on the Leadville, Colorado and Southern is set back a few minutes so the staff can sweep snow off of the boarding ramps and out of the gondolas: Leadville is above the snow line, and  the precipitation that blew downwards into Georgetown left a new accumulation on top of older drifts that have yet to melt off with any dedication.

Our charter is the LC&S first excursion of the season, essentially a trial run before members of the general public come to ride, and that makes for a more intimate feel than a typical train ride.

The tour members and the employees are equally vested in this ride going well, and the employees seem genuinely welcoming. The whole trip feels more like being invited into someone’s living room than patronizing a place of business, if that part of their domicile included flying hundreds of feet above valleys and birds-eye views of bygone railroad and mining activity--than patronizing a place of business.

Thinking of the trip that way is not too far off base, considering that the LC&S is one of the few  tourist railroads in the industry that is family owned and managed. The entire line would have fallen into abandonment, were it not for one local family’s decision to negotiate for ownership of the route and equipment and transform it from a freight route to a tourist railroad. Several of the family members are aboard the train, and all of them are friendly, welcoming, truly vested in making us feel welcome. That goes beyond expectations, and sticks in our memories far more than the scenery or the equipment.

After the train ride concludes, we drive south-east and in the afternoon arrive in Manitou Springs to ascend Pike’s Peak on the Cog Railway.  This route is far more trafficked than the Leadville route: We had the run of the train there, but here, there is hardly an open seat to be found on the two departing trains. Heavy snows prevent us from going all the way up to the top, but we are still ferried up to a respectable 11,000 feet. This attitude puts us back above the snow line, where the air is thin and the ground and trees are still thickly flocked with white.

What makes the geography of the Cog Railway stand out is that the higher altitudes don’t just reveal natural scenery, they give a panoramic view of Manitou Springs, Colorado Springs, Fountain and Widefield, and other cities planted east of the Front Range. Bringing raw goods to the markets to these cities, and Denver to the north, and all of the municipalities farther East, provided the inspiration to build railroads through the difficult Rocky terrain in the first place.

All of these cities are profuse with standard-gauge freight railroads in modern times--we find ourselves next to a rail yard feeding the Colorado Springs power plant when we check into a downtown hotel for the night--but the modern routes and equipment are so different than their preserved counterparts that it is difficult to remember that all the rails in the state were once joined in a comprehensive network.

Economic changes may have severed the narrow gauge railroads from their larger counterparts,but what remains the same is that these railroads remain the heart and soul of the towns rooted around their termini. They may not haul out valuable cargo like coal or gold, or function as a village’s only means of moving in people and vital supplies, but they breath life and vitality into their surroundings all the same. They may be one part of an economy based on tourism, as with the Cog Railway, or, like the Leadville train, they may provide a livelihood for an entire family and most of a community.

Visitors to tourist railroads also rent hotels and eat at restaurants and spend on other incidentals, and few of the locals we interact with are unaware of the weighty contributions railroad visitors make to the state state economy. They speak of the railroads with reverence, gratitude, a demure-but-deep-seated pride of partaking in something that cannot be replicated elsewhere.It is similar to the Virginian tendency to form a totemic veneration for  preserved railroad equipment, except here in the Rockies, except here, the devotion centers around the present, not a decades-gone pinnacle.

Many of our tour guides expound on the difficulty of building railroads through the Rocky Mountains, and emphasize that the communities along the lines were virtually unreachable without the rails. The builders of those original routes probably would have been surprised by how the tourist railroads have transformed themselves by the twenty first century, but they would still agree on one thing: Let the tracks go cold, and the towns in the High Rockies would go fallow. For all that has changed, the trains are still the lifeblood of their communities.