A Colorado railroads respite: Rails in the Rockies that renew

One of the joys of railroading is the places that it takes you. This dispatch is about the unique hijacking of the spirit and soul by train, and how it takes you to physical and emotional places, both new and familiar.

I spent the last week with my wife, Cate, in Colorado. It was meant to be a promotional tour for our new Colorado Railroads magazine and DVD: Visits with employees and friends of the Durango & Silverton and members of the Rocky Mountain Railroad Club. It was all that and much more: We visited friends, authors, and photographers who helped put together this magazine and video on one of the great railroad states. It was also a research trip for future projects, and the opportunity to take off a few needed days off to relax, hike, and enjoy nature (the Cub Lake Trail in Rocky Mountain National Park is a fun, interesting trail with a creek flowing through it in many places during spring runoff). To my amazement, we accomplished all of this, and much more. Best of all, around every bend, the railroads of Colorado talked to us.  

In between all of the scheduled activities, we traced abandoned grades of the Denver, South Park & Pacific and Colorado Midland railroads and wondered what it must have been like for those who built these gravity defying routes and those who ran the trains. We stood on the platform of the Durango & Silverton’s observation car Knight Sky as the snow blew sideways in the Animas River Canyon. We let the cold and wind take away our breath at the summit station on the Pikes Peak Cog Railway. We imagined a locomotive sitting under the spout, taking a drink from the Rio Grande tank at South Fork. We stood in a pelting rain while BNSF freights struggled southbound on the Joint Line near Castle Rock. We thrilled to the sight of trains negotiating curve after curve on Union Pacific’s Moffat Tunnel  route. We mourned for Rio Grande’s Tennessee Pass route with a few moments of silent reverence at Salida. And we strayed across the border into Wyoming to appreciate Union Pacific’s wise decision to bypass Colorado with its original transcontinental alignment via Sherman Hill in 1867.

All the while, the railroads of Colorado spoke to us once more of grandeur, of struggle, and of places well known that would be new again and places yet to be seen on this trip and trips in the days and years ahead.