I know a little bit about it -- I just drove along that line three weeks ago and looked into why it was there and who has been maintaining it. It was the Denver & Rio Grand Tourist Line until 2016. The gentleman who owns it and his brother have been maintaining the track. There was a NARCOA group there about a month ago. Apparently higher insurance costs led to the 2016 closing after an accident that injured a couple of passengers. The RR is for sale. Asking price is $3.4 million.
The line was one of the early extensions of the Denver & Rio Grand Western Railroad (Cumbres & Toltec and Durango & Silverton were also parts of that RR). David Moffat was the president of the D&RGW RR at that time and the Board in NY would not agree to finish the extension up to Creede, CO, even though there were a lot of new mines being developed in Creede. So Moffat resigned as president of the D&RGW and built the line himself! Not too long afterward the Denver & Rio Grande had a change of heart and ended up acquiring the line. Creede went from nothing to 10,000+ residents in about 6 months.
The line from South Fork to Creede travels mostly right along the Rio Grande River in a beautiful valley with mountains on both sides. Several attractive bridges cross the river and the scenery is gorgeous. However Creede does not want the train in town -- they claim they already have too many tourists. They actually pursued and won a reverse abandonment (I think that's what they called it) suit and took over the last mile of the RR into town.
The track at South Fork is standard gauge track and it still connects to the larger rail network via Alamosa (where Iowa Pacific has much of its rolling stock).
"adverse abandonment"
The issue was use of a parking lot that was the Creede station grounds. The town fathers, idiots that they were and still are, assumed the line was abandoned - it wasn't. But Shanks & Co. were not a common carrier railroad and flunked every FRA test in the book, plus a few STB rules. They were shiny toys people and not railroaders. STB took both sides out behind the woodshed more than once. Monte Vista is also at war with Shanks (and to a lesser degree Iowa Pacific/ Ellis over what evolved there)
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