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Right on schedule, the westbound California Zephyr pulled out of Denver's Union Station Friday morning, and I was aboard it.
Certainly it makes more sense to go directly from Salida to Grand Junction than it does to drive from Salida to Denver and then take the train to Grand Junction. However, the last passenger train between Salida and Grand Junction ran in 1964, and it's been so long since I hopped a freight that I've pretty much forgotten how.
Besides, this was a family outing. Martha and I and our two daughters traveled with my parents to visit my brother, Tony, and his wife, Kathy.
The high point of the trip, at least in a literal sense, is the Moffat Tunnel, bored beneath the Continental Divide in 1928.
Running rails due west of Denver was the lifelong dream of financier David H. Moffat, a genuine pioneer who arrived in Denver in 1860 and went on to derive fortunes from mines in Leadville, Creede and Cripple Creek. Moffat died in 1911 and never saw the tunnel that bears his name.
The rails then wound over Rollins Pass, 11,660 feet
above sea level. Like many other ignorant people (among
them the Colorado Division of Wildlife with its sign on the
west side), the announcer on the train called this crossing
Corona Pass.
Corona was merely the railroad station at the summit. The man who completed the wagon road over that pass in 1873 was another pioneer, John Quincy Adams Rollins. He too deserves to be remembered, not least because in 1866 he won 11,000 pre-inflation gold dollars in a 32-hour billiard game above Brendlinger's Cigar Store on Blake Street in Denver.
After the big tunnel, the trip is canyon after canyon: Fraser, Byers, Gore, Little Gore. At Bond, Moffat's original rail line takes off for Craig, where it ends. The Zephyr follows the Colorado River to Dotsero.
Geology buffs know Dotsero as the site of Colorado's most recent volcanic eruption, a mere 4,000 years ago. It is also the junction of the Eagle and Colorado rivers, each paralleled by rails.
For generations, the Arkansas River provided the most useful route into the mountains from the east. The old narrow-gauge main line branched off at Salida to cross Marshall Pass; the standard-gauge line continued up the Arkansas to cross Tennessee Pass before descending the Eagle River to the Colorado, and then westward through Glenwood Canyon.
Pueblo was the gateway; through it rolled the wealth of Leadville, Aspen, Ouray, Silverton, etc. Small wonder that Pueblo was Colorado's second-largest city, a Democratic stronghold with ample political clout.
So considerable was its power that Pueblo was able to obstruct all political efforts at building a railroad tunnel due west of Denver. Then came a disastrous flood in 1922. Pueblo needed state help; the trade-off was that Pueblo would quit blocking construction of the Moffat Tunnel.
Pueblo was right to fight the tunnel, for southern Colorado has suffered ever since. The main route across the Rockies became a quiet branch line. The Western Slope water brought through the pioneer bore of the Moffat Tunnel has enabled Denver's Republican suburbs to grow and grow as Democratic Pueblo declined.
Those Republicans of Jefferson and Arapahoe counties
keep electing politicians who call themselves
conservatives.
Conservatives like Sen. Bill
Armstrong that prattle endlessly about preserving
traditional lifestyles, values, etc.
What could be more traditional than a family trip aboard a train? Wouldn't a real conservative be in favor of such things?
Not our Sen. Armstrong. He denounces Amtrak as pork-barrel spending. He has said the government shouldn't be subsidizing transportation.
Highways get built with federal money, and he manages not to oppose that. The airlines get 50 times as much in federal subsidies as Amtrak does, and to my knowledge, our senior senator hasn't denounced that. Whenever Denver gets a new airport, constructed at public expense of course, he'll certainly make sure he's visible at the ground-breaking or ribbon-cutting.
As our subsidized train kept rolling westward, next to
subsidized Interstate 70 and beneath subsidized jets, it
occurred to me that we ought to call Armstrong's brand of
politics by its true name: not conservatism,
but
opportunism.
That's probably why he doesn't want you
to ride a train. It gives you time to think.
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