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Last winter, when the Post announced the itinerary for the Ride-the-Rockies tour just completed, I noticed that Salida was a stop, and that was about as far as my interest extended then.
But when the tour started last week and I read more, something looked familiar about the route -- a big rectangle, more or less, with corners at Alamosa, Durango, Montrose and Salida.
A century ago, that course was a Colorado tourist
attraction known as the Narrow-Gauge Circle,
promoted extensively by the passenger department of the
Denver & Rio Grande Railroad.
(For those unfortunates who aren't railroad buffs,
standard-gauge tracks have 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches between the
rails. There are a variety of narrow-gauges,
but in
Colorado, it was three feet between the rails.)
The tour could start in either Salida or Alamosa, aboard a standard-gauge train from Denver via Pueblo. Assuming a Salida start, the train went over Poncha Pass and then to Alamosa; the jagged Sangres loomed to the east, but for nearly 60 miles, the train followed the longest straight stretch of narrow-gauge track in the world.
From Alamosa, the tracks continued south to Antonito.
One branch (the Chili Line
) continued south to Santa
Fe, but the Narrow Gauge Circle went west over Cumbres Pass
to Chama, N.M. (preserved now as the Cumbres & Toltec
Scenic RR), and on to Durango.
The Narrow-Gauge Circle travelers faced a choice in Durango. If they wanted to make the circuit completely by rail, they took the Rio Grande Southern through Mancos and over Lizard Head Pass to reach Ridgway.
If they were willing to ride in a buckboard or a primitive auto, then they could take the train to Silverton, switch to the short-line Silverton Railroad over Sheridan Pass (what Otto Mears called Red Mountain Pass), and leave the rails for a few miles of terrifying switchbacks to Ouray, where they could again board a narrow-gauge train.
The two variations joined at Ridgway, where the train proceeded north to Montrose. There the narrow-gauge proceeded east, over Cerro Summit, then down Cimarron Creek into the upper portions of the Black Canyon, and up the Gunnison River to Gunnison, then over Marshall Pass to Salida.
The circle remained unbroken until 1947, when the Rio Grande abandoned a few miles of unstable track near Cimarron. The abandonments continued for another 20 years -- Poncha Pass and the Valley line in 1951, the Rio Grande Southern in 1952, Marshall Pass in 1955, etc. The only remnant rails are the Durango & Silverton and the Cumbres & Toltec, and they've got problems this year on account of the drought and the danger that their coal-fired steam locomotives will emit stray sparks.
But in a larger sense, there's another remnants -- the commercial geography of the southwestern corner of our state. The narrow-gauge circle connected with standard-gauge lines in four places: Salida, Alamosa, Montrose and Durango (the line from Durango to Farmington, N.M., was originally built standard-gauge with any eye to connecting with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad in the area of Gallup, N.M.)
At each of these four towns, the railroad had to build interchange facilities, which meant steady payrolls, which meant that commercial centers would evolve. And even if the railroad is no longer a player in that regard, the towns have continued as commercial and distribution centers. Each is a postal service sectional center for mail processing, and each boasts an immense Wal-Mart.
Why did this railroad geography persist even after the rails went away? It didn't happen in other parts of the state -- the old railroad town of Minturn, for instance, is greatly overshadowed by upstart neighbors like Vail and Avon.
The answer might be that there is a fundamental difference between a two-lane highway and a four-lane highway. The old Narrow-Gauge Circle is in a land of two-lane highways, and those roads were built to connect existing towns.
Move to the newer four-lane world of Interstate 70, and note first that it wasn't built to connect towns, but cities -- Denver, Grand Junction, and Salt Lake City. If it happened to serve any other existing places, that was by happenstance, and in the process, it formed a barrier rather than a thoroughfare within the towns -- witness Idaho Springs and Glenwood Springs, both sundered by the Interstate.
These four-lane corridors produce their own off-ramp towns, just as the railroad in the 1880s created its own towns at the expense of existing wagon-road settlements like Nathrop, Gardner and Saguache.
Thus preserving the character of this corner of the state means resisting four-lane highways, and now that a few thousand more people have enjoyed the modern equivalent of the Narrow-Gauge Circle, perhaps there will be more allies in this noble cause.
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