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As much as I enjoy the writings of the late Marshall
Sprague, who lived in Colorado Springs and wrote wonderful
books like Money Mountain
about Cripple Creek and
Massacre: Tragedy at White River
about the Meeker
Massacre of 1879, it now appears that he might have been
wrong about something.
That potential error is in The Great Gates: The Story
of the Rocky Mountain Passes.
The context is the
effort, in the 1880s, to connect Denver to Leadville by the
shortest possible railroad route.
The Denver & Rio Grande's 1880 route -- south to Pueblo, west to Salida, north to Leadville -- was 277 miles long, a considerable detour when it's less than 100 miles as a high-altitude crow might fly.
In 1884, the Denver, South Park & Pacific, then a subsidiary of the Union Pacific, completed a 151-mile route: southwest to Como, where the roundhouse still sands, northwest over Boreas Pass to Breckenridge and Frisco, then over Frémont Pass to Leadville.
That course was the UP's second choice, though. The UP also then owned the Colorado Central line up Clear Creek, due west of Denver, and the rails were already at Georgetown, less than 10 miles from the summit of Loveland Pass.
All they needed to do in 1882 was run tracks over the
pass to Blue River drainage, then cross Frémont Pass
to get to Leadville. As Sprague recounts, the first
three of those miles contained such an inconceivable maze
of trestles, bridges, cuts, shelfs and curves between
Georgetown and Silver Plume as to constitute one of the
greatest of tourist attractions -- the Georgetown Loop --
from 1882 until the thing was torn down in 1937.
The Loop has since been rebuilt, but its initial
construction represented mankind's last attempt to reach
Blue River by rail over Loveland Pass from Georgetown.
And there Sprague might have been wrong, for mankind is
currently pondering another attempt to get from Georgetown
to the Blue River by rail.
That's the plan of the Rocky Mountain Rail Authority, an
intergovernmental agency which in September received a $1.2
million grant from the Colorado Department of
Transportation to study high-speed rail along the
Interstate-25 corridor and the I-70 corridor from Utah
to Denver International Airport.
Just what can this study produce that has escaped notice for the past 150 years or so in that general area? That zone might hold the world record for railroad surveys, starting in 1861 when Denver's movers and shakers tried to get the transcontinental railroad to go due west of town, and lost out to the route through Cheyenne, Wyo.
The main result of those surveys was some nomenclature -- Edward L. Berthoud, a civil engineer looking for a route left his name on a pass, as did William A. H. Loveland, the Golden-based entrepreneur who helped finance Berthoud's explorations.
No suitable rail route could be found then. When Leadville boomed after 1877, the surveyors tried again, and the dead-end Georgetown Loop route was the result.
Denver financier David H. Moffat was president of the Denver & Rio Grande in 1887. He spent $107, 374 on surveys for a route due west from Denver; the corporate directors fired him in 1891 for wasting money this way.
So in 1902 Moffat began building his own railroad, the Denver, Northwestern & Pacific, west from Denver. But it didn't take the I-70 corridor; it went up Coal Creek and South Boulder Creek, over Rollins Pass to Middle Park, down Gore Canyon, then up to Steamboat Springs and Craig, where the money ran out and the line ended.
Moffat was long dead by the time taxpayers built the 6.2-mile Moffat Tunnel that opened in 1927, and the tunnel didn't serve a transcontinental line until 1934 when the Dotsero Cut-off connected it to the Rio Grande's main line above Glenwood Canyon.
Anyway, you'd think that we would have figured out by now that the I-70 corridor does not offer a feasible railroad route, especially a high-speed one that might get people out of their cars. It's a zone of narrow canyons, avalanches, tumbling rocks, deep snow and steep grades where it's hard enough to build a highway -- cars and trucks can handle steeper grades than a train can -- and keep it open.
So I suspect that, once this study is completed, Sprague
will be proven right -- the Georgetown Loop was indeed part
of mankind's last attempt
to go by rail from Clear
Creek to the Blue River.
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