A High Country Sampling of Colorado's Ghost Railroads
by Paul J. Goetz
The early morning light glowed soft—low in the eastern skies—radiatng out away from the plains like a consuming wildfire, as I drove off of Highway 50 turning into Penrose on Saturday morning. The mountains caught what moisture they could and held low clouds as if to capture mist in a net made of evergreen. Pikes Peak stood guard like a castle's wall when I pulled into a local garage.
Marc Widner, the owner of Penrose Auto Parts, greeted me with a smile. I questioned him about his experiences wandering the abandoned railroad grades in Colorado. “I found something interesting while walking along the old Florence and Cripple Creek grade just outside of Penrose,” he began. “Not far from the roadbed lay the broken piece of a rusted brake shoe.”I knew that it had fallen from the hanger of an old narrow gauge car, and as I held it in my hand I got a funny feeling about it.”
Marc
paused a moment to sip his coffee. “Maybe an engineer and brakeman stood
by a derailed boxcar sometime in the late eighteen hundreds. As they had to
make repairs before continuing on to Florence for the evening, the broken shoe
would cause some delay. The brakeman knew what this delay meant and angrily
threw the broken shoe out into the field.”
Placing his cup next to the computer, Marc continued, “There the rusty brake lay, until almost one hundred years later when I picked it up. The shoe belonged there. I had no business taking it with me, it was kind of eerie, so I placed it back in the dirt, half buried, just as I found it.”
Hunters of ghost railroads look for evidence of activity. Any relic, such as a spike, is like a golden idol in an Indiana Jones movie at once greedily accepted and questioned. Yet some things cannot be taken. They can only be admired from a distance and photographed for the posterity.
A red sandstone depot stands in front of the modern railroad yards in Pueblo. Inside the depot, stained glass splashes colors of red and green reflections onto the floor. The air is old with the smells of oak, faded ashtray dust, and rail yard grease. And just beyond the foyer the windows that looked out onto the coach yard tracks, once filled with the activities of pioneers, settlers, tourists, and soldiers from all of the twentieth century wars, were now empty—devoid of all railroad activity. A chocolate shop, caterer, and offices now occupy the rail nerve center of Pueblo. On the wall outside is a mark where the water rose during the flood of June 1921; it strikes across the surface of the red sandstone—laterally above the top of the door. The line is evidence of the past left there as a reminder and preserved by the depot’s owner.
Down the street from the Victoria Bar in Salida and across the bridge is a strange parking lot. It sits in front of Tenderfoot Hill between the tracks and the city streets. Down by the river the cold water rushes along—blue under the high mountain sky with the gray bare branches of cottonwoods framing Collegiate Peaks to the west. At one time an Art-Deco building stood near a bridge that crossed the Arkansas River. The narrow gauge and standard gauge trains mingled beneath Tenderfoot Hill to the north, and many of the famous photographers of the twentieth century climbed this mountain to take a picture of the yard leaving evidence of what once was.
NEXT: There was little evidence of any human habitation
except for the dam and the road.
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