Welcome to the Wild West - Part #4: Roads and Rails

The Colorado Mountains presented a huge obstacle to transportation throughout Colorado and this was one of the reasons the gold rush didn't start any earlier. But as placer gold deteriorated and more complicated extraction processes were needed, and as Colorado began experiencing its companion silver mining boom, not only were roads necessary, but railroads also became critical to making mining economically viable. They were also necessary to opening up the territory to settlement and development.


Rail and Trail down Ute Pass. Source.

TRAILS:

Trails were first set down by the native Indians but these were nothing more than tracks. As Colorado developed, real roads needed to be constructed to get in and out of the mining camps. Can you imagine how difficult it would've have been to build these roads on the sheer sides of mountains or through deep canyons? But before railroads were built, these were the only means of access and they became very busy indeed despite the tolls lumped on them by private owners. See, since there was a lack of strong communities in the west, or provisions to pressure the government, private road building was a free-for-all.

Mears' Million Dollar Highway. Source.

One of these private road-builders was Russian-born immigrant Otto Mears, who built some 300-450 miles of toll roads in and around the San Juan Mountains in south-western Colorado. With a keen vision, he built his roads in conformations and at grades suitable for railways and subsequently many of his routes were purchased by railway companies moving into the area.

His most enduring legacy is a 25 mile (40km) section of road of what is now US 550 running from Ouray to Silverton. Built in the 1880s, it was cut directly into the side of steep mountains, however, the 12 mile section that spurred the road’s nick-name as The Million Dollar Highway starts just south of Ouray through the Uncompahgre gorge to the summit of Red Mountain Pass.

And not much has changed on that section since, except that it is now paved. Drivers still must negotiate the nail splitting, hair-pulling, narrow twists, turns, and switchbacks running along clear, steep drop-offs. Chase and I travelled this section of road in 2008. Going south we were stuck on the cliff-edge side and even with the snow banks providing a faux guard-rail (since there are none), it was still scary as hell!

There are several legends to why it was called the Million Dollar highway, though nobody knows for sure. One was that it cost a million dollars a mile to build in the 1920s, another that its fill dirt contains a million dollars in gold ore.

1880s                                          (Source)

2000s                                                                          (My photo)

In addition to wagon roads, Mears built railroads and eventually owned four separate lines around the Silverton area.

Ute Pass is another road of historical importance in Colorado, lying west of Colorado Springs in central Colorado. It skirts the north side of Pikes Peak through the Fountain Creek canyon, climbing 3,000 feet to its summit in the settlement of Divide at 9,165 feet, and remains one of only a handful of access points into the Rocky Mountains along Colorado's Front Range.

Having its beginnings as a Native American trail used by the Ute Indians it became the most popular wagon route to the gold-fields by the 1860s. It was also one of the few roads in the mountains that wasn’t a toll road. But it was only a one lane trail and those coming by stagecoach or hauling goods by oxen and cart had to work out a plan so they wouldn't run into each other. It was also steep on the east side, with a 7% gradient. As you can see below, wooden railings were built to keep the animals from falling off the side!

Ute Pass Wagon Train. (Source).

Ute Pass 1890. (Source).

In 1872, to lessen the danger as more traffic headed to the mountains, a new route was built over Ute Pass using Fountain Creek as a guide. It would be widened several times before becoming US highway 24, one of the originals in this new nationwide system.

After the turn of the century, the state started rebuilding and organising roads in response to public pressure and the advent of the automobile, though improvements were scattered and mountain roads were the last to be touched. The city of Denver undertook an aggressive program of building mountain touring roads, including the highest road in the US up Mount Evans (which I hope to go up once the road is reopened after winter) in response to a toll road that was built to the summit of Pike’s Peak in 1917. Convict labour was used extensively to build roads in Colorado beginning in 1905 and the state led the country in its use until abolishing it in 1926.

RAILS:

Denver & Rio Grande Railway. Source

At the time of the Colorado gold explosion, railroads were being built everywhere in America from the east to the west coast. Competition was strong to build the first transcontinental railroad (TC) and while the Union Pacific got the rights, Denver and Colorado were left out of the plans with the line cutting north of the state through the gentler hills of Wyoming, avoiding the Rockies altogether. It was completed on May 10 1869.

Colorado Central narrow gauge train in Clear Creek Canyon
Source

Still, there were a number of Denver businessmen that competed with plans to build their own branch lines north to tie in with the TC line, for without such a vital life-line, the young city of Denver would quickly fall off the map. It didn't take long, and the Denver Pacific Railroad, backed by many prominent local investors, had linked Denver with the TC line at Cheyenne, WY in 1870. It had beaten the Colorado Central Railroad out of nearby Golden to be the first, and with the completion of the Kansas Pacific line to Denver (completed at Strasburg on the Colorado Eastern Plains), the Denver Pacific became integral to the first transcontinental rail link between the east and west coasts of America, and Denver’s future as the State’s Capital was sealed.

Railroad fever took off in Colorado after that, and companies began to spring up in abundance.

The set-back of the Colorado Central (CC)Railroad to build its line north to the TC didn't deter the company's ambitions. First it built a line to link up to Denver before building the first rail lines up to the valuable mining communities west of Golden: Black Hawk, Central City and Idaho Springs. With the help of engineeer Edward Berthoud, they founded a route through Clear Creek Canyon reaching about 50 miles from Denver at its farthest extent. It was short compared to other lines and traversed no spectacular mountain passes, yet it was the prototype for rail lines into Colorado's mountains and of tapping the wealth that lay within them. 

Union Station in Denver Circa 1880. Source

Early railroads all ran on standard gauge track, but Colorado's steep terrain required a narrower gauge railroad. Enter the single-gauge, narrower dimension railroad. The new Denver & Rio Grande Railroad (D&RG), founded by a former director of the Denver Pacific, was the first to introduce these into operation in Colorado which allowed its steam trains and their cars to better negotiate the narrow curving canyons and steep grades in these mountains. With this the D&RG succeeded in connecting central and southern Colorado's high altitude mining towns with Denver, and hence markets back east.

The D&RG was the epitome of mountain
railroading, with a motto of "Through
the Rockies, not around them" and
later "Main line through the Rockies".

At its height, around 1890, the D&RG (now D&RG Western) had the largest operating narrow gauge railroad network in North America and was operating the highest main-line rail line in the US, traversing the Continental Divide at 10,240 ft (3,120m) north of Leadville over Tennessee Pass.

Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Durango, Salida and Gunnison were all towns that began because of the line. Two of its major legacies are the Durango to Silverton line, which was blasted out of sheer cliffs above the Animas River, and the Royal Gorge route, which cut a line through the bottom of one of the deepest canyons in Colorado with the Arkansas River just a few feet from the tracks on one side, and 1,250 foot sheer granite canyon walls on the other. Needless to say, the scenery was spectacular.

One more line of note was the Colorado Midland Railroad, the first standard gauge railroad built over the Continental Divide, running from Colorado Springs to Leadville over Ute Pass, and through the divide to Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction. It was meant to be a serious competitor to the Rio Grande in conquering the Great Divide and constructing the first transcontinental standard gauge railroad through Colorado but due to several problems it only succeeded in becoming a close second and eventually failed.

The Colorado Midland, who's motto was "Throught the mountains, not around"
Source.

Most of Colorado's mountain railroads didn't have a hope to succeed, and the plethora of Colorado Front-Range railroads was as much a competition among cities as among train lines. Too many trains travelled to too many places with no chance of recovering their costs. In fact, as new "hot" mining camps replaced old, dead ones, tracks wandered around the mountains unfinished, searching for a destination. Inevitably, smaller lines fell off the radar or were bought out by the bigger companies after the silver crash and the depression. In fact, none of these Colorado rail companies exist today.

What became of these Railroads?

·       The CC, through a series of reorganizations and acquisitions, eventually became part of the Colorado and Southern (CS) Railway. Its historic mountain lines were dismantled by the mid 20th century but its connecting lines on the Colorado Eastern Plains survive as active lines of BNSF (Burlington Northern & Sante Fe) Railway, a major freight company (of which the CS Railway Company also ended up);

·       The D&RG railroad company is now defunct. Today, most former D&RG main lines are owned and operated by the Union Pacific Railroad;

·       By the 1880s, the Denver Pacific Railroad also merged with the Kansas Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads, with the resulting company retaining the Union Pacific name.

·       The Colorado Midland Railway ceased operations in 1918. Segments of the railroad were then sold to the Midland Terminal Railway; the rest of the line, mostly west of the Midland Terminal connection at Divide, was abandoned. The line was scrapped in the early 1920s.

·       The Union Pacific Railroad remains the largest rail network in the US.

Since the 1990s, 13 railroads, and many scenic historic byways, through some of the most dramatic and beautiful scenery in Colorado, have been revived throughout the Rockies to take modern day tourists on a ride back in time, and reviving some ghost towns in the process.



Above photos from The Colorado Directory