Colorado.... and South Dakota
Over the past 17 days, I've had a wonderful opportunity to visit a part of the USA I'd never experienced before. My wife and I and another couple headed west from Lancaster, Pa. on July 13 on Amtrak's "Pennsylvanian." We changed to the "Capitol Limited" at Pittsburgh, and finally to the "California Zephyr" at Chicago. Our arrival in Denver, Colo. on July 15 was the actual beginning of our adventure.
While our wives toured the Denver state capital building and other sites in the city, my long-time friend Bill and I picked up our rental car and headed out to the Colorado Railroad Museum, where WW&F member and Colorado resident Ira Schreiber met us (we almost didn't recognize him in his bus driver uniform without his battered derby) and conducted a tour of the 13-acre campus, including the shop and roundhouse. We also took a ride in one of the museum's Rio Grande Southern "Galloping Goose" railcars. Since the ride is a loop and is fairly short, each run makes three circuits of the loop.
The next day we (with our wives this time) drove west of Denver about 50 miles to visit the Georgetown Loop Railroad. The Loop line is about 3 miles long and features a towering steel bridge that crosses over its own track (that's the loop part) and Clear Creek. Originally built to haul silver from the mountains, the line was scrapped in 1938, and this section was rebuilt in the late 1960's. Our power was No. 9, a big three-truck Shay, helped along by No. 1203, a rare H.K. Porter diesel recently rebuilt with an Alco 251-model diesel engine. Both engines get a pretty good workout (the Porter smoked more than the steam engine!) hauling a nine-car train up the four percent grade and around sharp curves between Georgetown and the end of the line at Silver Plume. (Note that I'm wearing my WW&F long-sleeve T-shirt -- glad I had it since it was about 48 degrees.)
The bonus for us was on July 18, when we got a chance to escape again while our wives did laundry in Rapid City, S.D. We drove over to Hill City, about 20 miles away, to check out the standard gauge Black Hills Central, which features the only Mallet compound running in the country today. No. 110 is a 2-6-6-2 that puts on quite a show as it clomps up a couple of miles of four percent grade leaving Hill City for Keystone.
All this steam was an extra treat on this trip, which was actually a tour of Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, Devils Towner National Monument and a number of historic sites in Wyoming and South Dakota.