Rio Grande in the 60's

Alamosa to Chama

83 Images

Chama to Durango

45 Images

Durango and its branches

46 Images

Life after abandonment

60 Images

On April 12, 1961 Yuri Alekseyevich Gargarin flew into space and circled the earth in the Vostok spaceship. Meanwhile, a time warp away in Colorado and New Mexico, Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad firemen were still shoveling coal into steam engines and trainmen were riding the tops of old wooden boxcars. Even before it became a preserved railway the DRGW narrow gauge was a living museum of railroad history, steam railroading in the space age.

This is a gallery of my photos taken between 1960 to 1970 along those Rio Grande narrow gauge lines between Alamosa and Durango, and the branches to Silverton and Farmington. It also includes a few more recent pictures of operations on the Durango and Silverton and Cumbres & Toltec Scenic railways, preserved portions of the Rio Grande narrow gauge. Even though the images were captured during the beginnings of the "space age", in many respects they document railroading the way it used to be, even 100 years ago. The D&RGW narrow gauge was something of an island in time, largely bypassed by technological progress.

The pictures in the first three albums are shown in geographical order, starting at Alamosa and working west. In addition to the pictures, I have added some images of the clearances and trainorders issued to move traffic on the line. The "Life after Abandonment" album is in chronological order.

The color originals are 35mm slides, mostly Kodachrome II. Those taken in 1960 are Anscochrome and Ektachrome. The slides were scanned at 4000 dpi and digitally enhanced in Photoshop. The B&W images are from 2-1/4 inch square negatives, printed in my darkroom as 8x10 prints, scanned on an hp flatbed scanner, and digitally processed in Photoshop.

Starting in January 1960 I made more or less annual trips the the narrow gauge, occasionally two trips. By that time it was about the last place in the U. S. or Canada where "mainline" steam operated on a regular basis. Until 1965 the narrow gauge was reasonably busy year round, with freight trains running somewhere on the system at least six days per week. Plus the daily Silverton during the summer.

Then in late 1964 the Oriental Refinery in Alamosa closed. Crude oil for the refinery was carried from Chama to Alamosa in the "Gramps" tank cars, and had been a major source of year round traffic. Without the crude oil traffic the railroad began shuting down for the winter, typically from the end of December to April, to avoid the high cost of snow removal over Cumbres. About the same time the busy pipe and drilling mud traffic to Farmington began dropping off as the natural gas "boom" subsided, and what pipe and mud was needed quickly could be moved by substitute trucks when necessary. In the last several years of operation my visits became less frequent because train operations were much less predictable, often only one or two trains per month.

My last visit to the real "Rio Grande" narrow gauge was in 1970 when only the Silverton branch was still run by the DRGW.

Most of my trips were made with Gordon Chappell, a college friend, who over the years has become probably the definitive historian of the line. Other traveling companions on those trips were Rey Barraza, John Holt, Bryan Whipple, and Bob Field. Those were pre-internet days, so a lot of the trips were "shots in the dark" since we had very limited information about when or if trains would run. Toward the end I made several visits only to find nothing running.

Again, thanks to John Craft who located the software, hosts the site, and provides world class support.

John West

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