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 stands, northwest over Boreas Pass to Breckenridge and Frisco, then over Fremont 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 Fremont 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.
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 in 1902 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.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
