Denver metro voters already approved FasTracks once, and many of us would vote for increasing it another 0.4 percent to keep it on track. Unfortunately, our political leaders are not leading on this issue. Instead they are tiptoeing around, fearing any tax increase and looking at polls.
Fortunately, Denver’s pioneer leaders championed rail construction instead of taking polls to see which way the wind was blowing, as today’s leaders do. When the Union Pacific announced it was bypassing Colorado for Wyoming as the route of the transcontinental railroad, Denver’s 1860s movers and shakers did not hesitate. They did not fret about reelection chances, taking more polls, or being dumped into the nearest harbor by the Tea Party.
Back in the 1860s, Coloradans faced even tougher times than ours today. The Civil War, Indian wars, stagnation in the mining industry, and then the loss of the transcontinental railroad created the very real possibility that Denver would become just another of the hundreds of ghost towns littering the Colorado landscape.
The new Union Pacific town of Cheyenne, Wyo., aimed to replace Denver as the Rocky Mountain transit hub. Denver, crowed the Cheyenne Daily Leader, “was too close to Cheyenne to ever amount to much.”
Territorial Gov. John Evans, Rocky Mountain News editor William N. Byers and other leaders decided that if the railroads would not build to Denver, Denver must build to the railroads.
Evans, appointed governor by President Abraham Lincoln, had also been appointed by Lincoln to the transcontinental railroad commission. With unwavering commitment, Evans pushed a Denver railroad at all costs.
Addressing railroad builders wary of the Colorado Rockies as a barrier, editor Byers even reshaped Colorado geography, turning mountains into mole hills: “The profile of the country is fully described when we say hilly; but few elevations attaining the prominence of mountains.”
Gen. Grenville M. Dodge, chief engineer of the Union Pacific, disagreed after his surveyors encountered a blizzard on the proposed Berthoud Pass route in November of 1866.
After stepping down as governor in 1864, John Evans spearheaded the creation of the Denver Pacific Railway and became its president. Denverites bought Denver Pacific stock with cash or with promises of working on the roadbed or supplying railroad ties. They voted in a Jan. 20, 1868, election — 1,210 for and 15 against endorsing a railroad bond issue.
Much of the town turned out on May 18, 1868 for groundbreaking on the 106-mile-long lifeline to Cheyenne and a connection with the transcontinental railroad. A band struck up “The Railroad Gallop,” a keg of beer was tapped, and track laying began.
Two years later, Denver celebrated the official completion of its first railroad — and rode the rails into flush times that transformed a tiny town in the middle of nowhere into the metropolis of the Rockies.
If leaders and voters today follow the pioneer example, the Denver area could complete 119 miles of metro lines by 2016. Expediting FasTracks will also accelerate restoration of Denver’s glorious Union Station. It will be reborn as a multimodal transit hub for bicycles, buses, pedestrians, light and commuter rail.
Although current plans do not reincarnate the old Welcome Arch, the huge O-gauge model railroad layout in the basement of Union Station since 1935 will be preserved as a celebration of how earlier, bolder Coloradans whole-heartedly embraced rails to the future.
Tom Noel welcomes your comments at and invites you to join him on rail tours this summer.
