Sidebar by Ed Quillen
Transportation – July 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
The photo on pages 28-29 is by Otto Perry, and comes from the Denver Public Library Western History Collection, which holds the copyright. It is Call Number OP-10893. That also holds for the picture on page 34, except it is Call Number OP-10884. The timetable on page 36 is from Laird Campbell.
We were too cheap to pay the $25 a year it would cost to display those pictures on our website, but if the link still works, you can see those pictures and similar ones at link.
Many thanks to those who shared their recollections of riding passenger trains in Central Colorado: Bill Murphy, Laird Campbell, Gwen Perschbacher, her son Kirby, and Carol Slaughter; also to Suzanne MacDonald for her poem.
Thanks also to Pam Fischhaber, chief of rail and transit safety for the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. She found the 1964 and 1967 rulings in the PUC archives, and dispatched them to Salida faster than an express train could have brought them.
If you’re interested in more, try A Century of Passenger Trains … And Then Some, by Jackson C. Thode. The 2001 edition, published by the Rocky Mountain Railroad Club, is still in print, and available at the Salida Regional Library.
Another good source of Rio Grande passenger lore, though now out of print, is Vanishing Varnish by Gregory LePak, published in 1978 by Alpine Publishing Ltd. of Littleton. Thanks to Becky Nelson of the library for the quick job of summoning this one via interlibrary loan, and to Neil Reich of Durango for suggesting A Century and Vanishing Varnish.
The microfilm archives of The Mountain Mail at the Salida Regional Library were invaluable, of course, and I wish I had enjoyed more time to peruse the Robert Richardson Library at the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden.
