By Mike Rosso
I’d like to start off with a bit of business.
Last month, due to negligence on the part of our new printer, many of you received only a portion of the July issue and in some cases, only the cover. The problem lay with the “stitch and trim” process, the last order of business before the magazines are shipped to us. With apparently little oversight, the printers allowed over 900 copies of the magazine to be shipped with compromised stitching, resulting in many magazines falling apart in transit.
This was disastrous for us as we spent a good portion of the past month repackaging and resending magazines – time we could have spent researching articles, selling advertising, and other day-to-day business. We’re happy with the quality of the actual printing but when the last worker neglects to do their job well, the entire works fail. We’ve been promised this will not happen again and if you are reading this, chances are they’ve corrected the problems. If you were one of the unlucky ones to have not received an intact version of the July issue, please contact us by email at cozinemag@gmail.com or give a call at 719-530-9063 and we’ll make it right.
Did you know Colorado Central Magazine is partially named after a railroad? In the inaugural issue of the magazine from March 1994, Ed and Martha Quillen explained it thus:
“As for the name Colorado Central, we first sought a convenient name for a region described as “little mountain towns that were abandoned by mainstream America in about 1982, and evolved their own ways of doing things, and now face renewed interest from the real world, which could cause a lot of problems.”
Nothing fit. “Upper Arkansas Valley” is a mouthful, and it omits Park and Saguache counties. “Peaks Region” or “Rocky Mountains” or similar locutions are too imprecise.
Eventually we recalled that the geographic center of Colorado is near Hartsel. We’re in central Colorado. That’s our part of the world – the center, the core, the heart, el corazón. Colorado revolves around us.
Reverse the words of “central Colorado,” and there’s the name of a pioneer railroad – the narrow-gauge line that once ran from Golden to Blackhawk. Not quite this area, but Colorado Central was too fitting a name to abandon just because that railroad never reached this region, its intended terminus.”
(The entire editorial can be found at www.coloradocentralmagazine.com/1994-march/adventures-in-a-start-up/)
We asked our resident rail guy, Forrest, to come up with a little history of that railroad since he is a former Gilpin County commissioner and knows where the bodies – er, tracks – are buried. The rest of the magazine came together like a Johnston coupler, as this region is chock full of rail history and continues to have some active tracks (Leadville, Cañon City, Antonito and Alamosa).
Will the rails in Salida and Buena Vista ever see action again? Not very likely. The Union Pacific still owns the right-of-way and has no financial incentive to run trains on that line, but the fact the tracks are still in place leaves a glimmer of hope.
[InContentAdTwo] For now, we still have Amtrak, and both the Southwest Chief and California Zephyr run through Colorado. The Zephyr runs from Chicago to Emeryville, California, and can be picked up at Amtrak Stations in Fort Morgan, Denver, Fraser, Granby, Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction. The Chief can be picked up in Lamar, La Junta and Trinidad. Sleeping accommodations, dining cars, café cars, quiet cars and observation cars are available on all cross -country trains.
Trump has proposed major cuts to Amtrak’s funding. $630 million would be cut from subsidies for long-distance Amtrak service, nearly half of its $1.404 billion funding from the previous year. His justification for removing funding to long-distance rails is that they are often not on time and are operating at a loss.
Ways to prevent these cuts include contacting your representatives and buying a train ticket for an Amtrak train today. www.amtrak.com, 1-800-USA-RAIL
We hope you enjoy this issue, even if you don’t foam at the mouth at the sight of a train!
