Sidebar by Ed Quillen
Medicine – April 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
In 1885, Salida was well on its way to becoming the center of Colorado’s main transportation network – the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad.
Trains from every direction once passed through Salida. To the east the tracks ran to the Royal Gorge, Cañon City, Pueblo, Colorado Springs and Denver.
On the west, the rails crossed Marshall Pass to the Gunnison Country, Grand Junction, Salt Lake City and eventually the West Coast. The line north ran to Leadville; it would eventually be extended over Tennessee Pass to Glenwood Springs and points west. By 1890, the line to the south over Poncha Pass connected Salida to Alamosa and the San Juan Country.
Salida had railroad shops to repair locomotives and rolling stock. Railroaders needed repairs too – it was a dangerous occupation in those times – and so Salida was a sensible location for a medical facility.
The Denver & Rio Grande Railroad Hospital was built in Salida in 1885. It burned down in 1899, and was replaced with a new building that still stands as the core of the current hospital. In 1925, a two-story patient wing was added to the hospital.
After World War II, the railroad began cutting back on its mountain operations, and the narrow-gauge lines from Salida were abandoned in the 1950s. Diesel locomotives didn’t need nearly as much maintenance as their steam-powered ancestors, and the railroad cut back on its Salida labor force to the extent that “abandoning” its Salida hospital made corporate sense.
So in 1962, the railroad put the hospital up for sale. Two outside companies offered to buy it, but a group of local leaders raised money to purchase the hospital. They ran it as a private corporation until 1976, when the Salida Hospital District, which can collect local property taxes, was formed to acquire and operate the hospital.
The district bought the hospital from the local owners. In the early 1980s, the hospital was expanded for a new intensive care unit, laboratory, emergency room, and two additional patient rooms. In 1989, it was rechristened as the Heart of the Rockies Regional Medical Center.
E.Q. (with some extensive cribbing from the “History” portion of the HRRMC website. The photo is from a 1920s picture postcard in the Salida Regional Library Local History Archives.)