Remarkable Colorado 3ft museum
James Waite concludes his series on Colorado, recalling an impressive museum visit in 2011.
The Colorado Railroad Museum at Golden, in the Clear Creek valley around 20 miles west of Denver, owes its existence to Bob Richardson and Cornelius Hauck.
Bob came from Pennsylvania and fell in love with the Colorado narrow gauge after making his first visit in 1941. After war service overseas he moved to the state and set up the Narrow Gauge Motel in Alamosa, which soon became a home from home for visiting enthusiasts – encouraged by the journal Narrow Gauge News which Bob wrote and published from time to time in the 1940s and 1950s.
In 1950 he purchased Rio Grande C-19 class 2-8-0 no 346 (Baldwin 5712/1881) and put it on display at the motel. Soon after it was joined by two other locos.
One was Rio Grande C-18 class 2-8-0 no 318 (Baldwin 14769/1896) which started life as no 8 ‘Goldfield’ of the Florence & Cripple Creek Railroad. It was purchased from the Rio Grande by Cornelius, an enthusiast from Ohio. The other was the Florence & Cripple Creek’s 4-6-0 no 20 (Schenectady 5007/1899). After the line closed in 1915 it moved to the Rio Grande Southern where it retained its number and ran until its closure in 1951. No 20 was rescued by the Rocky Mountain Railroad Club and dispatched to the motel for safe keeping.
The motel business closed later in the 1950s. Bob and Cornelius bought a plot of farmland on the eastern outskirts of Golden and opened the museum in 1959, initially to house the locos from the motel. Over the years its collection expanded exponentially and came to fill what must have initially appeared to be a vast site.
Bob continued to devote his energies to the museum until he retired in 1991 at the age of 81, and returned to join family members in Pennsylvania. He died in 2007. It’s fair to say that the work he did in bringing the Colorado narrow gauge to the attention of a wide audience must have been one of the biggest factors which led ultimately to the preservation of the Silverton and Cumbres lines as well as many of the state’s locos, carriages and wagons.
The main museum building is a replica 1880s station. It houses an extensive and fascinating small exhibits collection and what must be one of the best-stocked narrow gauge bookshops anywhere in the world. There’s a separate library building and a replica roundhouse and repair shop. The collection of large exhibits, both standard and narrow gauge, is enormous. For many people the star
attraction will be the six 3ft gauge steam locos which now live there.
There are also five standard gauge ones, most of them with at least some historical association with the state. They include 2-8-0 no 583 (Baldwin 11207/1890), the only surviving Rio Grande standard gauge loco. The railroad scrapped its redundant steam locos with almost indecent haste back in the 1950s and no 583 only survived thanks to having been sold to the San Luis Valley Southern Railroad back in 1947. To my untutored eye it looked remarkably like its 3ft gauge 2-8-0s!
Other important exhibits include three Galloping Geese from the Rio Grande Southern, improbable-looking railcars which were more or less home-made, a business car from the same line and several Denver & Rio Grande Western carriages, vans and cabooses.
Long-term residents
The oldest loco exhibit is 3ft gauge 2-8-0 no 51 from the Denver, South Park & Pacific Railroad (Baldwin 4919/1880) which was later renumbered 191 and later still became Colorado & Southern Railroad no 31. It then moved to a logging concern and spent 30 years or so in increasingly poor condition at a museum in Wisconsin before arriving at Golden in about 1973.
This loco has now been magnificently restored to something like its original condition, albeit as a static-only exhibit as it would need a new boiler compliant with the stringent Federal Railroad Administration’s constructional methods before it could run again.
In addition to nos 318 and 346 another long-term narrow gauge resident is DRGW K-37 class 2-8-2 no 491, one of 10 of these locos which were rebuilt from standard gauge 2-8-0s by the Rio Grande at its Burnham shops between 1928 and 1930. It was previously no 1026 (Baldwin 20829/1908) and was withdrawn from service in 1970 after the closure of the Alamosa-Durango-Farmington line. The loco has been at Golden since 1985 – when I visited in 2011 it was a static exhibit but it has since been restored to working order.
Two three-truck Shays came to the museum from the Georgetown Loop Railroad at Silver Plume, 40 miles or so further west up the Clear Creek valley, after the organisation which had run the line for many years was evicted by its owners in 2004 and replaced by a different operator. They ended their years of commercial service with the West Side Lumber Co’s railway in California, which had become the last surviving 3ft gauge logging railway in the western US when it closed in 1961.
Sadly efforts to preserve the line were unsuccessful, though some of the track remained in situ as late as the early 2000s and may still be there. The nine locos it possessed at the closure (two Heislers and seven Shays) have all survived.
The locos at the Golden museum are nos 12 (Lima 3302/1927) and 14 (Lima 2835/1910). No 12 started out life as no 6 of the Swayne Lumber Company’s railway at Oroville, California which closed in 1938. No 14 was built for the Sierra Nevada Wood and Lumber Company’s system which straddled the border of California and Nevada near Reno. Some 16 years after their arrival they look to have become long-term exhibits despite having no connection with Colorado before preservation.
Crowded out
Surrounding the Golden site there’s a circuit of 3ft gauge track, perhaps half a mile long altogether. No 346 is the oldest working loco in the state and is steamed on a few days each year. More frequently one of the Galloping Geese runs on the circuit.
I visited while changing planes at Denver on my way home from Durango. It was perhaps not the best occasion to choose as it coincided with a ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ weekend. Thomas is phenomenally popular in the USA and the site, while extensive by the standards of many railway museums, was packed with families. The museum had the use of the enormous parking lot at the Coors brewery nearby but even this was full. Photography was well-nigh impossible with all these people around but the museum’s volunteers kindly let me stay on to take my photos after the site had closed to the public.
RGS no 20 was sent to the Strasburg Railroad in Pennsylvania in the early 2000s for restoration to full working order. I called in there in October 2011 and was shown round the well-equipped workshops where it was one of two locos being overhauled. My guide showed me how the middle ring of the boiler had been severely dented after a derailment, not an uncommon event on the lightly laid RGS tracks. It’s said that after the derailment the RGS management always arranged for the loco to be parked in a dark corner whenever the insurance inspector was due! Needless to say the boiler, which was otherwise in quite good condition, now has a new lower middle ring welded in.
No 20 returned to Golden in 2019 for final fettling, fitting of components and painting, and first steamed again in 2020. Covid permitting it is expected to visit the Cumbres & Toltec later this year.
The museum has always been run on a not-for-profit basis. I couldn’t find any way of getting there by
public transport. It took me about half an hour to drive there along the motorway from Denver airport on a Sunday afternoon. It’s undoubtedly one of the finest museums anywhere, especially for its collection of narrow gauge locos and stock and for its small exhibits. The Silverton and Cumbres lines are the main attractions in Colorado but it is well worth finding the time to call at the museum if passing through Denver on the way to visit them.
Huckleberry Railroad
Away from Colorado two more C-19 class 2-8-0s have run for many years at Knott’s Berry Farm theme park near Los Angeles. K-27 class 2-8-2 no 464 (Baldwin 21796/1903), the last of its class in service, joined them in 1973 but was found to be too large. In 1982 it moved to the Huckleberry Railroad at Flint, Michigan.
This line is about four miles long and was built in 1976 by the local authority at Flint, then one of the centres of Michigan’s automotive industry, to provide an imaginative leisure facility for its citizens. It uses the trackbed of an old Pere Marquette Railroad standard gauge branch which had closed the previous year. Its construction was one of many cultural and recreational initiatives undertaken at the town which was enjoying a period of considerable prosperity, though this would soon come to an end.
The car factories have now closed and Flint has become an extreme example of a rustbelt community. However the railway and the open-air museum of which it is a part, a place which provides a second home for interesting but redundant buildings from this part of Michigan, are all the more appreciated.
The railway is also home to Alaska Railroad 3ft gauge 4-6-0 no 152 (Baldwin 53296/1920). Both locos were in use when I visited on a very cold day in January 2019. No 464 was about to be withdrawn for heavy overhaul and it was good to see them running together.
The Huckleberry line was able to obtain some very interesting carriages including several from the Yucatan railways in Mexico, two from the Rio Grande and one from the RGS. Unfortunately it paints them yellow, not quite as bright a shade as the carriages at the Durango & Silverton but still unphotogenic, so I tried views in which the colour wouldn’t be too noticeable.
A third loco, 2-8-0 no 4 (Baldwin 24306/1904), from the 3ft gauge FC Potosí y Rio Verde in central Mexico, is plinthed midway along the line as a part of a logging train exhibit. It’s another very pretty machine.