There’s something exciting about activity on a dormant railroad track. A few such activities between 1912-1915 came to my attention recently related to the Gunnison branch.
The first took place on the way to the east portal of Alpine Tunnel. The C&S sent its last train through the tunnel on November 10, 1910, though cleanup trains appear to have traveled through the bore in December. The track, however, stayed in place as the railroad didn’t actually abandon the route. Some have surmised that the C&S feared courts might order them to open the route again as happened when the railroad attempted to also shut down the Boreas Pass route around the same time.
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| C&S grade west of Hancock |
For two years the track above Hancock lay dormant when the railroad needed a bit of 56 lb. rail, presumably to replace rail elsewhere on active track. In late summer, August 1912 the C&S sent a crew to pull up a half mile of 56 lb. rail a little west of Hancock. The curious part is that, even though the track there remained inactive, the crew replaced that half mile when they re-laid aged 35 lb. rail.
The rail remained in place until 1924 when the railroad’s chosen contractor William Turner dismantled it. Good thing that it was still there for all those years because it allowed some local frivolity.
As reported in a 1915 Buena Vista newspaper, in August a group of at least nine men and women were having some fun by riding a push car by gravity from the east portal of Alpine Tunnel downgrade to Romley. The track must have been clear enough to pull this off even after five years of disuse. Even if the track was in decent shape, it must have been an arduous task to get that car up the grade to the tunnel!
The joyride took a turn when the man in charge of the brake, Rick Hagardane, lost control. In fear of careening off any of the many upcoming curves, an assayer on the ride by the last name of McCarry jumped into action, literally. He wrapped a rope around himself and jumped off the back to be a human brake. His hope was to slow the car enough to allow the women to jump off safely.
Three women did jump and all got quite banged up with one breaking her collarbone. McCarry succeeded in eventually stopping the car after about a mile. The remaining passengers must have breathed quite a sigh of relief! Ironically, the ‘Human Brake’ McCarry only ended up with a few bruises. Some elements of this story seem like a “tall-tale”, but who knows?
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| Garo 2017. By Jeffrey Beall - Own work, CC BY 4.0 |
came back to life briefly. After two years of inactivity, on the night of November 11, 1912, an Alma newspaper reported the C&S ran a train “up for Garo and handled ten cars of freight from Cohen’s spur.” During the intervening years, wires had even been put up across the tracks. The crew had to cut these to get the train through. Interestingly, the newspaper also stated, “There have been reports before that the railroad was running trains at night over parts of this road, but it has been impossible to learn anything definite until recently.”
Now, if we could just get someone to re-lay the Gunnison branch tracks again in 2026, what fun it would be! In the meantime, the good news is that it’s happening for real in the Como yards.
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| Grading on the old Gunnison branch in Como, 2021 |
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| You can see the Gunnison tracks in the top right corner, 2026 |
Both above photos are screenshots from videos on the Denver South Park & Pacific Historical Society Youtube channel.
Sources:
Historic Alpine Tunnel by Dow Helmers
The South Park Line: A Concise History, CO Rail Annual No. 12 by Gordon Chappell, Robert W. Richardson, and Cornelius Hauck
A Documentary History of the South Park Line: Vol. 5, The Gunnison District, Part II by Daniel W. Edwards
