Alpine Tunnel on Two Wheels

 I happened on the video below and thought it was worth sharing. Yes, it is a couple guys on electric dirt bikes, but they do a nice job showing the amazing scenery and engineering of the west side of Alpine/Altman Pass. It is peppered with occasional narration about the railroad and the facilities at the west portal. Some of it is a little off (i.e. the main freight hauled was coal not silver), but most is correct. Either way, it's always a joy to see this amazing line. The one part that saddens me is to see all the hard-won restoration work on the west portal facilities accomplished by Ray Rossman and the Passport In Time program slowly disintegrating. Their work, done from the 1990s through the early 2000s and building on past preservation efforts, revitalized so many of the ruins there. Now, however, paint is pealing, weather (and vandalism or, at least, carelessness) is taking its toll, and nature is again fighting to reclaim its place. 

Signs of Life on the Gunnison Branch, 1912-1915

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.

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? 

Garo 2017. By Jeffrey Beall - Own work,
CC BY 4.0

Lastly, a bit to the east of the above happenings, a three-mile stretch of inactive Gunnison branch track
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.

Grading on the old Gunnison branch in Como, 2021

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

Views of C&S Rice Yard turntable and roundhouse (1)

 You can find a great album of 1988 photos of the old C&S Rice Yard roundhouse and turntable in Denver from the Historic-Structures website.

What happened to the C&S turntable in Chama?

After my previous post, there has been a lot of confusion as to the whereabouts of the former Denver Rice Yard C&S turntable that went to the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad in May 1997.

Here is an album showing the turntable in pieces in Chama in 1997. 

So far, it is clear that the turntable was never used. It was taken for use for a potential project that included rebuilding the Chama roundhouse. That project never occurred. Individuals on various forums think the turntable is still in Chama (in what is referred to as the 'swamp') while others think it may have been scrapped. 

Below are some excerpts from a 1997 C&TS Dispatch related to the turntable move.

"- heard that Elitch Gardens in Denver was making a 100-foot through-truss bridge turntable available at no cost other than freight from Denver to Chama. The turntable allows for a shallow pit and will be a key element in the roundhouse approach." 

Below is part of an article from the 1997 C&TS Dispatch explaining the roundhouse proposal and how the turntable could fit in with it.

The Denver C&S turntable's 1997 move to the C&TS

From the June 1997 Rocky Mountain Rail Report.

Alpine Tunnel: The Problem of Clearance, part 2

Restricting the brakemens’ work was only one of the many problems caused by the tight clearances of Alpine Tunnel.  Sometimes equipment simply didn’t fit, like when the rotary snowplow had to go through the tunnel during the winter of 1904-1905.  A number of inches had to be cut off some timbers just to get it through when westbound.  On the way back eastward, three inches needed to be cut off the already cut timbers to get the machine through again.  Owing to this hatchet work, a telegram was later sent from Alpine Tunnel station to report that some of these timbers were now moving inward.  

Rotary just outside of the east portal
(from Historic Alpine Tunnel)

New timbers were sent shortly after the above telegram, but within several months of the repairs, four timbers were found to be “kicking in.”  In September of 1906 the Bridges & Buildings foreman inspected the tunnel and noted that “conditions grow worse as the mountain crowds the timbers.”  He recommended certain sections of timbers to be removed and reinstalled farther back in the wall to widen the tunnel.

Rotaries were not the only pieces of rolling stock with difficulties in the tunnel either.  In November of 1907 a gondola, whose sides had bowed out a foot, scraped on the sides of the tunnel timbers.  An additional problem was the buildup of ice on the timbers.  As the ice accumulated, it stuck out and cars ground into these while traveling through the bore.

Gondola 4319, the only known surviving C&S gondola, on display in Central City (Tim Bain photo). The car is now excellently restored in Como

The Alpine Tunnel, like the famous ocean liner Titanic, is a curious study in a glorious venture that went wrong.  How the great Alpine Tunnel project went wrong still fascinates many, and to the list of problems that brought this ‘ship’ down, must be added, clearance.  It may not be as epic as the Goliath-sized snow drifts that buried the line, but clearance and moving timbers were a continual battering in the hull of the tunnel that helped bring the bore down in the end.

Below is an interview with George Champion who piloted the last rotary through Alpine Tunnel in 1910.

Alpine Tunnel: The Problem of Clearance, part 1

part of a map from the VHS of the video inside the tunnel

Back in 1992, a group of people took a film crew into the Alpine Tunnel.  While I had seen many photos
of the tunnel’s abandoned interior, this video footage truly gave the sense of the tight inky blackness of being inside the fabled bore.  Yet, the narrow confines of walking the tunnel are no comparison to trying to operate full-sized narrow-gauge trains through it as a recent reread of a few pages of Colorado Annual 12 made clear.

A laundry list of problems plagued the Hancock to Quartz segment of the C&S including long stretches of 4% grades, long winters at altitudes above 10,000 feet, rock slides on the western side of the pass, and lack of sun to melt the snow on the east side along with much drifting of the dry snow.  The missing sunlight on the eastern slopes did, however, reach the higher mountain peaks creating slushy snow that eventually came down the mountain onto the track.  One other problem not related to grades or weather, though, was that of clearance in Alpine Tunnel itself.

A display mirroring the tunnel's arch

The Alpine Tunnel was a mere 14 feet high above the rails.  This left just a little over a foot of distance to the ceiling above many locomotive smoke stacks and roughly 24 inches above boxcar brake wheels.  By comparison, these clearances were two or more feet smaller than those of most snowsheds on the line.  The width was similarly tight: 2 1/2 feet less in width than other C&S bridge structures or snowsheds.

One quickly wonders what brakemen who were needed on the top of cars to turn the brake wheels were to do in this circumstance, particularly considering that eastbound trains had the double danger of going downhill once passing the apex of the tunnel and then facing a sharp 24-degree curve just outside of the east portal.  Since the tops of high cars was out of the question due to the height restriction, brakemen chose to find two gondolas with brake wheels on adjoining sides.  This allowed them to do what is called “double brakes” (though, this didn’t keep them from the inevitable smoke inhalation of the belching locomotives).  Still, many trains exiting the east portal were out of control.  It could take all three miles from the tunnel to Hancock to finally stop a train.  Of course, some were not so lucky and left the rails.

A westbound train at the west portal station. 
From Historic Alpine Tunnel by Dow Helmers

Part 2 of this exploration will be posted in the next few days.

If you'd like to see the Alpine Tunnel area by drone, check out this video from my Youtube channel: