See Part 1 here.
FRIDAY, SUMMER 1954
COLORADO
NORTHWEST OF GUNNISON
With the midsummer sun piercing the windows of the Gutbuster, the trio’s car has left civilization behind and they are now headed northwest of Gunnison. Bob and the two Gilmer boys have entered coal country, old, disused mine buildings occasionally dotting the barren terrain and mountains rising up on their left, the 12,000 foot South Baldy Mountain towering in the distance. Running a museum since last year has not dampened Bob’s joy of history and he is eager to find the abandoned coke ovens Bill sighted earlier this summer. They are sure to be somewhere down this road.
As the Carryall Gutbuster trundles along through the increasingly sparse terrain, a narrow gauge track follows them on their left. These rails originally belonged to the DSP&P/DL&G/C&S, but operation of this line, known as the Baldwin Branch, was turned over to the Denver & Rio Grande once the C&S closed the Alpine Tunnel in 1910. Discarding the line through the bore severed the routes to and north of Gunnison from the rest of the C&S. The Rio Grande absorbed these lines into its own system. The Baldwin Branch, specifically, remained in operation until three years ago, 1951.
With the Carryall’s tires grinding more and more over uneven stones, the three keep a lookout for the old ovens Billy hopes to find again. They run across some ovens north of the ghost town of Baldwin, but Billy is quite sure these aren’t the ones he saw earlier in the summer, so they continue on, attempting unsuccessfully to drive over Kebler Pass. Unable to make it over Kebler, the group decides to go round about via Crested Butte. The road now is simply the remains of an old wagon road. Finally, Bob can go no farther. Not even the Gutbuster can continue on this road.
However, there is another problem. Bob cannot find a place to turn around. Thankfully he spies another road, a steep downward forest road, and decides to take it. On and on the three travel, but no place works for a turn around. The Carryall continues to bounce and vibrate when finally Bob notices a small flat spot that comes off the road. He throws the Carryall into reverse and backs up onto the spot. He looks to his right to check his surroundings. Oddly enough, outside the passenger window, a stack of cut wood that looks suspiciously like rotting railroad ties greets his eyes.
The three climb out of the car to take a look and Bob’s suspicions are confirmed. The flat spot they are on is part of an old roadbed and the wood stack is definitely made up of unused railroad ties. What were these for? No railroad, to his knowledge, ever cut through here.
The wheels are spinning in Bob’s head, but to no avail. What the trio has stumbled upon, though Bob will not figure this out for some time, is the hoped-for Road to El Dorado of the Denver, South Park & Pacific. Some had heard of a stretch of unfinished grading up Ohio Pass intended to reach Utah, completed in the late 1800s and abandoned before a single tie or rail was set in place, but no one in the burgeoning railfan era had ever found it.
Bob is desperate to explore what appears to be completed, but now bush-infested railroad grade heading both in front of his truck and behind. To the rear it appears that this old roadbed was constructed on two sides of a gully where a bridge was meant to be built. Over a half century since a construction crew mysteriously packed up and went home, Creation has busily reclaimed this wilderness disturbance, and Bob cannot see much beyond the small spot and the stack of disintegrating, unused ties. Curiosity is abuzz, but time is not in his favor. The Gilmer boys must be in Denver by the end of the weekend and they have many miles to go just to reach a good road, dinner, and an inn for the night.
After a few more quick looks, Bob reluctantly slides into the driver seat after the boys are in place, and rolls carefully back onto and over the rutted trail they had come on. With their eyes now in high alert for more rail grade, the group spots bits and pieces along the road, a cut here, some fill there. At the top of Ohio Pass they catch sight of filled-in grade striking out into what has become a beaver pond. Despite his disappointment to not have the chance to investigate further, Bob knows he will come back sometime to find out more.
Bill Gilmer is a bit disappointed never to have found the coke ovens he spotted earlier in the summer, but Bob is exultant to have stumbled upon a piece of construction so mysterious. For someone who knew so much about the narrow gauge in the area, he had no knowledge of a railroad at this spot. While the car leaves 10,065 foot Ohio Pass behind, heading north towards Redstone on the twisting road, and the long day doubtlessly leads the two drowsy passengers to quiet observation of the passing sights, Bob’s mind may have circled afresh with thoughts of the fabled South Park Line that had built towards this area. Was that old grade related to the dreams of the old Denver, South Park & Pacific?
With his eyes on the road ahead, and happy to let his likely now-sleeping young passengers dream away the last few miles of their day’s journey, Bob must turn his mind to more pressing matters: they won’t make their planned dinner time at the Redstone Inn.
*******
Bob and his two companions had indeed stumbled upon the mysterious lost extension of the DSP&P, though he didn’t know it until roughly a year later after a return visit and more research through old railroad documents. The railroad had done significant grading work up Ohio Pass, including a massive rock supporting wall, pushing the line west towards its Pacific namesake, but to a reason lost to history, inexplicably, one day all the work stopped before any rails were ever laid. Memories of Bob’s adventure in this area north of Gunnison would return to the forefront many years later when he orchestrated his most ambitious C&S/DSP&P acquisition.
Bob Richardson and the C&Sng
The iconic Denver, South Park & Pacific narrow gauge, later a branch of the Colorado & Southern Railway, was gone too soon to save much, the last major section of which, the line over Boreas Pass, was pulled up in 1938, ten years before Bob and Carl Helfin made their move to the Rocky Mountains. The final short leg between Leadville and Climax survived until it was standard gauged in 1943, ten years before the Narrow Gauge Museum got its start. By then scrapping operations had consumed what was not already sold off. As the Alamosa motel and museum collection grew, it naturally was dominated by relics of other railroads such as the Rio Grande Southern and D&RGW as both narrow gauge routes were, unlike the C&S, still alive in the motel’s early years, though these lines were in their death throes.
Yet, in a curious twist of fate, a large swath of Colorado & Southern rolling stock had managed to sneak past the scrap yard. An attorney from Denver by the name of Victor Miller, who rescued the Rio Grande Southern railroad from bankruptcy in 1929, sought to do the same for the South Park Line in 1931 when the C&S sought to get it off their hands. Frustrated in his failed, years-long dealings with the C&S, he filed a lawsuit. The lengthy saga ended in 1938 with Miller receiving 125 C&S freight cars that he could repaint and use on the RGS to settle the case. Most of these cars would later be sent to Alaska for use on the White Pass & Yukon route, deemed crucial to the WWII war effort, but several cars remained in Colorado.
In June of 1954, just one month prior to his jaunt above Gunnison with the Gilmer boys, Bob was able to rescue a few of these C&S-turned-RGS stragglers. To boot, he acquired three different types of cars, perfect to reflect the many roles played by a railroad. These were three of the four freight cars he bought from the RGS dismantler and stuffed with railroad records and hardware. This, along with what Bob later learned was the discovery of the unfinished South Park Ohio Pass grade, made the summer of ‘54 a very good summer for DSP&P/C&S history.
The June 1954 rolling stock acquisition included, first of all, C&S 1116, built in 1909. While turned into an outfit car for work crews by the RGS, it was originally a refrigerator car with roof openings where ice was once inserted to keep the car’s cargo fresh. The next car was 1910-built C&S 50,000 pound boxcar 8308, also reshaped into a RGS outfit car. And finally, Bob now had C&S 7064 built in the first year of the twentieth century, a 50,000 pound livestock car, with open gaps for airflow, left with other stock cars on Dallas Divide after abandonment.
These were the Narrow Gauge Museum’s first C&Sng rolling stock acquisitions. Still, everyone knows the ideal symbol of a line is a locomotive. In time Bob and Carl’s Alamosa museum had a RGS loco (no. 42) and a D&RGW one (no. 346), but there simply seemed no chance of getting a DSP&P/C&S engine. The only three left in Colorado were already claimed by various towns for park displays (No. 60 in Idaho Springs, No. 71 in Central City, and No. 74 in RGS garb in Boulder). The closest Bob could ever likely come would be the now-standard gauged steam-powered C&S rotary snowplow, essentially a locomotive that drives the blades instead of wheels, up at Leadville, but at the time the C&S was still using it. Upon these thoughts, Bob would have had to resign himself to the fact that there was nothing to be done. He would have to memorialize the South Park via the three freight cars and no engine.
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