See Part 1 here.
The Move to Golden; Two C&S Cars Say Goodbye
The Narrow Gauge Museum at Alamosa was growing, but by its 5th anniversary in 1958, this had turned into growing pains. On the positive side, the museum had acquired more and more equipment. Bob and his business partner Carl Helfin now had four engines, a Galloping Goose, several freight cars, and two cabooses. The problem was that they simply ran out of space. If the museum was to expand, it needed more land.
Accessibility was another issue for the museum, though not for the motel. When Bob and Carl first came to Colorado in the early ‘40s, the lack of tourist accommodations forced visitors to often sleep in their cars. Seeing this available market, Alamosa was a good spot to build a motel, a new concept at the time, as tourism was growing after the second World War ended, and the town was along Route 285, a highway undergoing slow, but consistent development.
The needs of the museum, however, were different than the motel. Tourist passersby were not the bread and butter of an historic collection. The museum needed a spot closer to a larger population.
These were all practical concerns, but some personal ones added to the impetus to move.
Issues had arisen between Bob and and his motel business partner Carl A. Helfin and the two decided to part ways. In February of ‘58, Bob graciously chose not to disclose the details and simply wrote in the last copy of his very popular newsletter the Narrow Gauge News that he had “sold his interest in the Narrow Gauge Motel Inc., [and] in the process acquir[ed] the bulk of the museum items.”
Bob embarked on an enormous undertaking: to relocate his museum. This was not a job to do alone, and he found a partner for his new venture in another fellow Ohioan by the name of Cornelius Hauck. Cornelius had visited the Narrow Gauge Museum in Alamosa some years back and pressed Bob to save another D&RGW engine, no. 318, that happened to be up for auction, to which Bob, who had reached a level of exhaustion in saving so much equipment already, quipped, “Why don’t you save it?” So, that’s just what Cornelius did, later delivering the locomotive to the Alamosa museum for display.
The two now joined forces to relocate the museum and found an ideal site in the town of Golden, once the gateway to the Rockies for the Colorado & Southern narrow gauge on its way up Clear Creek Canyon. A spot such as Golden, only a dozen miles west of metropolitan Denver, would allow easy access to the museum for many times more people than possible in Alamosa. Here the Narrow Gauge Museum was reborn as the Colorado Railroad Museum.
The heritage of the South Park narrow gauge was symbolically honored at the new museum’s founding on November 2, 1958 when Bob and then-president of the Rocky Mountain Railroad Club Bill Gordon used an abandoned construction crew shovel found along the never-completed Ohio Pass Extension, the grade found by Bob and the Gilmer boys back in ‘54, to turn over the initial shovel of dirt to inaugurate the start of construction for the new museum.
Other remnants of the South Park Line owned by the museum would not be so honored when they had to pay the price, quite literally, for the museum’s needs in Golden. The purchase of 15 acres of property between North and South Table Mountains, the move of all the equipment over 200 miles north from Alamosa, and the construction costs of the new Golden facilities all demanded sums not in Bob’s or Cornelius’ present pocketbooks. However, a uniquely timed opportunity arose which provided some desperately needed funds.
At the same time that Bob and Cornelius were struggling to move and build their new museum, another venture was rising from the ground in the town of Golden. When the now-world-famous Disneyland theme park opened in California in 1955, many claimed it would fail, but it bucked all expectations and became an enormous success, which in turn directly spurred numerous copycat theme parks, the very first of which was being built in the late ‘50s right in Golden at the very same time as the Colorado Railroad Museum’s start. This new park, dubbed Magic Mountain, eagerly sought to mimic Disneyland’s old-time narrow gauge train, and naturally looked to Bob and Cornelius for some rolling stock.
In 1959, in a heartbreaking but financially prudent move to raise money for the fledgling museum’s new building, the museum sold two of its C&S cars, refrigerator 1116 and boxcar 8308, to Magic Mountain along with RGS engine 42 and RGS caboose 0409 for use as a tourist-hauling park train.
The pocket book was tight and unfortunately these pieces of C&S lore filled the needy coffers. Still, Bob appreciated that the cars were given a chance to do what they were designed to do: haul cargo on steel rails, albeit human cargo this time. To do this, though, unlike the RGS engine, the cars lost most of their historic appearance and design in the process of being turned into smaltzy open-air theme park pieces. Much of the two cars’ half-century old character was destroyed as everything but their frames and running gear were ripped out and discarded, only to be replaced by seats and rider car shells.
To add insult to injury, the future prospects of the two C&S cars quickly deteriorated. Less than a year after the hopeful grand opening of Magic Mountain, the Disneyland-copycat declared bankruptcy and closed its doors. The park’s train was then put out to pasture as a display at the Magic Mountain site.
While the loss of the two cars left a hole in the museum’s C&S collection, it was filled with the discovery of a car that played a significant role in the railroad’s history. In 1961, a year after Magic Mountain’s collapse, Bob located and retrieved C&S caboose 1009. When the final C&S narrow gauge freight pulled into Leadville for the last time on August 25th, 1943, the car that had the sad honor of bringing up the rear of the train was this caboose. The tiny bobber, as the diminutive 4-wheeled cabooses were sometimes called, was dismantled in Leadville the following month, meaning that all her metal parts and wheel bases were removed, and the cabin sold to a private owner. Bill Brown, a CRRM research volunteer, said 1009 found her way to Buena Vista (though Bob noted in his autobiography that the caboose “was retrieved from Leadville”), where she remained until found, in 1961. Once Bob got her to Golden she was fitted with a new base and wheels to represent the tail end of the C&S like she did for so many years.
News turned hopeful again for C&S reefer 1116 and boxcar 8308 when the Woodmoor Corporation purchased the former Magic Mountain site, including the train, in hopes of reviving the spot somehow. Initially, in 1969, nearly a decade after their last use, Woodmoor moved the train and displayed it at the corporation’s headquarters in Monument, near Colorado Springs.
The news got better, or worse, depending on one’s perspective in 1971, when the Woodmoor Corp. officially reopened the former Magic Mountain site in a new form as a themed shopping area named Heritage Square. The good news was that the train was moved back to Golden. The bad news was that the train was not to run but was instead converted, along with the former Magic Mountain Railroad depot, into a stationary dining area with both C&S 1116 and 8308 having their open rider car sides enclosed to serve as parts of the restaurant.
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