The Twisting Tale of the Georgetown Loop
-part 3
by Kurt Maechner
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1972
CLEAR CREEK VALLEY BETWEEN GEORGETOWN AND SILVER PLUME, COLORADO
Each member emerges from their respective cars, ready for the brisk walk. It’s time to pull this dream up on a mast to see if the wind catches it. Either that, or it will be time to put it back in a trunk and store it in the attic once again.
_1_(22754841985).jpeg) |
| D&RGW 491 |
up on blocks, has had work completed the previous summer to create a crawl space for the station’s new foundation. Work has been been done to create a parking lot. Nearby, two narrow gauge pieces of rolling stock are on the ground, a donation to the CHS from the Rio Grande when it finally abandoned its narrow gauge lines two years ago. Four more cars and a locomotive, D&RGW 2-8-2 No. 491 were also a part of this gift, though they have yet to arrive. Even a fence has been erected around the station site and yard to protect it.
The group sets out, trudging along the aged, vacant grade. Aided by the sights in Silver Plume, heavy trepidation may have given way to a subtle lightness as they see a number of changes since they last walked this route. Work has been done on the old grade to make it possible to relay track. Near an area called Lebanon, a deep rock cut built by the original railroad has been secured after decades of disuse. Of even more startling knowledge, these encouraging renovations were not completed by good-hearted volunteers, but by the U.S. Army with whom the CHS had worked out an agreement.
Back in Central City, every last bit of the group’s work has been done with their own sweat, blood, and pocket books. But here, before their eyes, someone else has begun the work and made their own investment. Could this be the truly collective venture they have long dreamt about?
With each eastward step the group rises gradually with the incline of the roadbed, and at last reaches the empty expanse that once was the Devil’s Gate Viaduct, their hopes inwardly soaring as high as that missing structure once did.
Looking across Clear Creek Valley to a point slightly above the site of the north abutment of the old high bridge, they can see busy Interstate 70 on the mountainside. Compared to out-of-the-way Central City, where their present tourist railroad is located, the Loop line would have enviable public visibility as well as much more room to grow.
This might really work. Instead of throwing their backs into a short, hard-to-support line in Central City, they could operate what Gary Morgan in his book The Georgetown Loop would later call "one of America’s most spectacular achievements in mountain railroading,” constructed by the Navy Seabees themselves. Here was a venture to join, with all the aspects missing from Central City: visibility, support, partnership, and a promising future.
After their walk, the group’s excitement must be palpable. It’s time to make a proposal to the Colorado Historical Society. If the CHS will have them, they are ready to join the work to animate the process of rebuilding the historic Georgetown Loop and in time become the operators.
As the New Year dawned in the first month of 1973, the Central City group scheduled a meeting with the Colorado Historical Society.
JANUARY 1973
DENVER, COLORADO
Four men enter the room for their scheduled meeting with the Colorado Historical Society. With bated expectation, Lindsey Ashby and Dave Ropchan hope this is not only the way out of their Central City dilemma, but also the way forward.
Along with Lindsey and Dave is Ed Gerlits, the curator of the Georgetown Loop. They know they have an uphill road ahead as the CHS is in the middle of a public fundraising campaign to build a new museum structure in hopes of getting out of the aged building that is their present home. How can they possibly get the society behind an even grander project at this time?
The answer to this question comes with the fourth, and most important, guest in the room: The Seabee commander from Dave’s office.
In the course of the conversation with the CHS, the Seabee commander presents, on paper, an official proposal. This document spells out the details of three two-week summer camps, six weeks of bringing in construction experts to educate the battalion in the expertise of railroad track laying.
The CHS responds with an obvious question, considering that their funding is tied up with the museum building campaign, “Where are you going to get the track?”
Lindsey and his partners are ready for this question. “We’ll get it donated to the Colorado Historical Society.” This was not an on-the-spot reply. They had this proposal ready before the meeting, along with plans for the military to provide transportation of the track materials. An Air National Guard group in particular was even prepared to offer use of its flatbed trailers. And who is going to pay for all of this? Lindsey and the others from Central City explain that they plan to cover much of it themselves.
After talking through the details, the society representative looks at the four men and says, “We’ll go with it, but...we cannot give you a dime. You may put our hat on and whatever you can get given to the state of Colorado, wonderful.”
With this, the two groups worked through the details of a working relationship. Finding the Ashbys and their partners on the same page with how to go about the restoration, the CHS formalized an arrangement. Now, while continuing their operation at Central City, the Central City Narrow Gauge Railway group also morphed into the prime movers that brought the essential pieces together to resurrect the far-famed Georgetown Loop.
Operation Silver Spike
Just a few months later, on a cool, late winter day in March, Seabee Battalion 15 arrived in Silver Plume to walk the empty grade of the Loop. As their boots crunched on the cold dirt, the men talked through the exciting details of building an entire railroad. The training and hands-on work “would give Reserve Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 15 the skills necessary to make it the only fully organized and trained crew within the entire Naval Construction Force capable of undertaking a sizable railroad construction mission without delay under mobilization conditions.”
Dubbing the project “Operation Silver Spike,” the Seabees set their sights to build the Georgetown Loop Railroad.
By the summer of 1973 the Georgetown Loop was seeing more activity than it had since 1921 when the original high bridge was reinforced, over a half century ago. As the Rocky Mountain peaks heated up, donated rail began to arrive on trucks powered by the Seabees. Several railroads, some former owners of the Georgetown line like the Burlington Northern and the Union Pacific, became benefactors and offered old rails. Track was at last laid in Silver Plume to hold more rolling stock; there were 17 freight cars by October. One of the steam locomotives, No. 44 from the Central City operation, later replaced there with Shay engine No. 14, followed in the path of its railroad ancestors on September 18th to Black Hawk, traveling by truck, not far from the old C&S narrow gauge roadbed, through the former railroad division point at Forks Creek, and on to Silver Plume.
A fire was lit in No. 44’s boiler and steam drifted up from the engine’s smoke stack into the air above Silver Plume on Friday, September 21st, three days after its arrival, heralding the true arrival of the first live steam engine in the valley in almost 35 years.
The excitement continued to build with each new arrival and one year later an operating railroad would officially return to the valley.
The First Train
SATURDAY, JULY 27, 1974
SILVER PLUME, COLORADO
The rumble of a powerful engine fills the air near the old C&S Silver Plume depot. This is not a locomotive; that will come soon. For now, it is the rumble of a front end loader, property of the U.S. Army. The driver rolls his vehicle to the enormous pile made of a mix of gravel and sand, shoving its teeth into the mixture. The driver now swivels its massive rubber tires and roars off toward the tracks.
 |
| 1984 photo of No. 15 |
reach Denver & Rio Grande Western narrow gauge drop-bottom gondola No. 767 and lets its payload thunder with a deafening roar into her aged hold. Soon the whir of diesel No. 15, a former Oahu Railway engine that came to the Loop this month, will take over the noise competition to haul this, the very first work train on the new Georgetown Loop, down the line. Active railroading has returned to Clear Creek Valley.
The work train’s purpose is to ballast the new track. The Seabees will do the shoveling while the Army will spread it on the roadbed. Typically ballast rock is made of rocks that allow water to pass through it without compromising the level of track. The Loop couldn’t get their hands on any “real” ballast so they took what they could get: the gravel-sand mix from a facility in the area owned by the state.
Construction of the Loop’s mainline began in earnest about one year ago in the fall of ‘73. In addition to some yard track next to I-70 adjacent to the new home of the original Silver Plume depot, the Seabees started work from the site of the first bridge across Clear Creek and built upgrade toward the yard, laying a half a mile of rail. This new mainline was just recently connected to the yard track.
The rumbling of the front-end loader has ceased and diesel No. 15 is ready to go. Two short blasts on the whistle echo off the canyon walls as the first of two of today’s work trains begins to descend downgrade.
The following month, in August 1974, the first rail bridge east from Silver Plume across Clear Creek was complete and ready for track installation. This pin truss bridge, nearly identical to the original at this spot, was found on an abandoned railroad and moved to the site the previous year.
By the end of August steam engine No. 44 came to life again, the first steam engine on the line since C&S engine 68 backed downgrade with the 1939 scrap train. Locomotive 44 pulled a late summer freight with three cars for a special weekend of operation. The surprised few who happened to be able to ride on this train were the first to experience a small first seed of greater things to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment