The Twisting Tale of the Georgetown Loop
-part 4
by Kurt Maechner
Great Growth and a Big Barrier
Less than a year later, on June 21, 1975, the Georgetown Loop, even as construction continued, began occasional public excursions. In time trains began to cross the first bridge headed east out of Silver Plume, but early in the 1976 season, the railroad reached another milestone as excursion trains began to steam across the newly completed second bridge, extending the active line to nearly one and a half miles. This bridge, known as the turntable bridge since the last span in this spot was originally used for this purpose, was found south of Denver being used as a road bridge. To much surprise, many concluded that this was the very bridge used at this spot on the original Loop line. Somehow it survived the scrapper’s torch and came back to carry trains in the Clear Creek Valley once again.
Excitement and construction continued over the following years, and, in 1977, a second steam locomotive, 2-8-0 No. 40 was also brought over from the Central City operation to Silver Plume. However, the swell of amazement at the railroad’s resurrection during its second operational year, with its continued track growth and now a second steam locomotive, received a jolting blow as it came face-to-face with a massive obstacle.
In 1977 track construction ceased, and for some, enthusiasm ceased as well, at the site of the biggest hurdle to the railroad’s future. There, high on the southern side of Clear Creek Valley, at former C&S milepost 51.70, lay the crumbling remains of the abutment that once connected the track to the famed Georgetown Loop bridge. Now, in the place of the viaduct was a wide 300 feet of empty valley. Quite simply, without this bridge, the Georgetown Loop would never be a loop at all.
BETWEEN 1977-1982
SILVER PLUME, COLORADO
Locomotive smoke wafts into Harry Brunk’s nostrils. Consolidation No. 44 puffs restlessly next to the Silver Plume depot, eager to pull this morning’s train towards Georgetown. The news of the resurrection of this rail line has been spreading. Harry heard of it as far back as 1971. At the time he dismissed the whole idea as “a nice dream.” Even after the news that several major railroads had donated to the project, Harry was convinced it was a lost cause.
Harry is a young man with a love for painting and a love for model railroading. He will later gain
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| Harry Brunk later in life with his layout |
fame as the man who spent three decades building a model railroad of the Clear Creek narrow gauge, including the Loop itself, a home layout that will become world-famous, eventually being so renowned that it will be enshrined in the Cheyenne Depot Museum.
Too many tourist railroad dreams come and go and Harry knows it. Still, he came today to see what has been happening, to at least give it a shot. He hands a few dollars over to a woman seated behind a card table inside the freight room of the old C&S depot. The woman’s name is Rosa, one of the operators of the line along with her husband Lindsey. With her faithful assistant, a white dog named Tara next to her, she gives him change out of a metal box and hands him a ticket. Ticket in hand, Harry, along with other passengers, boards the train.
Engine 44 gives two long blasts on the whistle and begins the journey downgrade. The doubtful Brunk is struck by how much masterful engineering is traversed. To him, the main thrust of the Loop is the high bridge, which he knows is only a ghost still lost in the past. Still, as the narrow gauge train chuffs and twists through the valley that he assumed was nothing to shout about, he is surprised, when finally up close, at just how stunning the accomplishment of rebuilding this part of the line truly is, even without the Loop’s viaduct.
Finally, with one short blast from the locomotive’s whistle, the train comes to a stop high up on a mountainside. Just ahead of the train is an enormous, crumbling piece of stone and mortar stuck in the south side of the valley. This is where, until 1939, trains would have ventured out onto a spindly high bridge balanced precariously 95 ft above the creek below. Today, however, it is the end of track, and possibly the end of hope. Construction reached this point in 1977, and there it still sits, year after year, a gaping hole dead ahead.
A semblance of a station-stop is here at this odd end-of-the line. The spot, referred to as Upper Georgetown is reached by those parking below at the bottom of the valley via a bridge over the creek and a mixture of trails and stairs. With the new riders now boarded, the train begins its return journey to Silver Plume.
Despite Harry’s newfound enthusiasm for the restored segment of the line, he comes to the conclusion, as he will later write in one of his many model railroad magazine articles, “Without the high bridge, the ‘Devil’s Gate Viaduct,’ the Georgetown Loop [will] never seem complete.” He, as well as many others, are “sure that the expense of building that tall metal structure would be so astronomical as to doom the rebuilding of the Loop.”
Despite these well-founded doubts, the operators of the line seemed convinced the line had viability even without the bridge, so much so that in 1978 they added a third steam engine to their roster with 1922 Shay geared locomotive No. 8 purchased from Oregon.
Still, Harry Brunk’s lament carried ominous legitimacy. The line’s longevity was doubtful without the rebuilt high bridge. Harry was also right that the cost was far beyond the means of those involved, so high in fact as to be, quite plainly, impossible.
Yet, Harry later wrote these words, “and then the impossible happened.”
The American Dream
The first step to make the impossible possible is to find someone with the means to change a circumstance. The second step is to convince that someone to apply their means to the circumstance. The story of the application of these two steps towards the modern-day Georgetown Loop’s missing high bridge goes back to one man, Charles Boettcher, whose last name adorns two commemorative plaques inside the Loop today and whose life captures the heart of the American Dream. The story of his acquisition of substantial means begins in 1869, fifteen years before the original Loop bridge was completed.
In the same year that the United States completed its first transcontinental railroad, Charles Boettcher stepped off the gangplank from a steamship that had carried him across the Atlantic from Europe. Gone was his native home, gone was his family, gone was everything familiar. His homeland had turned into a disaster. Prussia was involved with numerous wars, including wars with France, Russia, and Poland, and was also attempting to unite the German states, requiring military operations which in turn required draftees to fight the battles. The Boettcher family refused to let their children become cannon fodder, sending their son Herman years earlier to make a life in America. Herman’s brother Charles, at age 17, the year a Prussian boy could be drafted into the military, was also sent off to America.
Charles planned to track down Herman who now lived in Wyoming. The two met in Cheyenne and Charles joined his brother in working at a hardware store, sleeping under the counter at night to double as a security guard.
Weekends for many hard workers in Cheyenne meant hard drinking, hard living, and quickly vanishing money. Charles was not going to fall for it. He worked and saved, saved and worked until those who were blowing their money found out he was a willing lender, albeit one who collected the money back with interest.
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| Charles Boettcher |
The sagacious, young Charles Boettcher decided to make some big moves. First, he and his brother bought out the Cheyenne hardware store for themselves. Then they traveled south to Colorado where they set up more of their own hardware stores. Charles, recently married to Fannie, built his first independent store in Boulder, where he stayed until a move to Leadville, possibly arriving by the Denver, South Park & Pacific Railroad.
Charles’ move to Leadville was motivated by the exploding craze of silver mining there. However, Charles knew better than to place his bets on mining. He always had an eye for the future and realized that more money could be made selling a miner’s pickaxe than could be made actually using it in a mine. While in Leadville, Charles also came to another conclusion, one that would set him on a course to greatness as well as generosity: a great deal of necessary materials to develop Colorado came from other states, which led Charles to ask, ‘Why not make it here?’
Charles Boettcher inaugurated a laundry list of Colorado businesses including a dynamite manufacturer, a bank, an electricity provider, a sugar beet company, and the business for which he is most famous, a cement producer by the name of Ideal Cement. By the time he left Leadville for Denver to set up an investment firm with various partners, he was one of the wealthiest men in the state.
Exit the Loop; Enter the Boettcher Foundation
While Charles’ and his firm Boettcher & Company’s fortunes took off, the fortunes of the C&S narrow gauge ran out. In 1937 the majority of the South Park district of the railroad, from Denver to Climax, was abandoned and on April 30th of that year the Interstate Commerce Commission authorized abandonment of the line west of Idaho Springs, essentially signing the death certificate of the Georgetown Loop. Yet, happenings were afoot in this same year at Boettcher and Company that planted seeds for a Loop resurrection nearly a half century later.
Charles’ fortune had not turned him into an Ebenezer Scrooge. The man to whom Colorado had given so much decided that he wanted to give back to his adopted home. In 1937, Charles, along with his son Claude, decided to formalize their excitement to give back to the Centennial State and started the Boettcher Foundation with the goal of giving sizable grants to major projects within the state. In perfect alignment with their goal, one of the first gifts from the foundation went to the founding of a school for handicapped children.
In the following year, 1938, the last year of the Loop’s operation, another important seed in its future was planted as Warren Willard took over the helm of Boettcher and Company. Willard, along with Cris Dobbins, the eventual president of Ideal Cement who worked his way up from his start there as a teen office boy back in 1919, became a great team as they worked together on the Board of Trustees for the Boettcher Foundation.
In 1948, Charles Boettcher, the generous, hard-working entrepreneur who still went to the office daily, died at the age of 96. The face of the foundation he started with his son now shifted to Willard and Dobbins, who would later become important players in the Georgetown Loop’s future.
Willard, the oft-suited man with his ever present dark rimmed glasses and slicked back hair did not just love business; he loved history, joining the Colorado Historical Foundation on their board and even rising to the helm of the CHS’ presidency. Here was a man with the love needed to spearhead historical conservation, but with the other trait that is equally necessary: the means to fund it. That love and those means came together in a comment made in the last year of the 1970s.
Since 1977, the Georgetown Loop had been running trains from Silver Plume, all the way to the gaping valley edge where the Devil’s Gate High Bridge once stood. That unbridged gap looked small compared to the enormous financial valley it would take to reconstruct the mighty span. Like Harry Brunk, many wanted to be optimistic, but too many other failed historical preservation plans had worn these hopes down to reality. A few words, however, gave reason to believe that this railroad’s story might have a different ending.
In the late 70s, Warren Willard made a small, but thrilling comment. The plight of the Georgetown Loop’s situation had reached his ear and he remarked that giving a grant from the Boettcher Foundation towards the reconstruction of the Loop bridge was something he was considering. This opened the doorway just enough to let in a small ray of hope.
And Willard wasn’t the only one open to the idea of helping out the tiny railroad. His close business partner and friend on the board of trustees, Cris Dobbins, came to the same position, albeit with some very persistent, possibly even annoying, persuasion.
“We’ve Got To Do It”
1979
DENVER, COLORADO
OUTSIDE THE BOSTON BUILDING
17th STREET
“Not again,” Cris thinks as he tries to avoid the man approaching from behind. This is much harder to do at age 75. On the other hand, his pursuer, Stephen H. Hart, is only four years younger. Cris had hoped to make it into the Boston Building at 828 17th Street in Denver and upstairs, like he had been doing for decades, starting as a teen-aged office boy in 1919 and working his way up to president of the Ideal Cement Company by 1952. In 1944 he became a trustee with the Boettcher Foundation where he and E. Warren Willard spun a vision for philanthropy together for over three decades.
But, no, Hart will likely catch Cris once again. This is becoming a pattern and an annoying one at that. For Steve, it’s no problem. He knows persistence. He’s been talking about rebuilding the Loop since the ‘60s.
Compared to the sophisticated Cris Dobbins, Steve Hart, the one on Cris’ avoid-list, is a character,
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| Stephen H. Hart |
though a very helpful one. Lawyers are always good to have in your corner, especially one as good as Stephen Hart. That doesn’t change the colorful personality of Hart who won his earlier job in the Colorado House of Representatives when his wife campaigned for him in, of all places, a bordello. Since his switch to the law field, Steve is quite well known for his “gracious and kind” manner, along with his cuss-worded socializing and ruthless card-playing tactics with clients. He and a colleague once beat Cris shamelessly in poker. Dobbins, who knew his own stature in the community, was not pleased to be treated without deference, even if it was at the card table.
Cris hurries up to reach the door of the Renaissance Revival-styled Boston Building. As he reaches out to open it, he is successfully accosted once again by Steve, nicknamed “Buzzsaw” due to his unceasing energy.
With a likely small eye roll, and a sigh, Cris turns to his addresser. He knows what this is about before Steve, a former CHS president, even opens his mouth, but stopping Buzzsaw’s tongue is hopeless in this case and he once again takes an earful of why the Boettcher Foundation needs to give a large grant to that tiny tourist railroad up in Silver Plume so they can re-build an old high bridge.
It is difficult to know exactly which plea of Hart’s finally pushed Dobbins over the edge, though Hart’s biographer called his pursuit of Dobbins on the matter “relentless.” He was not alone in making this entreaty either. Barbara Sudler, the CHS president, was also pressing their cause to the Foundation. In the end, a history changing decision took flight in a comment Cris Dobbins made in response to Hart’s unending solicitude. To whom the comment was made it is unclear, but the story is told that Dobbins sputtered the following exasperation: “We’ve got to do it. If Steve Hart comes up to me on 17th Street one more time and talks about this, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
A grant from the Boettcher Foundation would be the golden spike that would finally launch the Georgetown Loop over that great open chasm and allow it to live out its name in a full completion of the Loop.
And, then came the news.
On June 16th, 1979, Cris Dobbins, who seemed to be at last close to tipping the scales in favor of a grant, died at age 75.
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