The Swan Songs of Central City - Part 3

 

The Swan Songs of Central City

-Part 3

by Kurt Maechner

Here is Part 1

Here is Part 2

Silence, Neglect, Rebirth

C&S 71 and train-1964 with Burlington herald

Like many city railroad displays, the Central City train was greeted with great pomp and circumstance and then entered a slow descent to neglect, deterioration, and vandalism.  A plan to create a corresponding railroad museum seemed to have faded along with the train’s paint.  Surprisingly, in the 1950’s the CB&Q sent someone along to at least spruce up that paint job.  In the process, however, they added an anachronistic Burlington Route herald to all three pieces which none of the equipment had ever worn in revenue service.  What was meant to represent history came to be treated as more of a billboard.   

The weary years then stretched on for the train.  The once sought-after piece of history, now surrounded by a chain link fence to deter vandals and avoid accidents, kept up the silent memory that there once was a railroad here in Central City.  

The silence was finally broken with the arrival of a young couple.

SUMMER 1967
OPERA FESTIVAL WEEKEND
CENTRAL CITY, COLORADO

Rosa and Lindsey Ashby’s Jeep rolls past endless lines of parked vehicles on the hilly streets of Central City.  It is the mining hamlet’s annual Opera House festival and, as usual, the streets are packed beyond capacity with visitors eager for the unique combination of history and art in a rugged gold mining camp.

The Opera House is staging a number of productions this summer including The Merry Widow, Don Pasquale, A Masked Ball, and Cactus Flower, but the Ashbys did not come for entertainment.

They are looking for a spot with easy access to the old narrow gauge C&S railroad grade which sits at the top of a zig-zag switchback the railroad used to reach the 8,510 foot-high town from the much-lower town of Black Hawk.  

They find a spot that looks right and the Jeep comes to a soft stop.  Lindsey steps out and quietly shuts the door so as not to wake Leah, their three-year-old sleeping daughter.  The plan is for Lindsey to walk the old switchback downgrade to Black Hawk and for Rosa, with sleeping Leah, to meet him at the bottom.  This is not to say that Rosa is only a helpful bystander; quite the contrary.  Rosa and Lindsey are a team, ready to tackle a surprisingly daring dream, fully in and fully together.

With the sound of the rolling Jeep wheels moving away, Lindsey walks to the old railway roadbed and pulls out a map of the switchback that he got from M.C. Poor’s book of the history of what eventually became the Colorado & Southern narrow gauge.  Lindsey also brought something to write with, as he plans to make notes along the way, including where trestles once stood.  He, a petroleum engineer, and Rosa, a school teacher, are contemplating what some will surely call a foolish idea: The two want to rebuild an abandoned railroad to haul tourists, one of the first to do so in the state of Colorado.  

Lindsey, map in hand, takes his first crunching steps today downgrade on the old C&S right-of-way.  With these steps, he and Rosa enter a completely new chapter in their lives from which they will never look back.

Meeting the Colorado Narrow Gauge...in Chicago

Lindsey Ashby, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1933, saw trains roll by day after day on the Louisville & Nashville mainline outside of his grammar school in Kentucky where his family lived with Lindsey’s grandparents after his father’s passing.  Those L&N trains were not what truly hooked him onto railroads, though.

In the mid-1940s Lindsey and his family moved to Chicago, the railroad capital of the United States.  Yet, even being around all that railroad activity didn’t fully take hold of the young boy’s interest.  The real hook happened at, of all places, a fair.

The fair that became a catalyst for Lindsey Ashby was not the type with tiny coasters and spinning rides.  No, this was a much grander affair.  In 1948, 38 railroads joined together to host The Chicago Railroad Fair.  The large event included train pageants, historic equipment, innovative locomotive design displays, concessions, and, of course, rides.  A wide-eyed 15-year-old Lindsey would go down in the evenings to the fair to experience the sights and sounds of railroad history, from its rugged past to its potential innovative future.  When it came to the railroad bug, according to Lindsey, “that’s where I got really nailed.”

C&S 9 at 1939 NYC World Fair

This railroad bug narrowed to a Colorado narrow gauge bug when, far away from Colorado, Lindsey got his first taste of the Colorado & Southern narrow gauge at that Illinois fair.  When most of the South Park Line was abandoned in 1938, the company kept engine No. 9, a 2-6-0 Mogul, Railway Post Office (RPO) car No. 13, and coach No. 76 for exhibition purposes.  This little train had been sent as a static historical exhibit to the 1939 New York World’s Fair.  At the end of that fair the train was stored at the CB&Q Aurora, Illinois shops.  Less than a decade later, the train was resurrected, this time for operation as a carnival ride at the Chicago Railroad Fair, dolled up as an old-time western train.  

A make-believe railroad, running the length of the fairgrounds and dubbed the Deadwood Central, hosted C&S No. 9, with a fake old-time, large smoke stack, red painted features, and a name, “Chief Crazy Horse.”  Besides some open-air gondolas made from Rio Grande cars, the train also pulled the two saved C&S cars, RPO 13 and coach 76, plus one more, C&S business car 911, also saved by the railroad in the 1930s, in this case due to low scrap prices at the time of its retirement instead of by historical intent.

C&S 9 at Chicago Railroad Fair

It seems almost prophetic that young Lindsey Ashby, in this formative time of railroad love, rode behind a C&Sng locomotive and possibly on the C&S cars.  To add to the uncanny connection, one end of the quaint fair railroad included a western-style depot with the name “Central City.”  Little did Lindsey know what role that railroad and that town name would play in his life roughly two decades later.

A New Career Path

After the fair, passion for Colorado’s narrow gauge railroads stayed in Lindsey’s blood.  His curiosity was fanned into flame again when he went to college at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden and eventually made the Centennial state his permanent home with Rosa, whom he married in the early ‘60s.  The two began a lifelong partnership for railroad history that was just beginning when Rosa, with their sleeping daughter, dropped Lindsey off in Central City to walk the length of the abandoned C&S switchback from there to Blackhawk.

At the time that the 34-year-old Lindsey met back up with Rosa and their daughter at the bottom of the switchback in Black Hawk, the couple had already been looking for a change in their life.  Living just over 30 miles away in Golden, Rosa worked as a teacher and Lindsey as a petroleum engineer.  Despite this stability, something seemed lacking in their lives.  They had been holding out hope that Lindsey’s completion of an advanced degree attained through night school might bring the change they hoped for.  Unfortunately, the degree provided no new vistas in his oil company career.  Together, Rosa and Lindsey determined to find a new direction for their lives and it started by charting out the Central City switchback in hopes that they might be able to do what almost no one in Colorado had ever done before: bring a dead railroad back to life.

Cripple Creek & Victor Narrow Gauge

The Ashbys did have some inspiration in a man who had just recently done what they hoped to do.  Over in Cripple Creek, Colorado that same year, 1967, John Birmingham, who had bought two tiny German steam engines, built a 2-foot gauge tourist line on the abandoned standard gauge Midland Terminal right-of-way.  The Cripple Creek and Victor Narrow Gauge Railroad opened up on June 28th and was doing well hauling tourists with a small train and giving riders a taste of the old mining days.  Lindsey had visited the line and this got Rosa and him thinking that one could possibly make a business out of a tourist railroad.  

The couple began to analyze the possibilities before them.  They noticed that the 2-foot gauge of the Cripple Creek line definitely limited the number of passengers the line could haul.  A 3-foot gauge line, they surmised, could haul many more.  After looking at the Central City switchback and the number of visitors Central City received—on Opera Festival weekends, they estimated, four times more than the city could reasonably hold— the Ashbys considered that the short 3 1/2-mile route between Central and Black Hawk was a line where someone with very little money could make a profitable railroad come to life.

Their dream started to become clearer, but there were serious risks.  Nearly all of the land the old railroad bed was on consisted of mining claims.  In order to build across it, as well as to gain credibility in the eyes of the towns of Central City and Black Hawk, they felt the need to acquire these claims.  Where would the money come from?  The Ashbys made a surely heart-wrenching decision for a young family: they would sell their home.

Lindsey put the situation this way: "We had to ask ourselves: Do we want to continue? We decided we would rather go ahead and risk failure - face whatever. It would be better to have risked doing it than to spend the rest of our lives wondering 'What if?'"

This sacrificial action would kill two birds with one stone.  First, on a practical level, it would provide the funds to buy the mining claims at an auction.  Secondly, it would make it very clear to the city governments, from whom they desperately needed approval, that they were not merely tinkering with a pipe dream, but were absolutely serious about the project. 

The Ashbys decided against living with ‘What ifs’ and sold their home.