Two Crossings: Walt Disney and the C&S narrow gauge, part 1

Walt Disney and the Colorado & Southern narrow gauge. Not a combination one would expect. However, they crossed paths at least twice, once quite directly.

1948 proved a pivotal year when Walt Disney’s dream of a what would later become Disneyland took flight after a visit to a fair. That year marked the beginning of the Chicago Railroad Fair and, Disney, already a railfan, rode the California Limited along with his fellow railbuff Ward Kimball to the Windy City. At some point in Arizona Disney had a chance to blow the whistle on the train’s engine. Kimball remarked that “I had never, ever seen him so happy.”

When the duo arrived in Chicago, Disney had already been considering the creation of what he called “Mickey Mouse Park” with rides for children. What he found at the Rail Fair caused him to completely re-envision the concept of an amusement park. The Fair’s grounds were set up similar to the 1893 World Columbian Exposition with its various “villages.” The Rail Fair’s version consisted of locations including a beach, a French quarter, a dude ranch, and a pueblo village. According to Train by Tom Zoellner, “The connecting thread between all these villages was…an old timey railroad: the Deadwood Central, a tribute to the western mining roads of the 1870s, which ran on narrow gauge and cost a dime to ride.”

And what equipment did this old-timey train consist of? None other than C&S 2-6-0 No. 9, mail car No. 13, coach 76, business car 911, and a string of Rio Grande gondolas converted to open-air rider cars all dressed up in fantastical old-west garb. The C&S equipment, minus 911, had been preserved previously for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York where the 3-piece set had been on static display. After that fair, the train sat in the CB&Q’s Aurora, IL shops awaiting an unknown future. No. 9, revived to active life again, likely since pulling the last C&S passenger train from Leadville to Denver in 1937, was now pulling trainloads of Rail Fair visitors back and forth between two stations named Deadwood and Central City. These passengers could then visit each of the far-flung lands.

Guidebook for the Chicago Railroad Fair. C&S No. 9 in front of C&S mail car No. 13

Disney liked the design so much that Ward Kimball said Walt talked of “little else” on the return train trip to California. Disneyland later took shape as four village-style lands, Adventureland, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, and Fantasyland, all linked together by an old-time narrow gauge train that author Tom Zoellner points out “look[ed] eerily similar to the Chicago Railroad Fair.” 

1955 Disneyland map

Disneyland Railroad 1955 - B. Don Erb photo

Two side notes are worth mentioning: First, Disney told Kimball that he planned to run his proposed railroad for fun for himself on days when the park was not open. Secondly, another individual was inspired by the little C&S train at the Fair: a teenaged Lindsey Ashby. The train bug caught him there and he would later, along with wife Rosa, pioneer a tourist train out of Central City, CO and later the Georgetown Loop.

In an upcoming post, I will show another connection between Walt Disney and the C&Sng. It may be less direct, but it still had an effect on the future of two important surviving C&S cars.