Posted 7:09 am Sunday, July 19, 2009
Travel Trip: Durango & Silverton Railroad
By TOM MITSOFF
Web Editor
In the Old West, passenger trains pulled by coal-fired steam locomotives were state-of-the-art transportation.
Web Editor
In the Old West, passenger trains pulled by coal-fired steam locomotives were state-of-the-art transportation.
One hundred twenty-five years later, a coal-fired steam locomotive still pulls a passenger train up a southwest Colorado mountain range along a 50-mile route that was built to move mined precious metals efficiently down the mountain for processing and sale.
What it lacks in efficiency in the 21st century, it makes up for in the insight it provides into the way people traveled more than a century ago. These days, the Durango & Silverton Railroad in Colorado is pure gold for any tourist who visits the area.
Based in Durango, the privately owned railroad provides several passenger trips daily to and from Silverton, a very small town obviously made to resemble an Old West town, with saloons, small shops, businesses and dirt roads.
The only hint of modern day is the vehicles and trucks parked along the sides of the dirt road.
We signed up for a full day trip, which departed Durango at 8:15 a.m. For the next three and a half hours, we chugged slowly up the side of the San Juan mountain range, making a gradual ascent from Durango's 6,100 feet above sea level to Silverton's 9,300-foot elevation. Along the way, the train picked up and dropped off passengers at locations that would be generous to call remote.
We were told that it took nine months to build the railroad, and it is apparent that the shortest distance between two points was the objective.
Much of the route was mere feet from the banks of the Animas River, and one portion was along the edge of a cliff from which a passenger could jump from the train and make a several-hundred-foot drop into the gorge below.
A few inches separate passenger train car from freefall. (Remember the famous scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in which Robert Redford and Paul Newman jump off a cliff together into a river? It was filmed here.)
The 3 1/2-hour trip up the mountains ends in Silverton, which literally looks like a Western movie set. Aside from the few dirt-road intersections and buildings along the dirt roads, there isn't much more to the town that meets the eye.
The Census Bureau says its population was around 500 a decade ago, and we wondered where 500 people could have lived. It seemed evident that the town opens up when the train arrives, and probably closes down when the train leaves -- maybe not a whole lot different than a century ago.
Visitors get about two hours to lunch, shop and roam Silverton, and that's about all you need.
The trip back down the mountain is a little shorter because it is downhill, but it is every bit of three hours.
We took the train both ways, and we were told by some veterans of the trip that the best idea is to take a bus ride up the mountain to Silverton, and the train back down.
Six and a half hours of rail travel -- with its share of shakes, bumps and weaving -- is a lot for a single day.
Still, we recommend that when in the Durango area, this should be the first attraction you book.
It can fill up, and you don't want to miss this treasure of a trip back in time. Cost for the round-trip train ride starts at $79 per passenger.
