Now this is a railroad ... sort of. Three engines and 16 cars on a passenger train far exceeds anything I've seen so far. Only problem, the train only goes 12 miles! But several of those miles are pretty spectacular. Two EMD F units lead the train out of town, followed by 15 assorted passenger cars, a midtrain power car and finally another F unit running backwards. They leave from a very pretty Santa Fe Depot in downtown Cañon City, CO. I'm going to have to do some more checking to see what a Santa Fe depot is doing on an old Denver and Rio Grande line, but it's a very nice depot. Shortly after leaving town the train enters the gorge and the ohs and awes start. Several trips I have taken so far had beautiful views down into gorges but this is the first one right through the gorge. At one point the gorge narrows to about 30 feet and rather than chisel out a ledge for the train to run on the engineers just bridged the gap above with some steel girders and hung the track over the river, the famous "hanging bridge." After going the 12 miles to Parkdale, which is actually just a siding, the train stops, the engineer gets out and walks to the other end of the train, and uses the rear facing engine to take the train back to Cañon City. One interesting railroading note ... on the return trip, we stopped a few minutes at the hanging bridge, as we were told is a long standing tradition. When we started up again, the engineer blew three short blasts on the horn, indicating that we were actually going backwards.
Ride it if you can.
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