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John Norwood’s American Railroads Soft Cover
John Norwoods American Railroads
Soft Cover
Copyright 1995 FIRST EDITION
192 pages
Indexed
Contents
Foreword6
Chapter 1 - Mears' Quest for Ouray8
Chapter 2 - Colorado & Southern Narrow Gauge34
Chapter 3 - Three Notable Narrow Gauge Lines38
Chapter 4 - Denver & Rio Grande Standard Gauge50
Chapter 5 - Colorado Midland Standard Gauge58
Chapter 6 - Major Standard Gauge Railroads62
Chapter 7 - A Dilemma-Too Many Photos109
Chapter 8 - Little Known Standard Gauge134
Chapter 9 - Linking East with West164
Chapter 10 - Mergers, Acquisitions and Abandonments168
Epilogue - Some Dreams Come True-Some Don't183
Index189
I retired early for one reason: I had a surfeit of railroading. I never wanted to ever again see, hear,
smell or think about a railroad. For three years I was able to maintain this attitude, but then I began suffering from a different surfeit or, more accurately, two of them: I was tired of traveling and bored to death with leisure time. Therefore, I started a second career as an independent railroad consultant.
The year 1965 marked the beginning of an emerging interest in the Silverton Branch by railfans. This interest just kept increasing. Those of us who earned our bread and butter on the railroad could hardly understand why anybody with good sense would pay money to ride a train over a piece of railroad like the 47 miles from Durango, Colorado to Silverton. We thought that they must be old-timers who, just for the nostalgia, wanted to make one last trip down memory lane. But these people were not old-timers. They were young people or middle-aged at most.
ENIGMATIC RAILNUTS'
They were not just railfans: they were "railnuts." They have not changed much over the years, either, except that now they cover more territory. They flock to any place where a steam-powered railroad has been resurrected. Their numbers continuously grow, too, so that now they number in the tens of thousands. They ride trains, build railroad models, organize clubs, buy souvenirs-and they buy railroad books and magazines.
Remembrance need not come from things that have happened to us personally. It can derive from history. Sometimes history has been so vivid that it seems we have been a part of it; history needs distance and perspective to become part of us. It is a voice forever sounding across the ages and we read it according to our prejudices and associations. I relive history in pictures inspired by Conrad, Stevenson and London of sails billowing under tropical skies off a Pacific island paradise replete with palm trees, grass shacks and tawny maidens. Railfans, of course, relive history in pictures of sleek high-wheeled steam engines, whose gleaming varnish and shining rails lead to the horizon, of the staccato bark of perfectly tuned valves bouncing from the walls of a railside cliff, or of a spiral of coal smoke trailing from the stack.
Thus, it remains that remembrance, either personal or secondhand, is the only paradise out of which we cannot be driven away.
My wish is that each of us forever be given our own imagined paradises. For railfans, I wish blustering smoke from a stack, cinders in the eye, hands on the throttle and drivers churning. For myself, I'll take the South Seas, although, with my years, I do not know what I would do with the tawny maidens.
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