We're on our way home. We were happy to get away from our La Quinta hotel and head west. We stopped at Georgetown, CO where we had tickets to ride a narrow gague railroad. After spending several hours at Georgetown, we drove toward home. We charged several times and ended up in Price, UT.
The Georgetown Loop Railroad is a narrow gauge railroad. It was originally built to service the mines at Silver Plume. The elevation change between Georgetown and Silver Plume is 675 feet. The distance as the crow flies is a mile and a half. In order to get an operable railroad to carry heavy ore load, the railroad needed to be nearly ten miles long (to keep the grade below 4%). They did this by making the track go in a loop over Clear Creek, bridging it twice, once quite high above the river.
We rode in a train that had a Mogel (2-6-0) steam engine that was pulling seven cars. We rode on an open top car that had a shade canopy over half of the car.
We passed over Clear Creek several times. Here are pictures looking upstream and downstream as we crossed.
From the train we could see across the valley to where I-70 ran next to the mountain. There wasn't much traffic at the time.
We stopped for 20 minutes or so at Silver Plume. Here is the original depot and a picture of the mountainside that shows some of the tailings from the mines.
When the engine was working very hard, it put out black smoke.
Here we are crossing the high bridge for the second time on our way back.
At the entrance to the railroad, they had an ore car filled with what appeared to be galena, the ore that is often rich in silver and lead and sometimes gold.
As we were driving toward Utah, we got into a rain storm that was so heavy that we (and several other cars) pulled off to the side of the road until it subsided to the point that we could see the road again.
Finally, at the end of the day, we had put in 414 miles.
