 Aizan Longmont, offering a diversity of topics about our community that will inform and entertain you. We invite you to sit back and enjoy this edition of Aizan Longmont. This is the NYWOT Historical Society Now and Then lecture series. I'm Kathy Kaler, president of the NYWOT Historical Society. Your video tonight is coordinated by board member Leonard Satanja with videographers Bill Decker and Patrick Bowen. Larry Dorsey is our presenter tonight and railroads are a big part of NYWOT's history. NYWOT is a railroad town and the railroad was built in 1873 by the Colorado Central Railroad. NYWOT was built on the east and west side of the train tracks. The train tracks go along the diagonal between Boulder to Longmont. The train was a very important part in the start of NYWOT in that people could come, residents could move here, mail could come, and products, equipment could come here. Then the farmers and business people could ship their produce and products to market. There were many railroads connecting in Boulder County in the late 1800s. Today we will take a trip on the Switzerland Trail. It was a narrow gauge railroad and it served the mining communities in our foothills. Larry Dorsey will present the program featuring vintage photographs and scenes from the foothills just west of NYWOT. Part of the trail today is a walking trail and hiking and part of the trail also is for Jeep travel. Larry Dorsey is a longtime Boulder County resident. He is a retired history teacher from Fairview High School, Boulder High School, and Centaurus High School. Larry is chair of the Superior Historical Commission. He is trustee emeritus with the Colorado Railroad Museum which is located in Golden. Larry was the second of the presenters lectures for the NYWOT Historical Society Lecture Series. Long time ago, this is now Larry's fourth story in history about railroads that he is bringing to our audience. Larry Dorsey presents the Switzerland Trail, a Boulder County railroad. Well thank you Kathy for that fine introduction and hello everybody. It's always a pleasure to be here in NYWOT at the NYWOT Historical Society and beautiful left hand Grange Hall. Very historic place and so tonight we're going to be taking a historic trip back in time on the Switzerland Trail. It's a railroad that I'm sure a lot of you have heard of since it was an important part of railroading in Boulder County. As Kathy said, I'm kind of a railroad fan and involved with history preservation, Superior Historical Commission and with railroading at the Railroad Museum. So we're also going to be using the auspices of the Colorado Railroad Museum this evening as well. And so I think the introduction covered things very well. I did have the history of teaching in the Boulder Valley Schools and in my retirement I'm able to devote a lot of my time to the things that I enjoy, such as railroads and steam engines and things like that. So normally we have a pretty good sized crowd of course and with this situation a little bit different. So some of my early slides are oriented more toward a fuller house. But one of this, I have a creed I live by I'm sure all of you do too. And so we, whoops, we do like to plan ahead. And I would like to take a minute to do a real quick plug for the Superior Historical Museum, which normally will be open on the first Saturday of every month. But unfortunately with our current circumstances it's not. But just keep this in mind is something to do when our COVID experience is over and things are back more to normal. We have a little miners' house from the industrial mine camp that's now our museum at Second of Maple Street in Original Superior. Included in that is an HO scale diorama of the industrial mine that's shown there. I'm going to take a moment since I've got this little red dot right here. Here's my laser pointer. So when I'm talking about pointing out something, look for this red dot please and hopefully we'll be able to find it okay. Now normally with this place packed with people we'd make sure that the ladies are careful with their chapeaus. And to have equal time of course to encourage the gentlemen not to spin on the floor or any other place like that. So, oops, so, Switzerland Trail. This was a marketing name that was devised back in the late 1800s. We'll go through how that came about. But here we are. We're going to do the early years up to 1898. I'm sure many of you are aware that the Bible on the Switzerland Trail is the Forrest Crossin book, The Switzerland Trail of America. Forrest Crossin is a unique character of the Old West who resided in Boulder and was an old railroad and newspaper man. And he wrote this book and then there's two editions out there so keep your eye out for it because it is the source authority when it comes to the Switzerland Trail railroad. A little bit of background first. To start with railroading in Colorado, Colorado Territory is connected back to the transcontinental railroad, the construction of it across Nebraska and into Wyoming. But before it got to Wyoming it clipped the northeast corner of Colorado Territory up by the town of Julesburg. So here we see the construction crews laying rail up around Julesburg. So Julesburg was at the end of the line, western terminus of this construction project. It was kind of a wild and woolly place and I think it's hard for us to imagine today that Julesburg was once called the wickedest little city in the west. Since they went to Cheyenne and then on to Ogden, Utah, Denver got passed up and the head of the Union Pacific Railroad just blew Denver off. It's too dead to bury, he said. So Denver really is in a tight spot here because economically speaking being bypassed by the transcontinental railroad was a real financial setback. So the big moguls of Colorado Territory finance and politics put together their resources and built the railroad from Denver up to Cheyenne. The Denver Pacific and that connected the soon to be capital city of Colorado Territory with the new city built by the railroad Cheyenne, Wyoming. So at the very beginning of this saga we have a big competition between the cities of Golden and Denver about prominence in Colorado Territory. You probably know, many of you do, history buffs that Golden was a territorial capital for quite a few years. And Denver of course became the competitor to Golden and we see some very significant names in Colorado history. And I'm using my laser pointer now so there should be a red dot by Mr. Loveland, Teller, Bertha. These are all names that are prominent in territorial and early statehood politics and business. And so Denver, this is the Colorado Central Railroad that Kathy mentioned in the introduction. And the Union Pacific and all the subsidiaries. Union Pacific was a classic octopus-like corporation in that time period. It had its tentacles every place and it had all sorts of railroads of different names that were connected or subsidiaries of Union Pacific. Here we see some more of the important names from that time period. So the competition is on. And this map, so way down here that red dots close to the bottom of the map, there's Golden. So at one time the railroad to Boulder came out of Golden and went up kind of paralleled Indiana Street near Stanley Lake and then into Boulder. And in the meantime, there was another railroad that came straight across from Brighton to Erie and right up the Boulder Creek. So here are those two railroads, the Colorado Central. April of 1873, it comes to Boulder. And as Kathy mentioned, it just kept right on going and went through Nilewatt and Longmont and eventually up to Cheyenne. And then the other railroad is the Denver and Boulder Valley. And as I said, it went right up Boulder Creek. So this is really a Boulder Valley railroad. This was the Union Pacific subsidiary. And when I first moved to Boulder in the late 1960s, there was still traffic on that line. And right into the city, they'd parked their Union Pacific freight trains right there at 28th and Pearl Street. They'd go eat at one of the local restaurants, the train crew would go eat at one of the local restaurants. So Denver wins the competition. So this map is where my red dot is, it's showing Denver. And so this route that originated to Boulder now comes out of Denver. Denver becomes the territorial capital. And here are those two lines. And this also shows a branch near Lewisville that went through Superior, Marshall, University, and again the Denver and Boulder Valley. So one of these Union Pacific subsidiaries was the Union Pacific and Gulf. This is a very early photograph, maybe one of the earliest photographs of a train in Boulder. And that's a line of stock cars there. And notice the track is still unfinished and there are three rails in this track, this dual gauge track. There's both standard and narrow gauge on the same roadbed. So standard gauge is four feet, eight and a half inches between the rails. Narrow is anything narrower, most common is three foot gauge as we call it. So what's going to happen is that the big inner city trains are going to be on standard gauge. Going into the mountains will be a narrow gauge because it's easier to construct less expensive and it could make tighter turns, tighter radiuses. Not as expensive to construct and frankly the standard gauge is probably couldn't get through some of these canyons in Boulder County. I'm going to show you a map now of Boulder back late 1800, early 1900s. So here comes that line from Denver and there's takes that right turn up to Ninewatt. I'm sure all of you have been in this location where my cursor is right now because that's about 34th and Pearl Street and that's where you get stopped by the train. As it's going from Denver to Cheyenne and it takes a long time for 125 or 30 rail cars to go by. So there's that that's about 30th and Pearl. That street right here is called Water Street. If I had a bunch of people and I'd ask what that street is known as today, maybe Kathy probably knows. Water Street is now known as Canyon Boulevard. Yeah, so the street that the street that's now a major East West artery was once the railroad tracks with two lanes one on each side of the tracks going different directions. Right there is where the depot is was at 14th and water now Canyon. And so this is what what the trackage looked like back then here comes the Denver and bold I'm sorry the Boulder Valley railroad coming up from Erie. And so here's a why so what happened is training come from Denver come that way and then come down into the center of the city. And this map for modern people is there really is a lot of information in this map. So here's here's 12th Street now known as Broadway. And so all this area here to the west of Broadway clear to about 4th Street was all the rail yards. So this is full of all sorts of trackage. Turning why this right here where the cursor is right now is probably about where the library. The new library built in the 1960s is located and the newer libraries across the creek and also is probably about the St. Julian Hotel little different now. It was an industrial area that train yards literally. And about right in here would be the Justice Center and right this where my cursor is now is the that is the engine house that an engine house where they pulled maintenance on the locomotives. So quite a different scene along Canyon Boulevard today compared to what it might have been say 1900. And here's that engine house that's about 4th Street and Canyon Boulevard and up in the background you see Settlers Park. And so here's a couple locomotives to stalls. And so it wasn't real big operation. That's where they pulled maintenance on the locomotives. The Switzerland Trail locomotives one of the incidents that took place down in the train yards in that location was a huge dynamite explosion. And this shows the aftermath. Here's where the explosion took place. My cursor is now. And what happened was a little labor spat shall we say. We had some strikers and some strike breakers from the Union the railroad Union. And a Union man was sure that a box car in a box car was sleeping some strike breakers. And so his idea was to set off some dynamite in this car and set fire to this car and scare him out. Well it turns out that the car was loaded with dynamite heading up to one of the mines. And that was an immense explosion that blew out plate glass windows and Pearl Street and left a huge crater. And the three guys in the box car died. The perpetrator of the crime was convicted and sent down to Canyon City to the state pen. So that was right about where the St. Julian Hotel is right now. So why build a railroad into the mountains? Well it's been shown that in the research that to ship or out of the mountains by wagon and horse or mule would cost about $20 a ton. Ship it out by rail was about $1 a ton. So there's economic motivation for this big time. This shows going the other way instead of coming out with going in to the mountains. And we see here it looks to be probably a steam boiler heading off to a mine or a mill being pulled on a wagon by six horses. This is right in the city limits of Boulder and getting ready to go up into the hills. And so you can see what it takes to transport something into those horse and wagon days. Here's another eight horses. And look at this. This road hardly can be considered a real road. And here's this wagon with, again, it appears to be a steam boiler being taken up to a mine. So the alternative here's a not very large narrow gauge flat car. And you compare the load ability of this railroad car to the wagons. And then imagine having 10 or 12 or 20 freight cars on the train. So this is a motivation is much more efficient transportation, more profitable, of course, and effective. So the railroad that goes into the mountains had three different names. The first incarnation is called the Greeley Salt Lake and Pacific. It was kind of an interesting name since it didn't go to any of those places. It didn't start in Greeley or go to Salt Lake City and certainly not to the Pacific Ocean. And in fact, as this incarnation here it went 13 miles into the mountains to the town of Sunset up in four mile Canyon. So it had a long way to go yet to get to the Pacific Ocean. Then we had it re-capitalized and became known as the Colorado and Northwestern. So you see a lot of CNW stamps on let's say railroad equipment like switch keys or something. In this case, it's not the Chicago and Northwestern. It's the Colorado and Northwestern. And this is one to come up with a Switzerland trail moniker. And then later another one more try at re-capitalizing. It became known as the Denver, Boulder, and Western. Now the old timers like to make up these funny names with the initials. So D, B, and W stands for drink, beer, and wine. And the another one was the CNS. They called that the CNS was the crooked and slow or the DNRG was the dirty and rather greasy. So this was a real common thing that the old timers like to do with the acronyms. So the Greeley, Salt Lake, and Pacific laid its tracks in the Boulder and the Yards and then up four mile Canyon arriving at Sunset in 1883. So they were tapping into all the mines and mills of Boulder County. Now this map is going to show leaving Boulder goes west of Boulder. And then four mile Canyon takes a right turn going north and northwest through Salina and Wall Street. All familiar names, I'm sure for a lot of you, terminating at Sunset. So that was a 13 mile trip. It was a pretty revolutionary because even though it was not getting to every community in Boulder County, the mine owners could get their materials to the sites along the route and have it transported back into Boulder or wherever it's going next. So here is what was called Oradell which is just right there where right now where my cursor is. This would be the highway going up to Netherland and then you had to turn into four mile Canyon. Right now there's something like some kind of a camp or something right there in the trees. A lot more trees in this canyon that used to be back in the old days. If we had our usual crew here I'd be warning you right now that there's going to be a test. And so on this material I don't think I mentioned earlier. And so here's the first clue about the upcoming test. How many bridges were between 4th Street and Sunset? Keep that in mind. I took a little drive up 4 mile Canyon 6-8 weeks ago to kind of see how things had changed since I was there last. Huge changes. A lot more homes and then what I noticed really was how many more trees there were along the creek especially. And it seemed a lot more overgrown than it did when I used to drive up there frequently. So here's a little town of Sunset. And so you have a Y here so that's enabled them to turn the engine or turn the train to change directions because this photograph was taken after the other two lines were built. So it's a little bit misleading. This line goes off to Eldora and this line goes off to Ward. It wasn't there in 1883. So imagine it's not there now. So this is where they went first. And here we see an eastbound train heading back down to Boulder. They turned that on the Y. They had a little depot there inside the Y. And this was a very typical passenger setup with a combination baggage and passenger car and a conventional passenger coach. Here's the depot at Salina. By the way, you may be seeing this watermark on a lot of these photographs. These are from Carnegie Library. And by using them with the watermark, you don't have to pay to use them. So there they are. Boy, I wonder if there's ever any problem with flooding in the 4 Mile Canyon around Salina. Look how close this depot is to the 4 Mile Creek. And we know, especially in 2013, we know how serious the flood was in Salina. This little Salina depot tucked away in this canyon. Here's another view of it. When I first originated this slideshow, I did a tag team with Sylvia Petem. And we did it at Gold Hill Historical Society. So I've got a little bit of emphasis on Gold Hill here for a couple of minutes. Hopefully you've been to Salina and been up 4 Mile Canyon. Know what that looks like now. Here's a really important old timetable. For one thing, I love this map because it's almost like somebody dropped some spaghetti on this piece of paper or something. It's way out of scale. You have about a half an inch to go from Denver to Boulder. And then you have all this other space for the shorter distances up in the mountains. But the railroad, the Switzerland Trail, never went to Gold Hill itself. It had a Gold Hill station, but it was about one or two miles to the west of Gold Hill. So this shows the connection. They had to take the stagecoach. If you wanted to go to Gold Hill and you wanted to take the train, you had to ride the stagecoach from Salina to Gold Hill. A lot of you know if you've been there, that's a pretty steep grade up out of Salina to Gold Hill. And so here's the stagecoach. It looks like something out of an old Western movie, doesn't it? I always thought they didn't have that many people on a stagecoach, but you can see I think that would have to be kind of top-heavy myself. I don't know how you feel about it, but there they go. They're going to go to Gold Hill. And see how well we can read this. The stuff I've highlighted tells us that it takes, it took three and a half miles from Salina to Gold Hill, and it took about, let's see, it started at 10.20, got there at 12 noon. So it was almost, what was that? Somebody help me on that. I had it calculated one time, but it took a couple hours anyway to get from Salina up to Gold Hill. And I think it's two and a half hours, and it takes about two hours to come back because they couldn't let it get going too fast. So there's life in the old days. There really were stagecoaches hauling tons of passengers in those kinds of circumstances. Well, here's the big event that changes the history of the Switzerland Trail Railroad, and that is the great flood of 1894. And so here's the depot, and here's the bay windows who are track side. So we're looking west right into the canyon, but we can't see it for the overcast. And so this is Boulder Creek water, clear up to the depot at Canyon Boulevard and 14th Street. Okay, test takers, how many bridges? 60 bridges. The problem that happened was nine inches of rain, or three inches, or three days. And what happened was that as the water rose and started eroding things and washing things away, it started washing away the bridges. And the bridges became debris as they went downstream and they would, in turn, take out other bridges. So between all the logs from downed trees and probably parts of buildings and the bridges, the bridges were all wiped out and completely devastated the railroad. And you can see poor old locomotive 155s looking like it's in trouble over there in the background. And here we see some of the local lads watching the excitement of the flood. So there's, now we're looking south toward University Hill and there's Boulder Creek. And look how much is covered here. And there's the University buildings off in the distance. So this is an immense setback. It takes four years to recapitalize this railroad. And so not only did they rebuild the line from Boulder to Sunset, then they took off on the project of building another branch, one branch to Ward and another branch to Eldora. And I love these old guidebooks and things. Some of you may know a local collector by the Riverick Center. He has all sorts of advertising paraphernalia, including train stuff. And this was one of his. But it's a witchland trail guidebook. And we see where it says health, wealth, lofty mountains, fertile valley. So this is a little guidebook that the passenger could take along with them and point out things along the route. So here's that route as where it goes from Sunset up to Montalto and into another version of the Gold Hill Station onto various sightings into mines and into Ward. So here's the newspaper write up about the contest winner. Our new railroad came up with this contest. Whoever could come up with the best slogan would get $10, or princely some, back in those days, I guess. And so this is pure marketing 19th century style. And we see it in that same time period over in Ure, for example. They call it the Switchland of America. So this attraction of the Swiss Alps as a marketing tool, sorry. So this superintendent, I haven't determined if he's a superintendent of schools or what, but at any rate superintendent stuck won the $10 contest out of over 200 suggestions. And the railroad then added the of America, the Switchland Trail of America. The very common thing to do would be to load up and go to Montalto. And there's the park, there's the lodge there and a fountain. It was a very nice place. A lot of times in those days what they would do organizations like unions, churches, fraternal organizations would charter the train and take the whole train of transport, let's say the organization like the Knights of Pythias or somebody like that, the Redman and the Knights of the World and all those kinds of people. Unions like the United Railroad Workers and so on. And they go up, we have some passenger cars and in the boxcar oftentimes stocked up with beer and ice to keep it cool. Now, I said note this dormer because we're going to see it again. You'll see why. We have a little problem with facts. The Forest Service has incorrectly titled this Mount Alto, not Montalto. And according to Sylvia Petem, they don't have any plans of changing it. So I guess that's going to persist unless somebody really gets on them. So that's incorrect. It was Montalto. There's all sorts of cool things you could do in taking a trip like this. And one might be to take a ride back to Boulder or wherever on a hand car. So they just, they took that on the back of the train and they got to where they let it go. They just let it go and coast downhill. And it looks like fun to me. Or it could maybe stop the train and let people go pick strawberries. Often the distance here is the train standing and waiting for its passengers to come back. And a common problem in Colorado Mountain Railroad was the persistence of snow in the wintertime. And so it makes for a nice pose, but also can cause some problems with the, get a locomotive caught in a snow slide, as we see here. Here's the tender back here. There's the coal bunker and the water tank. And so I think we're looking down into the cab of the locomotive that's been torn off. So a little bit of a hazard and very typical of Colorado Mountain Railroading. Well, it's time to reorganize again. And so they have a last gasp as I'm calling it. That was the Colorado Northwestern. Now we're going into the phase called the Denver Boulder and Western. And we'll take a minute to talk about the line that went to Eldora. And so again, there's Sunset. There's Sugarloaf. And we'll go about right and here's probably where the Peek-to-Peek Highway is, the Caribou Ranch, and the town of Eldora. Not the ski area, but the town. And so this is the Glacier Lake and note the dormer. There's the same dormer and the same building. How do you get over there? Well, the people decided that the customers had dwindled so much on the Ward branch that they disassembled the entire lodge and put it on some flat cars and took it over to Glacier Lake and reassembled it. So today when you go to Mont Alto, there's a chimney there and a lot of people think almost a burn down or something, but it actually took it apart and reassembled it. So there it is at the Glacier Lake. Got a little sighting there. There's some trains on the Y. And I love this picture. Kids frolicking at Glacier Lake. And on the back of this photo it said July 4th, 1904. On this route to Eldora was a stop called Cardinal. And this picture has a lot of stuff in it. And it comes the railroad through that cut across this great trestle and toward us like that. So the depots over here, this building on the side of the hill over here is the Cardinal Mill. And the Cardinal Mill has been saved and is in the possession of Boulder County Open Space. And if the timing's right, you can get a chance to see it if there's some county personnel on staff that day. Now this is also important, not because it was probably a gold extraction mill there, but also because if you're going to go to Netherland, this is where you get the stage to Netherland. So the rest of this paragraph, which I don't think you'll be able to read well, says that you can also go from Cardinal to Netherland one and a half miles. So the train did not go directly to Netherland. Here's a nice shot of Locomotive 32 coming through a cut on its way to Eldora. Maybe all these people were in those cars. This is the typical like I was saying earlier about how the fraternal organizations and church groups would charter a whole train. Part of that was usually getting their pictures taken at some point along the way. And here we are coming into the Eldora station. Not exactly a Grand Central station here, pretty small. That building still exists. It's part of Dr. Doug Dart's summer cabin. Now, so this is kind of on the south side of the creek, South Boulder Creek. So if we're looking back toward the town of Eldora, here's the schoolhouse and then there's all the community. And back in here, there's a building where my cursor is right now with a dormer on its roof too. And it's still there. It was up there a few years ago. It's called the Goldbinders Hotel. It's a bed and breakfast and very quaint and funky. So in this branch, again, we've got our snow issue. So one way to cope with that is something called a rotary snowplow. It has a series of blades that circulate like this and acts kind of like the snow blurry might have in your garage. And sulfide flat site calculate to be roughly around where Netherland Junior Senior High is located today. So here we are getting the tracks cleared off on the way to Eldora. Well, there was one interesting little side trip, so to speak, with this branch and that is that they built a stub down to the construction site of the Barker Reservoir, Barker Dam, creating the Barker Reservoir. And so this site is the Reservoir construction site looking back toward the town of Netherland. So the dam construction company paid for this branch and then it was torn up after it was finished because obviously it was going to be underwater at some point. Okay, so this is 1909. We're on our way to 1920. A little interlude of something called World War I. And at the same time as a development of Americans' fascination with vehicles with rubber tires on them and engines. And here is a little variation on that kind of automobile called a Stanley Steamer. And here's this picture is taken in Boulder. And so tourists could now go up the new road to Netherland up Boulder Canyon, bypassing the four mile canyon route and go to Netherland. Why go to Netherland? So they can keep on going to Estes Park because the same Mr. Stanley also constructed that marvelous hotel in Estes Park. So Boulder, Lyons, Longmont, Loveland, Fort Collins all had stations where people could take the Stanley Steamer automobile up their very respective canyons eventually getting to Estes Park to the Stanley Hotel. Well this didn't help the railroad and he did it. Furthermore with a highway, well a navigable automobile road up Boulder Canyon, this means that more and more people are going to be using their personal cars and the trucks to haul out the ore. So after the World War I decline of economic activity and another flood in 1919, trucks, buses, automobiles the Switchland Trail was defunct and in some places there you can take a hike on some of the remaining roadbed. There's quite a bit of it that's still possible to walk on, ride your bicycle or a trail bike. As Kathy said way back in the beginning the four wheel drive in a lot of places too because not that it's too steep but I found that it's so rocky it's just really difficult to take a conventional car over that. So enjoy it on foot or bicycle or Leonard informed me about a very interesting anniversary happening about right now. Day before yesterday I was hiking up at the Caribou open space Boulder County and there's an educational sign up there that tells about how tomorrow October 1st 2020 is going to be the 100 year anniversary of the removal of the last rail of the Switchland Trail. It's quite a significant day and I wanted to ask you Larry if there are so many rails that went up in these seemingly serving small towns do you think there will ever be rail again? Serving any of that like Netherland or any touristy narrow gauge rails? Well I doubt it Leonard. I think what we'll see with tourist railroads would be utilizing the lines that are already in effect so or road beds that are untampered with but I think overall it's all automobiles anymore so yeah and thanks for that personal insight on that because the scrapping of this railroad like many railroads is a big deal they have a company out of Denver that specialized in it pulled up the rails and either resold the rails or sent them off to be melted down the same with the locomotives and things like that a lot of the locomotives are resold and used by other railroads but a major scrapping project for sure. And again in the spirit of reusing materials here we have a picture of the Boulder County Courthouse and you're probably wondering why is that in this slide show on the Switchland Trail Well the original courthouse burned down I think it was 1932 and had to be rebuilt of course and so this is depression days by that time and so a great proportion of the stones used in the construction of this building were made from the old bridge abutments from the Switchland Trail so they went up into the canyons took the blocks brought them down to the yard the courtyard and they had a big stone cutting operation there and they cut them to size and that became part of the building materials for the new Boulder County Courthouse I'm going to spend a few minutes on Switchland Trail locomotives and I have a goal behind this because a lot of you are probably pretty familiar with one particular Switchland Trail locomotive so the rod engine is one like this where the push rods are on the outside and they push back and forth and that makes the wheels go around and this is a great painting by Howard Fogg was a very famous local Boulderite artist whose work showed up all around the world but the rod engine has a maximum 2% grade is a fairly steep grade in railroading. Railroaders are happy they could have a completely straight line with no curves quite level and that's not reality so in Colorado narrow gauge railroad we had a lot of 4% grade and a very unusual piece of this line is supposedly had a short few hundred yards of a 5% to 7% grade but the point is that the 4% is all a rod engine can handle after that they just cannot do that sort of steep elevation so the result of that is that many railroads developed geared locomotives and their purpose of those was since they had a system of gears cogs and gears around the wheels that they could go up steeper grades but of course they were limited on speed very slow so here's a climax locomotive part of the Switzerland Trail locomotives and here's a Shea locomotive with a more famous and locomotive that railfans really like because you get to see all this apparatus here working turning the cogs and the wheels and making it go up steep grades. Here's our old friend number 30 that's the one I want to focus on for a few minutes. A beautiful painting showing number 30 coming down from maybe from Ward his name happens to be Richard Ward and he is from England and he painted this without ever coming to the United States so he painted that based on a photograph but a nice job and here's number 30 in the yards by the engine house around 4th 5th Street and building up to the ladies and gentlemen as you probably recognize this locomotive as being the one that was in Boulder's central park for years and years along with some other equipment unfortunately after having one caboose completely destroyed by dynamite another one burned seriously and constant vandalism the city of Boulder and the Colorado Railroad in USAM arrived at an agreement where the locomotive is now on play at the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden and so those of you who remember that from the old days in Central Park Boulder can go see it again at the Railroad Museum. It's an arrangement we have with the city of Boulder and it's been a good arrangement they've been very helpful with the maintenance and we also have this caboose that was burned so seriously a few years ago and had coached number 280 all of these are on accessible at the Railroad Museum along with even this is the possession of the Railroad Museum one Colorado Northwest boxcar. For you folks if you can prove your Boulder County resident on October the 23rd you get free admission to the Railroad Museum as part of the agreement with the city of Boulder and the Railroad Museum well Railroading days aren't the same now trains are very prominent in our society but they're freighters and they're all kinds of freight transportation and coal transportation but the era of passenger travel as we once knew it was gone a sad day and when you could imagine being able to hop on a train in downtown Boulder and end up in Ward a couple hours later and that brings us to the end of the program and I'd like to give credit to my sources of photos and images to all these locations and it's been very much a pleasure to be able to share with you the history of the Switzerland Trail of America Boulder's narrow gauge railroad. Thundera's applause there All right. Any questions? Any questions? With these several efforts and you talked about the recapitalization of the railroad at times several efforts different companies to get it to work how really profitable were these railroads and were some of the big industrialists and big names that you mentioned at the beginning were they involved in these seemingly small town railroads? Yes they were. Again at the beginning we saw that some of the early construction was done by subsidiaries of Union Pacific and this was Jay Gould who was probably the prototype robber baron and so this was a lot of big money but did they make money? In those days the financial corruption was centered around corporations like railroads that were being money laundering and things like that were going on so money was being made and a lot of times by some kind of questionable techniques especially the long haul, short haul situation that they would do with the farmers charging more for the short haul than the long haul for example. Most of those individuals you saw on that one slide were financially very well off but a lot of them were also on the precipice a lot of times. One little mistake and it was disaster. We had depressions in the United States in 1873 in 1893 the one in 1890 was especially bad because that was the silver crash where the government stopped buying silver for us. The money was backed by gold and silver for quite a while and once that happened the silver mines went kaput and so this was high finance at that time that's for sure. You're welcome How much steam pressure is typically in these older steam locomotives? If I'm not mistaken it's around 180 pounds per square inch the system holds a lot of steam and I think one of the most fun things that happens down at the railroad museum when we have live steam operations is when the pop off valve goes off and all of a sudden there's this great sound and this great noise and there's this great plume of steam coming up out of the pop off valve so I think it's 180 psi Thank you Larry for coming and I hope you all enjoyed the trip on the Switzerland trail and the whole of the history of railroading here in Boulder County. Have a good evening