POTD: Ghost Echoes of Steam Whistles Where Sunsets and Aspen Leaves Fall

You never know where you're going to run into a railroad. On the west side of Boreas Pass, not far from the roadbed of the Denver, South Park & Pacific narrow gauge railroad, Chris May took this beautiful sunset photograph of fall aspens and what I suspect to be Mount Lincoln, if not Quandary Peak, both 14ers above the fine resort town of Breckenridge.

Very little could seem to have changed from this sunset over Boreas Pass
to the time when the first steam whistles echoed over the Blue River Valley.
Photo: Christopher J. May

It could seem that the Denver, South Park and Pacific Railroad, later the Denver Leadville & Gunnison and then Colorado & Southern, is one of the "other" Colorado narrow gauge railroads, meaning not Denver & Rio Grande Western or Rio Grande Southern, two of the longest lived, most spectacular and most expansive narrow gauge railroads in America. But to think that they're the only roads would seem ...well, narrow minded.

The South Park, as it's called familiar, was considered a rival railroad to the Rio Grande for many years. Departing Denver for Waterton Canyon, it wended its way into its eponymous park by Kenosha Pass, where it built a roundhouse that still stands in Como. From there, a branch sprung across the Continental Divide over Boreas Pass to tap the mining towns of Breckenridge, Dillon, and a small mining hamlet called Keystone in Summit County.◊

Further Information

DSP&P Historical Society
DSP&P on Wikipedia
DSP&P for modelers