Alamosa: The Town That Arrived by Train in One Day

Alamosa is the largest city in the San Luis Valley, and it was built in almost a single day. When the Denver and Rio Grande Railway's narrow-gauge tracks reached the valley floor in July eighteen seventy-eight, residents of the nearby settlement at Fort Garland dismantled their buildings, loaded them onto flatcars, and had them reassembled at the new railroad terminus by nightfall. The story goes that the rail crews ate breakfast in Garland City, then ate dinner from the same building in Alamosa.

The town was incorporated in August of eighteen seventy-eight. Within a decade, Alamosa had become the central hub of North American narrow-gauge railroading, with the Rio Grande's tracks fanning out in all four compass directions across the valley. The name is Spanish for cottonwood grove, which described the river bottom where the railroad laid its first ties.