Antonito: Departure Point for America's Highest Narrow Gauge

Antonito is the Colorado terminus of the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad, the longest and highest coal-fired steam-operated narrow-gauge railroad in the United States. The line was built in eighteen eighty by the Denver and Rio Grande Railway as the San Juan Extension, intended to serve the silver mining camps of southwestern Colorado. The narrow three-foot gauge was chosen to navigate steep mountain terrain.

When the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed in eighteen ninety-three, collapsing silver prices killed most of the line's traffic. The railroad survived for freight and local passengers until nineteen sixty-nine, when abandonment of the line was approved. Railway preservationists and the states of Colorado and New Mexico jointly purchased the sixty-four-mile segment from Antonito to Chama, New Mexico, and tourist service began in the early nineteen seventies.

The route crosses the ten-thousand-foot Cumbres Pass, threads through two tunnels, and runs along the edge of a six-hundred-foot gorge , all on locomotives burning coal, unchanged in their mechanics for over a century.