David Moffat's Impossible Railroad

David Moffat was a Denver banker and mining investor who decided, late in life, to build what many considered an impossible railroad. The route he proposed would cross the Continental Divide directly west of Denver through the heart of the Rocky Mountains, avoiding the tortuous canyon routes that existing lines had used to reach the western slope. His Denver, Northwestern and Pacific Railway pushed west through brutal terrain, blasting tunnels and laying track through passes that closed under snow for months each winter.

The railroad reached Steamboat Springs in the winter of nineteen oh eight and nineteen oh nine, with the first freight arriving December nineteenth of nineteen oh eight and the first passenger train on January sixth of nineteen oh nine. For Steamboat, connected to the outside world until then only by wagon roads and stagecoach, the arrival was transformative. Cattle could be shipped to Denver markets. Coal from the Yampa Valley mines could move by rail. Tourists could come.

Moffat himself died in nineteen eleven, broke and still fundraising for his great project. The tunnel that bears his name, bored through the Continental Divide at a length of six point two miles, was completed seventeen years after his death, opening in February of nineteen twenty-eight. It was the longest railroad tunnel in the Western Hemisphere at the time and cost approximately twenty-four million dollars to build, with at least twenty-eight workers killed in the process.

Six years later, the Dotsero Cutoff, completed on June fifteenth of nineteen thirty-four, connected the line to the Denver and Rio Grande Western at Dotsero near Glenwood Springs, creating the first true direct rail route between Denver and Salt Lake City that Moffat had always envisioned.