Georgetown Loop Railroad: The Corkscrew to Silver Plume

Georgetown and Silver Plume are barely two miles apart. The problem is elevation. Silver Plume sits six hundred forty feet higher than Georgetown, and between them the canyon walls leave almost no room for a road, let alone a railroad. In the eighteen seventies and early eighteen eighties, that six hundred feet of altitude was the central engineering puzzle of Clear Creek County.

The solution was audacious. The Georgetown, Breckenridge and Leadville Railway hired engineers who designed a route that did not go straight at all. Instead, the tracks looped back on themselves, climbing in great curves and spirals, gaining altitude slowly enough that the engines could manage the grade. The resulting line, completed in eighteen eighty-four, covered four and a half miles to connect two towns that were two miles apart. At one point the tracks crossed directly over themselves on a high trestle. The total route included three and a half complete circles when all the curves were calculated.

The climax of the line was the Devil's Gate Viaduct: a bridge carrying the narrow-gauge cars nearly one hundred feet above the floor of Clear Creek on an arched iron span. The speed limit on the bridge was four miles per hour because of the combination of height and sharp curve. Trains slowed to a crawl while passengers looked straight down at the creek.

At the height of the silver boom, the Georgetown Loop was Colorado's premier tourist attraction. Passengers rode up from Denver specifically to see the engineering. The silver crash of eighteen ninety-three nearly killed the line. The railroad was dismantled in nineteen thirty-nine for scrap metal.

In the nineteen eighties, History Colorado rebuilt the line from historical records, relaying three feet of narrow-gauge track along the original right-of-way. The Devil's Gate Viaduct was reconstructed exactly as it was. The train runs again in summer, carrying passengers across the same bridge at the same four miles per hour.