How the Rails Made Denver

Denver's survival as a city was never guaranteed. When the first transcontinental railroad was routed through Cheyenne, Wyoming, rather than Denver, the snub threatened to leave the young town stranded and irrelevant. Local boosters refused to accept that fate.

They organized the Denver Pacific Railway, and on June twenty-fourth, eighteen seventy, the first train from Cheyenne rolled into Denver, finally connecting it to the national network. Just two months later, in August of eighteen seventy, the Kansas Pacific completed its own line, linking Denver eastward across the plains. The two connections transformed the city's fortunes.

By eighteen eighty Denver was served by seven competing railroads, and the confusion of multiple separate depots led the lines to consolidate. Union Station opened in eighteen eighty-one near the South Platte River, becoming the central gateway through which people and freight flowed in and out of the region. The rails turned Denver into the commercial capital of the Rocky Mountains, the place where the mines, the ranches, and the wider country all met.

Goods flowed out, settlers flowed in, and the warehouses, saloons, and hotels that clustered around the tracks formed the backbone of the growing downtown. The lesson was not lost on other Western towns, which understood that a community bypassed by the railroad could wither while one connected to it could thrive. Denver had nearly been the former and made itself the latter.

The station remains a centerpiece of the city to this day, restored and busy more than a century later.