The Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge: A Freight Railroad Dressed as Tourism

The train that leaves Durango each morning for Silverton is pulled by a steam locomotive burning coal. The cars are vintage. The route winds forty-five miles through the Animas River gorge, which is so narrow and steep that the canyon walls crowd the track on both sides and the river runs white below. It takes three and a half hours each way. People come from across the country to ride it.

The Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad was not built for any of this. It was built in eighteen eighty-one to haul silver ore. The Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad needed to move metal out of the San Juan Mountains fast enough to make the boom profitable, and the Animas Canyon was the only practical corridor. Standard railroad gauge, four feet eight and a half inches, was too wide for the terrain. The Denver and Rio Grande ran narrow gauge at three feet, which fit.

The ore trains ran for decades. The mining economy collapsed, gradually at first and then completely. The railroad survived by accident, in the way that things sometimes survive when they are the only option in an isolated place. Tourism arrived as a secondary purpose in the nineteen forties and fifties, when heritage travel was becoming a market and diesel had not yet replaced every steam engine in service.

The railroad is now a National Historic Landmark. The steam engines are authentic because the railroad never had the money or the traffic volume to modernize. The gorge that makes the trip spectacular is the same gorge that made the narrow gauge necessary. The tourists are riding the industrial logic of the eighteen eighties without necessarily knowing it.