The Rio Grande Southern and the Galloping Goose

For decades the lifeline of this town was a narrow gauge railroad called the Rio Grande Southern. It was the dream of Otto Mears, a Russian born immigrant and legendary road builder they called the Pathfinder of the San Juans. Between eighteen ninety and eighteen ninety one, Mears pushed his little railroad across one hundred sixty two miles of savage mountain country, from Ridgway in the north down through Telluride and Rico to Durango in the south, to haul out the silver.

The line was completed in December of eighteen ninety one. Its triumph lasted barely a year and a half. The Silver Panic of eighteen ninety three closed the mines almost overnight, and the railroad lost most of its traffic.

Mears lost control of his own line. Yet the Rio Grande Southern refused to die. In nineteen thirty one, its chief mechanic built a fleet of strange homemade rail cars out of automobiles, cheap to run and able to carry the mail and a few passengers.

Railfans nicknamed them the Galloping Geese for the way they waddled and honked along the tracks. Those quirky machines kept the line limping along until it finally shut down in the early nineteen fifties.