Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad

Few railways in the world still do the job they were built for with the same kind of machines. The line from Durango up to Silverton was laid by the Denver and Rio Grande in 1881–82 to haul silver and gold ore out of the San Juan Mountains, and trains have run over it ever since. The track is three-foot narrow gauge, a choice that let engineers bend the rails around tight curves in a canyon where a standard-gauge line would have been ruinously expensive. Coal-smoke and whistle echoes aside, much of what you ride in is genuinely old: the coaches and locomotives include rolling stock going back to the 1880s, and the steam fleet is headed by the big K-36 and K-37 engines built for the Rio Grande's mountain lines.

The building of it was a feat of raw labour. Around five hundred men, largely Chinese and Irish immigrants, pushed the grade up the Animas valley in a little over nine months, and at the narrowest point they had to blast a ledge out of sheer granite. That ledge, the High Line, is the moment everyone waits for: the train creeps along a shelf roughly 300 feet above the river, with nothing but air between the window and the white water below. Beyond it the valley closes into the Animas Canyon, deep in San Juan National Forest, where the only way through for miles is the river and the rails.

Over 45 miles the train climbs close to 3,000 feet, from Durango at about 6,500 feet to Silverton at more than 9,300 — an old mining town set on a high, flat stretch of the Animas valley ringed by peaks. Hollywood noticed the scenery early: more than twenty films have been shot along the line, among them Around the World in 80 Days, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Prestige. The line became a National Historic Landmark in 1961 and a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark two years later. After the Rio Grande sold it in 1981 it passed through several private owners and is now run as a heritage railroad by American Heritage Railways.

Durango itself grew up around the railroad; its depot on Main Avenue dates from 1882 and still stands in its original form, with the railroad's own museum close by. The full round trip to Silverton is a long day — around nine hours including a layover in town — and shorter options combine the train one way with a bus the other. Summer trains run all the way to Silverton; in winter the service turns back at Cascade Canyon.

Getting there

The train leaves from the Durango depot at 479 Main Avenue, in the centre of Durango, Colorado. The nearest airport is Durango–La Plata County Airport (DRO), about 19 km from the depot. Silverton, the far terminus, sits at the head of the Animas valley and can also be reached by road, which is how the bus-and-train combinations work.