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Climbing the Mountains on the Colorado Midland
von: Arlene Lanman
BookBaby, 2021
ISBN: 9781098383008 , 534 Seiten
Format: ePUB
Kopierschutz: frei
Preis: 29,74 EUR
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INTRODUCTION – CLIMBING THE MOUNTAINS
The economic potential of booming mining camps inspired the Board of Directors of Colorado Springs’ First National Bank to build a standard-gauge railroad through the Rockies. They believed they could provide the mountain region with better equipment and service than the region’s narrow gauge railroads were already doing. The optimistic capitalists of “Little London” soon learned some hard lessons about pitting money and machinery against the high country.
In 1885, they elected John James Hagerman as president of their proposed Colorado Midland Railway (CM), a year after he arrived in Colorado. He was in his forties, had already made a nice fortune in iron mining on Michigan’s mostly-flat Upper Peninsula but was seeking a cure for his tuberculosis. Once in the Pikes Peak Region, he energetically set about leading the railroad project and raising capital.
The initial objective was revenues from Leadville and Aspen, along with coal from around Redstone and New Castle – where Hagerman invested – and from agriculture. Arranging a traffic agreement with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, the Midland was competing with the roundabout narrow-gauge Denver & Rio Grande, which, despite its earlier start, still barely beat the CM into Aspen. At the urging of and financial support by the Rathbone Brothers Company, the line was extended to Glenwood Springs to help grow its economy and that of the Colorado River Valley (then called the Grand River).
The CM’s original plan was to build to Salt Lake City after reaching New Castle and Grand Junction but it became financially impossible for both the Midland and the D&RG. The Colorado Midland and the D&RG jointly built and shared the line from Gramid (west of New Castle) to Grand Junction. The joint route was the Rio Grande Junction Railroad, built in 1882.
FINANCIAL CHALLENGES
•The CMR was costly to construct, and overall did not receive as great a quantity of traffic as had originally been hoped for; the line was bedeviled by financial difficulties right from opening to closure, and spent much time as a -- usually nominally independent -- "football" being kicked around between bigger and more powerful neighboring railways.
•After an initial couple of years' of being truly independent, the CMR was sold in 1890 to the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. J.J. Hagerman made his second fortune and left the company.
•In part as a result of financially troublous times for the whole country -- the 1893 Silver Panic -- the CMR (and its "parent" Santa Fe) went into receivership; trains continued to run, and better prosperity slowly returned, but the Midland ended up being sold in 1897 to a wealthy entrepreneur, one Henry T. Rogers, and reverted to life as an independent outfit, once more opting for the title of "Railway".
•This genuine independence was, again, short-lived. The CMR's two nearby older and larger "frenemies" -- the Denver & Rio Grande / Denver & Rio Grande Western, and the Colorado & Southern -- had ideas of profiting by acquiring the Midland: it was sold to them in 1900, with each company having half ownership -- the CMR remained nominally independent. This situation was characterized by ups-and-downs from various causes: on a generally downward slope, however -- from about 1908, things began to be a financial drain for the "Midland" part of the joint undertaking.
•Early in 1917, the CMR was foreclosed on by the financiers. It went to auction, and was rescued by a rich entrepreneur -- not the Mr. Rogers of twenty years previously, but one Albert Carlton. This gentleman very effectively used his considerable "clout" to regain traffic for the CMR, and to improve the railway's physical condition. Sadly, though -- among the very many nasty attributes of the First World War, it was shortly to deal an all-but death blow to this, it would seem, predestined unlucky rail undertaking.
•The USA entered the war in April 1917; very late in that year, the nation's railways were, as a wartime measure, temporarily nationalized under the United States Railroad Administration (USRA). The shortsighted USRA noted that the shortest distance across Colorado (Grand Junction to Denver) was over the Colorado Midland – apparently, their map did not indicate the mountains. The USRA routed nearly all cross-continent traffic -- including "all government mail and freight over the Midland. This proved a burden too great for the CMR -- short of motive power and staff, and with track and equipment still in indifferent condition caused traffic to backlog, and the consignments were not getting through as desired. Winter 1917 / 18's being a hard one, did not help. USRA inspectors concluded that the D&RG, despite its longer route, was after all more capable of doing the job. In the spring of 1918 the original policy was reversed, and the transit traffic was sent over the D&RG. As one source puts it, "With traffic suddenly gone, the railroad was back in receivership again as of July 1918." Albert Carlton was appointed as receiver, and ordered to stop operating the railway in early August. This had to be done -- all services on the railway, ceased. There was hope that this might only be temporary for the duration of the war. Approaches were made to larger railway undertakings to take over the CMR -- nothing, however, came of these. Mr. Carlton, hoping against hope, long delayed scrapping of the CMR west of Divide; but in the summer of 1921, dismantling began -- deeding the right of way to the State of Colorado for highway purposes.
•In 1919 the Midland Terminal Railroad bought approximately 21 miles of the CMR between Colorado Springs and Divide, to ensure the maintenance of their connection with the continent's rail network. This "augmented" Midland Terminal Railroad, was then running between Colorado Springs and Cripple Creek, and continued to operate passenger services until 1931, and freight until 1949.
THE MIDLAND PRESENTED MANY ENGINEERING CHALLENGES
1.The Midland was an extraordinarily difficult railroad to operate, in large part because it had very little level track. In crossing Colorado, the line made three summits – at Hayden Divide, west of Colorado Springs, at Trout Creek Pass, and at Hagerman Pass on the Continental Divide. The Hagerman Tunnel was completed in 1887. In 1891, it was replaced by the Busk-Ivanhoe Tunnel which was at a lower altitude. This shortened the line and made the grade easier, but the approaches to these summits were severe: eastbound trains faced an ascent of about twenty miles of three percent grades in the climb from Basalt to the western portal of the tunnel at Ivanhoe; westbound trains climbing out of the Arkansas River Valley faced a shorter but still difficult climb of 3.24%. The ascent from Colorado Springs to Divide was also severe, with several stretches of 4% grade and significant curvature.
2.At the time of its construction, the Midland was among the best-appointed roads in the United States. Ten of the locomotives it purchased in 1886 and 1887 (the Class 115 2-8-0s) were among the largest and most powerful of their type in the United States. Unfortunately, the Midland's cash situation militated against capital replacement, and most of the locomotives purchased in the road's first decade were still on the property when it closed in 1918. The Midland purchased its last locomotives, the Class 175 2-8-0s, in 1907; after that, the purchase of new power fell behind ordinary operations and maintenance expenses on the company's priority list, and was postponed in part because of concerns about the ability of the roadbed and track to support heavier equipment. At the outbreak of the First World War, the road's chief mechanical officer proposed the immediate construction of a new class of engines (2-6-6-0) to handle the surging traffic, but the state of the road's physical plant (which urgently needed both maintenance and upgrading) was such that he limited his proposal to a copy of the D&RGW's C-48 class locomotives, a design that was thirteen years old and approaching obsolescence.
3.The Midland consisted of over 300 miles of track, with some sections of 4% grade where it crossed the Continental Divide at 12,000 feet. However, standard gauge railroads were not efficient at any grade over 2%, and this engineering flaw led to the Midland’s demise in 1918.
4.It had some practical, as well as aesthetic, positive attributes. Sadly, after the first years, less-good-than-hoped-for financial doings precluded particularly high-class motive power. And, the CMR's being built from the first to standard gauge resulted in more solid and stable routing than with the lines, quite often closely parallel with the CMR's, of its sometimes "mirror twin", the Denver & Rio Grande. In parallel-routes situations, the CMR's lines tended to be higher up in grade in relation to watercourses, than the earlier...