I came as a young man, refugee from the plains.

Looking for higher ground.

The sun shines through the rain.

You're the mountain folks & old cow folks.

who found peace of mind I guess loving Mother nature makes you naturally kind.

Colorado, everywhere you go I'm in your shadow.

You're calling to me.

Colorado, The sun's melting snow.

Making the river flow to the sea.

I made a journey of more than 2000 miles in Colorado without seeing half of it.

For it's as large as New England and New York.

Upon the famous scenic route, the Denver and Rio Grand Railroad, I rode from Denver to the New Mexico border, through southern Colorado and back through the middle of the state over the famous Marshall Pass.

I took in on the way the full length of the Silverton and the Rio Grande Southern Railways, which, in quest of mining towns and agricultural settlements, are laid amid some of the most gorgeous, stupendous, varied scenery in the state.

Welcome to Southwest Colorado!

Riding along the animus River aboard the Durango to Silverton Narrow Gauge Railway, rolling along near top speed about 15 miles an hour.

Few last minute riders here.

Tickets are hot items, often purchased more than a year in advance for the view, of course, but but also for the simple pleasure of going nowhere in particular, just going, as phrased by writer Robert Louis Stevenson back in 1878.

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.

I travel for travel sake.

The great affair is to move.

This adventure has its roots in the town of Durango, set in among the buttes and bluffs of the San Juan mountain chain, a town where trains and tourists are a way of life.

A century ago, Durango was a baught, brawling town of tents and tenacity, silver and saloons and muddy roads on which to haul away the stuff of this rocks to riches story.

But then they built a railroad.

When they were constructing this line in 1881 to 1882, dynamite was not in existence yet they were.

All the blasting was done with black powder, where they had drilled the holes, set the charges, and then blasted them with black powder, what they called the stuff that came in these cans, the Widowmaker, because of its unfortunate tendency to explode in the faces of miners tamping it into place, they estimate that there was approximately 10,000 laborers during the construction, but the amazing part of it is that they built 45 miles of railroad in nine months and five days.

A century, and countless tons of ore later, the Silverton leg of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad had become a tourist oddity, many of its cars in tatters.

But a wealthy orange grower bought it all and began the tedious, expensive job of restoration.

Well, we do all of our own restoration work here.

We have done some fabrication work or replicate them.

The cars, it'll range, I would estimate, for a gondola, maybe 50 to $100,000 for any one of those, and it could go possibly as high as a quarter of $1 million per car, depending on what you're doing to it.

Carpenter Ray Ludwig has been giving these cars a rebirth for a dozen years.

There's just pride in, craftsmanship that we do.

I think all the carpenters that we have that work on the restorations do have a lot of pride in their work as far as, the details and the finished products that you up with.

Locomotives get a facelift, if that's what you can call rebuilding 135 tons of iron in the roundhouse.

A new one, the old one, burned to the ground back in 1989.

They've got huge machinery that can take 7,000 pounds of metal carve off the rough spots and create the life force that would pull a train with an accuracy down to thousands of an inch.

It's a decorators nightmare.

Light doesn't stand a chance.

Grease is a kind of necessary evil, but changing a tire holds a new meaning.

Going down and down.

And a slip can mean a broken arm.

or merely a bruised ego.

The shop is so good it has more work than it can handle from all over the nation.

T he day starts early for the Durango and Silverton crew.

Train runs on time.

This train leaves at 915, so we'll leave at 915.

Conductor will say all aboard and we'll leave.

And at 915, the start of a 45 mile odyssey to Silverton.

I sit on the back platform of the train, dragging my patent leather shoes,through embers of fireweed growing one at a time.

How slowly I go by, how long I use the wonder of the mountains in my eyes.

As if I were that very boy again.

Saturday morning, steaming up time.

And from the backs of trucks and vans come the results of years of work.

Engine genuine steam engines going on the line.

First coal.

Oh, but not just any coal.

Find the best, best coal you can get.

Because it does vary quite a bit.

And, it is important to use the better coal.

because the others tends to soot up and clog the flues or various other problems.

All this takes place on the private railroad operated by the Colorado Live Steamers Club.

Men and women whose love of steam is more lifestyle than hobby.

It's not as informal as it may seem, however.

Everything gets tested, including boilers.

First we had to bring it down full of water and, pump it up with a, tender pump here to test, at 100, at 200 pounds.

Pressure to make sure the boiler is safe and safety valves.

Don Morgans engines all pressured up, ready to go on the line.

Oh, I just always been interested in trains.

I got a layout that I started in 1936, and, just always been interested in trains.

They were up to about 40 pounds on it.

Now.

I've got a bunch of cars over there and there's a tank car, stock car for gondolas and a caboose.

And so after what to most people, must be an eternity of engine building.

This is about four years.

And now relying on a maze of pipes, valves and pistons.

The engineer's moment of truth has arrived.

This Lilliputian layout was faithful in every detail, from switches to track.

It's just fun to be here where the narrow gauge is.

Dons , English contractor engine, is about ready to go after construction that lasted, a little over five years.

You just have to do it a little at a time.

And, I think I made everything except for whistle.

I had a great uncle who was a boiler maker for the Southern Pacific.

And, his son and I would go down to the shops, and, I don't know, I've just always been fascinated by trains.

I also like building things.

I've been building models since I was six years old, of some sort.

And so engine builder becomes engineer, I guess you think of the real ones.

You know, I think especially with the steam locomotives running, this is essentially just like, running a real one .

And, it requires all the, all the same functions.

And, in fact, you have to do a little more because here you're the fireman and the engineer About a dozen miles away, Al Lloyd has years to go before his engine can highball with the rest of the live steamers.

Meanwhile, his one time one car garage is a place of organized chaos and high tech machinery, or a steam engine is being created one piece at a time.

The amount of time in this is 7500 hours, and roughly about five years.

And that's not devoting eight hours a day that's at your leisure.

And because there's other things that you have to do at the cost, I'm trying to keep the cost down at a minimum of $10,000.

It's gratification of working with my hands, taking a piece of metal, forming it, putting it on the locomotive and whatever configuration it goes on, and seeing it actually move or function.

And just to know that I did it.

But it can be dangerous working on and under these 2 to 400 pound engines.

Lloyd remembers one fateful day.

I did not realize, what I did, I went to swing myself more under the locomotive to work on it and end up putting the locomotive up on top of my chest.

That was 250 pounds.

I was fortunate enough.

And of course, being concerned not with myself to hold the engine and roll it down off the floor.

And then as I sit here on the stoop thinking to myself, headlines and paper locomotive kills man in garage.

And I got to laughing.

And I did have a bruised chest.

But I was very lucky.

And very happy.

On this day, as an air pressure test transforms Al Lloyd's wheels, pistons and rods into the embryo of what will be a steam locomotive someday.

Meanwhile, there are other steam engines to watch and to ride.

But sometimes, as in full size life, a glitch, Ralph and Alice Hawes have run out of steam.

It's just one of those things, and you'll learn to accept it.

And if it happens, it happens, you know.

And so the Hawes watched the more fortunate steam by.

They turn, they tinker, and they tell of a better day.

The first time you come out and put it on the track.

You open the throttle and it moves.

You know, you really accomplish something.

These are really not toys.

These are miniature locomotives.

Yeah.

The real fun part was from my point of view, because he came around the track here and wen t weee!

And that was probably the best part of the whole thing for me.

Perhaps a lot of us never grew up.

That's fine with me.

The greatest surprise comes with seeing how the railroad builders have flung their steel and loops upon the mountainsides and tops, where one would suppose no engines could ever haul a train, or trains could ever yield a profit.

And where it is no uncommon thing to see, three and even four lengths of the same railway above or below your car as the rails, tack to and fro toward the top of a steep mountain.

Morning and the rain washed valleys on the Colorado New Mexico border.

Few signs of mankind's intrusion here on the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains.

But there is a heartbeat, a sound that forever changed the destiny of thousands.

The sound of steam.

Once it was the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad hauling the rich ores, gold and silver from the mines to the smelters.

Today it's the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad.

We are its freight and we ride for many reasons.

We rode the train because it was here.

But we are.

And my son is a real train buff, that was one reason why I wanted to ride on one of the old.

I've never ridden on a train before period, except for one short trip, but never a nice long trip.

My grandfather was an engineer on a train, so I've always been interested in trains.

And now we found this train and we just decided that we would come down off the mountain and go back up a different way.

We were discussing how the pioneers must have felt coming all the way across the country in a train l ike this.

As you look out the windows and see this it mustve been an adventure.

That must have been very, oh.

Risk taking people to come this far.

This way.

Yeah.

This is only half the difficult half of the 64 mile long, cumbersome Toltec railroad.

There's a 4% grade.

So two locomotives pull up from Chama, New Mexico, and into Colorado through a landscape until recently unmarked by highways.

For tourists, a treat.

For train man Gilbert Gallegos, another day's work.

Well, I really wasn't into trains until I started working here, and it just grows on you and gets in your blood.

Started here in 1986.

And before that, I never even really considered riding the train.

Once I started, and was employed here, it got in my blood.

And you see different, scenic views from your start to your finish Noticing changes.

Well, not quite.

Wishful thinking is still very much alive here at the east end of the Cumbres line, where kids still dream of running locomotives.

Antonito, Colorado, where the history of the narrow gauge is told and retold by railroad official Earl Newman.

The railroad was originally built in 1880 by the Denver Rio Grande Railway as part of their extension from Denver into the San Juan Mountains around Silverton, and it was built in there to haul the gold and silver or out of the Silverton area.

And, it operated, not only hauling all the mining equipment and so forth, but later on hauling livestock, coal, natural gas supplies, that sort of thing.

But the mines closed, the economy changed, and most of the track along the Rio Grande line was abandoned.

Remnants of the once grand railway marking the landscape, like so many dinosaur bones.

But the states of Colorado and New Mexico got together.

They saved 64 miles of the line, and this longest and highest narrow gauge railroad is constantly upgraded.

The line was built narrow gauge because the terrain in which the railroad was, forced to traverse was extremely rugged.

The use of the narrow gauge track allows the railroad to go around much sharper curves than it normally would if it was a standard gauge line, and it provides quite a show for train buffs and tourists.

But make way for the kids hero.

His safety check complete, engineer John Coker Wow, sir, isn't it fun running that engine?

It is fun running a locomotive.

It's, It's a lot.

You can't lose sight of the responsibility, which is easy to do sometimes when you're having a good time.

But, you have to, you have to understand the responsibility and be, be on top of that and be aware of the many safety factors involved in running something like this.

The star having spoken, it's time for dads and grandads to explain the real way the engine works.

Forgetting for the moment that there will be much more to look at very soon.

The scenery that obviously we have along the railroad.

We, have probably, extremely wide variety of scenery along the line from the almost desert like scenery we have around Antonito To the thousand foot depths of the Toltec Gorge.

The alpine meadows pass.

The mountain valleys over around Charles.

So it's a quite a wide variety of scenery to be seen.

The area between Chum & Antonito, is very much unspoiled.

Once you leave town, you're away from all kinds of civilization.

There's no power lines, there's very few houses out there.

It looks very much the same way as it did 100 years ago.

Meanwhile, the train for Antonito is leaving, and it's about time for the young riders.

This train, I never knew was so bumpy.

Even the restrooms are bumpy.

Three hours from now, the train from Antonito will meet the train from Chama.

Meanwhile, everybody seems to have a special reason for being here.

My husband has never been on a train, so we thought, we take this train ride.

My father was a round house foreman for the Eerie railroad.

So it was started in my blood.

That is steam trains.

I like steam trains.

My son has really taken over the family tradition.

He came to smell the smoke and eat the cinders.

It gets in your blood.

I don't think it ever gets out.

So that's what I have my kids here for, is to get a little bit of that in their blood.

My dad just loves trains, and so he decided that we should, go on the train.

I'm here because I'm with my grandma, and I've never been on a train before, and this is really fun.

The train from Chama has topped Cumbres Pass and the second engine is uncoupled.

And on to meet the sister train from Antonito.

At the ghost town of osier, East meets west.

A change of engines, and more picture taking and back down the line.

Beautiful country.

We've.

We've taken the train, over from Chama.

Very, very nice.

The West side is so green and the east side is a desert again.

So it's got all kinds of country.

And Forest Service volunteer Joe Emmons couldn't have had a better day.

The sound of the whistle is like a symphony.

And the smell of the forest, the aspen and the sage out here is just like perfume.

And it's just great.

Upon a lonely hill I sat just above the railroad tracks.

Far, far away I heard her sing her lonesome whistle and bell to ring far in the twilight of the eve.

When autumn colors turned the leaves I heard her blow at milepost nine.

Assuring me that she's on time.

The engineer.

He waved to me, and for a moment I had a dream.

For as she passed I heard her sing and filled the air with nostalgic rain.

As I bathed the train, a silent good night from on the hilltop, I heard her sing her whistle and her bell to ring.

And as I slowly walked away I had sweet memories for another day.