Colorado & Northwestern

Company History: The C&N was established in 1897 with the goal of connecting a recently discovered gold mining region around Ward, Colorado to Boulder by way of Sunset. There was a brief flirtation with building the line as a 22” gauge tramway but plans for a 3’ gauge steam road won out. The C&N followed the route of the Greeley Salt Lake & Pacific up Boulder Canyon (the GSL&P was completely destroyed by flooding in 1894 and not rebuilt.) This time, C&N engineers marked out a line higher up the canyon side to avoid the flooding issue. They reached the first mines around Sunset in 1898 and came to an agreement for trackage rights on the Union Pacific Denver & Gulf to lay four miles of 3rd rail to reach the Pennsylvania Mill at Culbertson east of Boulder. That June, they reached the mines at Ward. The mainline from Boulder to Ward was 26 miles long and gained more than 4,100 vertical feet with grades as steep as 4.49% and curves as tight as 30 degrees. They also managed to avoid any tunneling.

Traffic levels were a bit disappointing and in 1903 the company was reorganized with “Railroad” replacing “Railway” in the name. In 1904, C&N built a 20 mile branch to the mining town of Eldora (they had vague dreams of building into Colorado’s Middle Park and the line to Eldora was a first step in that direction.) In hopes of attracting tourists into the mountains, C&N made another trackage rights agreement, this time with Colorado & Southern from Boulder into Denver’s Union Station in 1905. There was a brief ray of sunshine thanks to a new dam that began construction at Nederland, just east of Eldora. C&N was in a position to move men, equipment and material to the construction site but work on the dam turned out to be seasonal and inconsistent. An economic slowdown in 1907 suspended construction on the dam and the C&N fell back into receivership. In 1909, C&N was reorganized as the Denver Boulder & Western.

Successor/Parent History: This line was formed in 1909 from the remains of the bankrupt Colorado & Northwestern. It served the area’s mines and mining community. This line operated until the collapse of the local mining economy after World War I. It was abandoned in 1919,

Brief History: The U.S. is a country of 50 states covering a vast swath of North America, with Alaska in the northwest and Hawaii extending the nation’s presence into the Pacific Ocean. Major Atlantic Coast cities are New York, a global finance and culture center, and capital Washington, DC. Midwestern metropolis Chicago is known for influential architecture and on the west coast, Los Angeles' Hollywood is famed for filmmaking.