Georgetown Loop Railroad

The narrow-gauge line between Georgetown and Silver Plume climbs about 640 feet in two miles of valley, and to do it the Union Pacific engineer Robert Blickensderfer laid nearly four and a half miles of track, with two hairpins and a loop over Clear Creek at Devil's Gate. The high bridge there was finished on February 28, 1884. William Henry Jackson photographed it within weeks, and for half a century it was one of the commonest postcard views in Colorado.

By then silver was faltering and the visitors drifted elsewhere. The Colorado and Southern, the last railroad to run the line, abandoned it, and in 1939 the high bridge was taken down and sold for scrap; the historian Thomas Noel puts the price at $450. When Interstate 70 came up Clear Creek decades later, it was cut into the mountainside rather than laid along the valley floor, and in Noel's account the old grade was one of the reasons.

The Colorado Historical Society, now History Colorado, began rebuilding the loop in the 1970s on land and mining claims donated to it, and in 1982 the Boettcher Foundation gave a million dollars for a new high bridge built to the original's lines. The first train crossed it on June 1, 1984, and it was dedicated on Colorado Day, August 1, a hundred years after the first. Trains run in summer from Devil's Gate Station, just below the bridge, up to Silver Plume, with a stop for the Lebanon Silver Mine tour. The old Georgetown depot was cut off by later building and is not on the run.