The Mountains's High

Another shot from my 1983 Colorado trip. This is on the joint line, so called because the tracks were used jointly by the Santa Fe, the Burlington Northern, and the Rio Grande railroads. It is a very busy line, running south from Denver, to Colorado Springs where the lines diverge onto their own tracks. A lot of long, heavy trains run here. Mostly coal from the mines of Colorado and Wyoming bound for power generating stations in Texas and the southeast.

This shot has a southbound Santa Fe near the town of Castle Rock, Colorado. It is immediately adjacent to I-25, whose lanes can be seen just in front of the lead locomotive. Towering above that locomotive is snow covered Pikes Peak, which at 14,000 plus feet is a good mile and a half higher than the elevation of the tracks.

The area around Castle Rock is another of those locations where urbanization ran wild in just a few years. When I was there is 1983, Castle Rock was still a sleepy small town. On a visit ten years later it had become engulfed in the suburbs of Denver. Rural locations I had photographed on my first trip had been converted to housing tracts and strip malls.