A Colorado Railroad Dug Under the Divide in 1893, Then Climbed Back Over the Mountain to Save Rent

There is a railroad tunnel under the Continental Divide in Colorado with a creek coming out of it. The east portal sits at just under eleven thousand feet, at the end of a dirt road, and what comes through the gate is water, a steady flow of it, out of a hole that was dug for trains. The last train went through in 1918. The last car went through in 1943, because for twenty years it was a highway. Then the roof came down. And the tunnel kept working anyway, because by then it had a third job, and it has done that job every day since. Six hundred feet above it, on the same mountain, is a second tunnel, older, with ice on its floor, that the same railroad dug first and gave up. Twice. This is not a story about a railroad that failed. Plenty did. It is a story about a company that built the right tunnel and then decided it could not afford to walk through it, and about what a hole in a mountain does when the people who dug it are gone. IF YOU ARE GOING UP THERE As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. DeLorme Colorado Atlas & Gazetteer: https://amzn.to/4dlwd04 WHERE IT IS From Leadville, take the road west to Turquoise Lake and follow Hagerman Pass Road up the west side of the lake. It is dirt, it wants four wheel drive, and it is open from about late May until the first heavy snow. Nearly four miles up, below the road, is the east portal of the Busk-Ivanhoe tunnel, the one the cars used as the Carlton Tunnel, with the water coming out of it into Busk Creek. About a mile further is the trailhead for the Colorado Midland Centennial Trail, which follows the old railroad grade five and a half miles out and back to the east portal of the Hagerman Tunnel at 11,528 feet, past the site of the great trestle, the snowshed remains and the cabins of Douglass City. Do not enter either tunnel. The road itself continues over the pass at 11,925 feet to the Fryingpan side. PRONUNCIATIONS Leadville: LED-vil. Busk: BUSK. Ivanhoe: EYE-van-hoe. Basalt: buh-SALT. Fryingpan: FRY-ing-pan. A NOTE ON THE IMAGES The research and the script are mine, from primary records and archives, and the sources are listed below. Where no photograph of a place survives, and for this channel that is often, the images are period material from elsewhere rather than the place itself. SOURCES Colorado Midland Railway, histories of the line, the Hagerman Tunnel of 1887, the Busk-Ivanhoe Tunnel of 1893, the 1897 receivership, the 1899 blizzard that closed Hagerman Pass for 77 days, the 1918 receivership and the court order of the 3rd of August, 1918 New York Times, on the end of the Colorado Midland receivership and the abandonment of the Busk-Ivanhoe Tunnel, November 1897 United States Forest Service, Pike-San Isabel National Forests, Colorado Midland Centennial Trail Center for Land Use Interpretation, on the Busk-Ivanhoe Tunnel east portal and the water diversion to Pueblo and Aurora City of Aurora Water, on the Busk-Ivanhoe system Records of the Busk-Ivanhoe and Carlton Tunnel: the 1922 conversion to State Highway 104, the 1942 end of maintenance, the 1945 collapse, the repair by the Highline Canal Company, the 1971 and 1988 water sales Trail and field accounts of the Hagerman Tunnel portals, the trestle site, the snowsheds and Douglass City IF YOU WERE THERE If you have driven Hagerman Pass, or walked the grade to the tunnel, or you have family who worked for the Midland or drove the Carlton Tunnel when it was a highway, I want to hear it. And if anybody has a photograph of an automobile coming out of that tunnel in the 1920s, with the railroad portal around it, I would very much like to know it still exists. Comment or write to oldalignmentinfo@gmail.com. Old Alignment. Abandoned American roads, railroads and infrastructure. New video every other day. My other channel, Legal Until, tells the stories behind the laws of the American road: @LegalUntil #coloradohistory #abandonedrailroad #continentaldivide