The Colorado & Southern Railway, which published this booklet in 1905, was a strange combination of a standard-gauge railroad trending north-south from Cheyenne, Wyoming to the Texas border and some narrow-gauge railroads trending east-west into the Colorado Rockies. The north-south portion from Cheyenne to Denver was known as the Union Pacific, Denver & Gulf and as the name suggests was controlled by UP. The portion from Denver south was the Denver & New Orleans, also controlled by UP. One of the lines into the mountains was the Denver, Leadville & Gunnison, controlled by, you guessed it, Union Pacific.
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When Union Pacific went bankrupt in the panic of 1893, a Denver businessman named Frank Trumbull managed to get himself appointed to be the receiver for these subsidiaries. He then maneuvered to have the bondholders sell the railroads to the Colorado & Southern, a company he chartered in 1898. Naturally, he became president of the C&S and quickly acquired several other narrow-gauge lines into the mountains as well as the Fort Worth & Denver, which connected with the C&S at the Texas border and continued to Fort Worth, Dallas, and Abilene.
In 1908, he sold the whole thing to James J. Hill’s Burlington Railroad. Trumbull had acquired enough of a reputation in the railroad industry that he was subsequently made chairman of the board of the Chesapeake & Ohio, Missouri-Kansas-Texas, and other railroads.
Issued during the Trumbull years, this booklet is divided into chapters that describe several individual trips: the Georgetown Loop, Leadville, Cripple Creek, and the Switzerland Trail on the narrow gauge lines; and Ft. Collins/Greeley and Pueblo/Trinidad on the standard gauge. The booklet is filled with attractive black-and-white photos, but the placement of the photos does not necessarily follow the text as they focus on the more stunning sights — usually on the Georgetown Loop route — rather than the actual scenery seen on some of the other routes.