It was thus in the spring of 1880 that surveying, grading and track-laying crews successively started out of the San Luis Valley, literally breathing down each others' necks en route to the Animas River Valley. Their path was one upon which virtually no surveying work had been done, and which represented the most rugged terrain yet penetrated by an American railroad. Challenges encountered on Cumbres Pass and the Toltec Gorge were monumental. A railroad which had never built a tunnel had to come up with two of them, and it ultimately took 63 miles of track to cover the 35 miles between the stations at Antonito and Chama.
The eventual objective at Silverton aside, there were two primary motivating factors fueling this seemingly insane undertaking. One was the extensive coal resources present along this southern route, primarily in the Animas Valley and beyond. The other was the enormous potential of a new railroad town named Durango, for which the railroad and its connected companies became surveyors, platters and salesmen. Animas City would be put in the shade by this new development of uniform streets, all amenities - and lots of customers for the railroad.
While initial speculation had the railroad reaching Durango from the San Luis Valley at the end of 1880, the difficulty of building through Toltec Gorge and over Cumbres Pass set the timetable back considerably. The first survey stake at Durango's site was driven September 13, 1880, but railroad grading crews were only then working their way up the east side of Cumbres Pass. Railroad lobbying efforts for a post office at Durango were rewarded November 19, 1880, but that was six weeks before the company was able to operate trains to the summit of Cumbres Pass - and still well short of the Continental Divide. The task of reaching the brand new railroad town at Durango was a massive one. One company report indicated the railroad had more than 1,000 men and nearly 400 teams at work on various aspects of the construction at any given time.
The D&RG began running trains into Chama, New Mexico - an equally new division-point town it had staked out in the valley of the Rio Chama - in January 1881. By then, surveyors and graders were working over easier terrain west of Chama. This included an innocuous crossing of the Continental Divide at a point that is actually lower than Chama. Slogging through first snow, then the mud it created, rail crews first paralleled the Rio San Juan and later reached another of the company's new towns at Arboles, on the banks of the Rio Piedra, where trains started running the second week in June 1881.
One month later, workmen were spreading freshly cut ties along Railroad Street in Durango. The tracklayers reached Durango the morning of July 27, 1881, and a work train chugged into the corporate limits of the town that same afternoon. The train likely included a special car that was used by the first agent, Frank Jackson, until a depot could be erected. To mark the arrival of this first steam locomotive, John L. Pennington ceremoniously yanked one of the iron spikes out of a tie-plate, and with three blows Durango mayor John Taylor Jr. drove a silver spike - made from ore out of a mine on Junction Creek - in its place.
The first passenger train arrived two days later, with only a few cars hauling dignitaries, among them railroad officer and Durango promoter Alexander C. Hunt and his son Bruce, one of the new town's first merchants.
It was on the southwest corner of the intersection of the new tracks and what is now Eighth Street that the first depot was built - an austere structure designed as a freight depot but which served as telegraph office and passenger depot for longer than most had anticipated after its August 1881 opening. Wrangling over a site, then plans, then specifications for the projected passenger depot and office building delayed erection of this structure from its mid-August inception until occupancy in late January 1882. While the freight depot is long gone, the passenger depot at the foot of what is now Main Avenue is in its 124th year of service as the ticket office and headquarters of the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad.
Coaling facilities, shop buildings and a roundhouse were all erected in the railroad's first year in Durango, with the roundhouse turntable going into service December 9, 1881. Up until then, the D&RG turned its trains at the end of the line in Durango on an unusual elevated turning wye, the west end of which jutted out into space over what is now the intersection of US Highways 160 and 550.
By the time the railroad was finally completed up the Animas Canyon to Silverton in the summer of 1882, Durango was everything its railroad-building founders had hoped it would be, with amazing volumes of people, ore, produce, livestock and merchandise moving to and through the new metropolis by rail.
Allen Nossaman has resided in Silverton for more than 40 years, working as a newspaper owner, railroad station agent, house painter and county judge. An archive director of the San Juan County Historical Society, Nossaman has published extensive histories of development in the San Juans. His Many More Mountains Vol. 3: Rails into Silverton is available in the Animas Museum gift shop.
