Colorado Railroad Museum

Fifteen Acres Between Golden And Denver Holding Around A Hundred Locomotives And Cars, Built Around Colorado'S Narrow Gauge Railways Including The Galloping Geese, The Part Bus Part Railcar Machines The Rio Grande Southern Built Out Of Desperation And Which Existed Nowhere Else On Earth. · Golden, Colorado

Colorado built its railways on three-foot track because the canyons were too narrow for anything wider, and this museum exists because somebody realised in the 1950s that the resulting machines were about to disappear entirely. Fifteen acres between Golden and Denver now hold around a hundred locomotives and cars, most of them narrow gauge, arranged around a replica 1880s depot with a working roundhouse and turntable behind it. The strangest things here are the Galloping Geese: seven machines the Rio Grande Southern welded together out of car bodies and lorry parts in the 1930s because it could not afford to run trains any more, half railbus and half improvisation, which existed nowhere else in the world. Several still run. Steam days put a locomotive under pressure on the loop track, and children are the point of the whole operation - though the volunteers, several of whom worked the railways, are the exhibit that nothing on a label can match.

17155 West 44th Avenue, Golden, Colorado, 80403, United States

Open daily year-round during daytime hours, closing on a small number of major holidays. Admission is charged and is modest. STEAM AND OPERATING DAYS RUN ON A PUBLISHED SCHEDULE rather than every day - turning up on an ordinary weekday means a static collection, which is a different visit. Thomas the Tank Engine and holiday train events are separately ticketed, sell out well ahead and fill the site. The roundhouse restoration shop keeps its own visiting arrangements.

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