Rio Grande: Scenic Line of the World, Second Edition

Hardcover, 208 pages, 9 x 11 in., color photographs and maps.

The Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad was built through the Rocky Mountains, not around them. A tenacious rebel, the Rio Grande survived for more than a century as an independent railroad in a land of giants. At the end of the 20th century, the enduring memory of the Rio Grande is one of black and gold diesels thundering through smoky tunnels on a right-of-way blasted out of solid rock by construction engineers who didn't know the meaning of the word impossible.

The First Edition was published in 1994 and comprised 128 pages with 146 photos. The Second Edition includes 208 pages, 223 full-color photographs and nine lavishly illustrated maps. This new volume presents a retrospective of a railroad where words of description always fall short. In the pages of Rio Grande: Scenic Line of the World - Second Edition may be found all of the elements that made the Rio Grande the scenic wonder it was. The evergreen mountains of La Veta Pass, the bare rock of the Royal Gorge, the golden aspen on Tennessee Pass, the multi-colored sandstone of Ruby and Bootlegger Canyons, the moonscape of the Utah desert, the majestic Wasatch Range, and the sheer ruggedness of the entire Moffat Road, are all here in one amazing volume.

Through acquisitions and mergers, Rio Grande slowly lost its personality to that of Southern Pacific, and later, Union Pacific. The images in this book help preserve the memory of the last years of the Rio Grande and perhaps provide some justification for the railroad’s bold claim of being the Scenic Line of the World.