DENVER -- The Rio Grande Zephyr, a tarnished silver dinosaur that is the last passenger train of its kind, will say farewell to the canyons and mountains of Colorado this weekend.
The Zephyr, the last privately-owned intercity passenger train in the United States, makes its last run Sunday.
The train will continue under the operation of Amtrak, starting Monday, but for nostalgic railroad buffs it will be in name only. There will be new cars and new schedules and new owners.
Gone will be the stainless steel Vista-Dome and dining cars with names like Silver Banquet and Silver Aspen.
The Zephyr, which began in the 1940s when the nation was rediscovering itself, has become a regional institution, carrying tourists as it streamed across the Colorado Rockies and Utah desert between Denver and Salt Lake City.
'It's been a good job and I'm going to miss it,' says D.L. 'Red' Knuter, one of the men who runs the Zephyr as its conductor.
'Amtrak will never be able to replace it, at least as far as the sentiment. It's an end of an era.'
The Zephyr's roots lie in the Twin Cities Zephyrs of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy in 1947 and the California Zephyr, the famed three-railroad line inaugurated in 1949.
The California Zephyr was operated by the CB&Q, Denver & Rio Grande Western and the Western Pacific until the Western Pacific dropped its section in 1970. The remaining two lines ran the Zephyr from Chicago to Ogden, Utah, until 1972, when Amtrak took over the CB&Q's section and rerouted the San Francisco Zephyr through southern Wyoming.
'Amtrak envisioned us to be part of their system, but we were unable to come together at that time and we elected to remain independent,' says Leonard Bernstein, a 41-year Rio Grande employee who will be the railroad's liaison with Amtrak.
In recent years, Bernstein says, the Rio Grande has been losing $3 million a year on the Zephyr. 'When Amtrak approached us earlier this year our chairman had to take a hard look at it.'
The result was an agreement between Amtrak and Rio Grande that will reroute the Amtrak's San Francisco Zephyr onto the tracks of the Rio Grande. The decision was not a pleasant one for Wyoming, which is left without any passenger train service.
Over the years, the Zephyr's most popular stretch has been the 185-mile scenic run from Denver to Glenwood Springs, slipping under the Continental Divide through the Moffat Tunnel, which cost $18 million to bore in 1927.
The train glides past the Winter Park ski area to Granby and then follows the Colorado River nearly 200 miles through Gore Canyon and Glenwood Canyon, past Glenwood Springs to Grand Junction until it says goodbye to the Colorado River near the Utah border.
From there it streaks northwestward to Salt Lake City, arriving 14 hours and 570 miles after it left Denver.
Along the way it visits, however briefly, towns or ghost towns with colorful names and colorful pasts. Places like Sulphur, Flat, Troublesome, Azure, Grizzly, Ruby, Cisco, Solitude, Helper and American Fork.
Why do people ride the Zephyr?
'They like the scenery, they like the nostalgia, they like to get in the domes,' says Knuter. 'They ride because they're not in any hurry. If they're in a hurry they take the plane.'
The problem is that more people have been in a hurry in recent years, particularly in the winter. As few as four cars might be on the train during the winter, less than half the summer number of nine.
Since Amtrak announced it is taking over the Zephyr, the seats have been sold out weeks in advance with people wanting to ride in the domed cars one last time. A 10th car, normally held in reserve, has been added. The seats for the final runs in the dome cars are being sold, where before they were just used intermittently by any passenger seeking a better view.
The Zephyr's final days were troubled.
A mudslide and flood in the Spanish Fork Canyon of Utah April 15 washed out the Rio Grande tracks. The railroad was forced to shorten the Zephyr's run from Denver, turning the train around at Grand Junction.
That left the final runs with an abbreviated schedule. The Denver-to-Salt Lake City run, scheduled Saturday, halts at Grand Junction with bus service to Utah. The final run will be Sunday from Grand Junction to Denver.
