Don't feel bad, Chris. I always get the Royal Gorge and Manawatu mixed up, too!
I was sure the photo was the west end of the gorge. Summer of 1965 while in high school, several of us worked at the Royal Gorge for about a month building the town and movie set for "Cat Ballou," which eventually became the Buckskin Joe Frontier Village (I think still there). Mostly we hauled lumber and supplies from the trucks by hand to the building sites, as they didn't want auto tracks on the main street where they'd be filming. Columbia Pictures was nice enough to let us "kids" borrow their trucks after hours to drive down to the river at the west end of the gorge for fishing, hiking, watching the trains exit the canyon, and general fooling around. You have no idea how narrow that deep canyon is until you've been there. Barely enough room for the river and tracks between the vertical walls. In those days, the Royal Gorge bridge was open and you could walk or drive a car across it (now it's like $40 to drive your car across, and only after the park closes). We often walked or drove on it to watch the freight trains on the tracks FAR below (1,250 ft. deep). You could hear their horns several minutes before they got to the bridge. The engineers would always blow their horns at the bridge for a nice echo. Almost made you dizzy looking straight down into the canyon from the bridge to get a photo. So I've enjoyed the discussion on the NG vs. SG days, and the names of the sidings we saw though had no idea what they were called. BTW, talked to Lee Marvin a couple of times (nice guy) during their rehearsals, but never did see Jane Fonda. We weren't there for the actual filming.
