Early D&RG construction and the Panic of '73

CR BT Dispr Wrote:
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> lie - and logically how would they have covered
> the ever-building RR for almost five years with
> just four cabeese?

Not that I'm saying that it can't be a (temporary?) caboose but I just had to point out that the D&RG wasn't "ever-building" in the 5 years in question.
1871 Denver - Colorado Springs(75.5 mi)
1872 Colorado Springs - South Pueblo(44.1 mi), South Pueblo - Labran(Florence)(32.8 mi), Labran - coal banks(Coal Creek)(2.6 mi)
1873 no construction
1874 Labran - Canyon City (8.4 mi)
1875 no construction

There was a Panic, usually blamed on the collapse of the Northern Pacific, in 1873 which tanked the economy back East until late 1875 or so. Colorado wasn't much affected except that it became a near impossibility to raise funds for additional construction of anything from back East. D&RG had done a lot of grading in 1873 but didn't have the money to put track on anything but the little extension to Canyon City. Even in 1876 General Palmer had to stop construction West of La Veta (town) until the next year and concentrate his funds on the line to El Moro (near Trinidad). And look at all the trouble Colorado Central and the South Park had raising money in the same time frame. The CC narrow gauge reached Black Hawk (1872) and Floyd Hill (1873) and then stopped there until 1877. the DSP&P managed to build, with several thousand $$'s help from Arapahoe county, to Morrison in 1874 then stalled until 1878. Even AT&SF had to stop building after it reached just over the Colorado line (late 1873) until it could raise enough funds to resume in 1875, reaching Pueblo in 1876.

Remember that when the D&RG reached Pueblo the big Colorado Coal & Iron plants were still a decade or more in the future (some of the first rails rolled there went to the then building Silverton branch in 1882) and the D&RG lived mostly on coal being hauled to Denver. It was fairly common in railroad construction in the western US to reach into lightly settled areas and then take 3-5 years for traffic to build up as the area expanded to take advantage of the new opportunities. Even in big booms, like Leadville, the first couple of years saw massive inbound traffic of machinery to allow mines & mills to expand production now that they had reliable transportation.

So four cabeese might have been (barely) enough for those early years, before the extensions in 1876. OTOH, given the shortage of funds, converting a few boxes to temporary cabeese might have made sense as a stop-gap measure. Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer choice.

Hank

ps I still like the 19th century term Panic for things like the current market decline. It says it like it is!