Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad - Highline

Author's Comments

There are railroads, and then there is this. The Highline is a ledge cut into the canyon wall above the Animas, and the train runs it the way it has since the nineteenth century, slowly, deliberately, trailing a long ribbon of coal smoke that catches the morning light and holds it. The photograph everyone wants is the one from across the canyon, the locomotive small against the rock, the river a thread below. That photograph requires effort. The Animas River Trail near Rockwood will get you close to the right angle, and late September will give you the aspens turning gold along the ridge above the tracks. If you are riding, take the open-air gondola and stop trying to make the postcard. The picture from inside the train is different and in some ways better. It is the engineer leaning out at a curve, the cinders catching sun, the shadow of the cars rippling across the canyon wall as the train bends into the Highline itself. Detail work. The brass fittings worn smooth by a hundred and forty years of hands. Steam against blue sky. Morning is the time. The canyon runs north to south through this stretch, and the early light reaches the western wall first while the river stays in shadow, which gives you the layered exposure that makes the scale legible. By midday the light flattens and the smoke disappears into haze. Come in late September if you can. Come in summer if you cannot. Either way, the train will be there, doing what it has always done, and you will be one more photographer in a long line of people who tried to fit it into a frame.

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