The Georgetown Loop

The Georgetown Loop. Georgetown Loop Mining and RR Park. The festivities that greeted the 1877 arrival of the railroad in Georgetown were short-lived. Word of massive silver discoveries in Leadville, forty-five miles to the southwest, sparked a rush to the new ore fields. The Union Pacific Railroad, anxious to join in the bonanza, proposed several rail routes to Leadville, one going west from Georgetown and crossing the Continental Divide at Loveland Pass. Surveys were made of the route in 1879, and two years later, the Georgetown, Breckenridge and Leadville Railway was incorporated., The greatest obstacle to the line lay just outside Georgetown, where the Clear Creek Valley rises almost 640 feet in under two miles, resulting in a grade of over 6 percent-too steep for most locomotives. However, Union Pacific Chief Engineer Jacob Blickensderfer devised a simple yet stunning plan to reduce the grade to 3 1/2 percent. , , To achieve the requisite height at Devil's Gate, the valley's narrowest point, the track formed two hairpin turns, looping dramatically over itself above Clear Creek. It then continued up the valley, crossing the creek twice more and climbing through a 30-degree horseshoe curve called the Bill Fill., Three years in the making, the Loop was completed with the construction of the high bridge, and the first train chugged along the circuitous path to Silver Plume in March 1884. All too late - Union Pacific rail lines had already reached Leadville by an easier route farther south, and plans to continue the Georgetown line over the Divide were abandoned. , But the Loop had caught the American imagination, and soon tourists from all parts of the world traveled to Georgetown and over the Loop to Silver Plume. From there, visitors took the Argentine Central Railroad to the top of Mount McClellan or rode the Aerial Tramway up Sunrise Peak. For about forty years, sightseers came, but visitation slowly decreased after World War I. The coming of the automobile signaled the end of the Denver to Silver Plume excursion line, and in 1939, the Colorado and Southern closed the road and dismantled the track. A great era in Rocky Mountain railroad history had come to an end., Captions: , Famed western photographer William Henry Johnson was hired by the Union Pacific to produce promotional Views of the Loop. This well-known shot shows four trains on the Loop at one time, each pointing in a different direction of the compass. , Caption: , The diagram of the Loop shows one complete spiral and two reverse loops of the track, adding up to 3 1/2 complete circles when all curves are included. The speed limit on the high bridge was a cautious 4 mph.