With a huff and a puff of smoke, the steam engine slowly pulled out of the Colorado City Yard and began its trip along Fountain Creek, up Ute Pass and on to Cripple Creek - in prior times the Colorado Midland was on its way to Grand Junction. The engineer pulled the cord and blew the whistle a final time.

It was February 6, 1949 when the last passenger train ran on the historic Midland Terminal. I have no recollection of this memorial event; I was three years old. What I do remember is that our home in Old Colorado City was less than three blocks from the abandoned railroad bed and five blocks from the abandoned roundhouse and machine shop. As youth, we "toured" the inside of the abandoned buildings and walked the "line" to nearly the town of Cascade, over the "double-dare" Crystal Park Bridge and through the eight tunnels in Ute Pass. The remainder of the "line" was viewed from my parent's car as they where remembering their past.

As a Structural Engineer, I have been captivated by the many engineering feats accomplished by the Colorado Midland's design engineers. Over the last several months I have studied and visited many of the railroad sites and, in doing so, I recalled things that I knew and many things that I did not know were revealed by my study. The emphasis of this book is to tell the story of the Midland from a design engineer's perspective as to what they knew and how they applied the engineering principles that were available during the time of construction, including how they selected the locomotives. In addition I wanted to know the politics of the time and who really owned and directed the Midland. I also studied and have written about why the train stopped at the many towns along the way, what the people were doing there, and how did the stops get their names - This was a festinating step into the past and early history of Colorado as a Territory and then as a State.