Track 1 is UP, while it is BNSF for the the 28 miles from Sedalia on south into Palmer Lake. The northbound Track 2 is just the opposite, with Palmer Lake to Sedalia belonging to UP and Sedalia to Littleton BNSF. At Palmer Lake, the double mains bot- tleneck down to UP single track for the next 32.4 miles into Crews in the town of Fountain just south of Colorado Springs, except for a six-mile stretch of BNSF rail from near Kelker (with a junction to serve the Fort Carson Army Base’s occa- sional trains of tanks and other military equipment) to Crews. A 3.9 mile long siding with three crossovers (at points named Bijou, Colorado Springs, and Cimarron) at the north edge of Colora- do Springs, along with sidings at Mon- ument and Academy between Palmer Lake and Colorado Springs, help relieve some of this single track congestion. Then 36 miles of double rails begin
again from Crews into Pueblo, with the west side southbound Track 1 BNSF and east side northbound Track 2 UP. Additional crossovers are located at MP 87.9 south of Crews; at a location called Buttes at MP 95.3; and again at Bragdon between MP 108.6 and MP 109.9.
A Bit of History This “Joint Line” began in July 1871
when the new Denver & Rio Grande Railroad was being built by Civil War
Congressional Medal of Honor winner General William Jackson Palmer from newly booming Denver in what was then Kansas Territory to El Paso, Texas, at the Rio Grande River, with a connec- tion with a Mexican railroad to Mexico City. Palmer’s fledgling line was built as three-foot gauge, and his “Baby Rail- road,” so called because of its diminutive size and 30 pound rails, reached Pueblo, 120 rail miles south of Denver, by June 1872.
With both the Atchinson, Topeka &
Santa Fe and the Rio Grande having eyes on the silver mining boom town of Leadville to the west, in 1877 a three- year court fight (bullets were also fired!) occurred over the right to build west- ward from Pueblo through the deep and narrow Royal Gorge of the Arkan- sas River. This “Royal Gorge War” was finally settled in 1880, with the D&RG getting the rights to the gorge (creat- ing the Grande’s famed Tennessee Pass line, closed by current owner UP since 1997) and on into Utah. The AT&SF in turn got the rights to Raton Pass to the south (today’s Raton Subdivision of the BNSF’s Southwest Division, and the route of Amtrak’s Southwest Chief). Then in 1887, changes started hap-
pening that would lead to the creation of today’s Joint Line. The AT&SF built a standard gauge line closely paralleling the Grande between Denver and Pueblo,
prompting the Rio Grande to start stan- dard-gauging its line in order to better compete.
Then yet a third Denver-to-
Pueblo line (up to 15 miles to the east) was built in 1881 by the Denver & New Orleans, through a succession of owners becoming the Colorado & Southern in 1898. Not as efficient as the AT&SF and D&RG lines, in 1900 the C&S agreed to a joint operation using the AT&SF’s line (with the C&S line largely unused until it was torn out in 1919), spawning for the first time the term “joint line.” The Denver & Rio Grande’s line was not part of this new agreement until World War I when America’s railroads were taken over by the United States Railroad Ad- ministration, which mandated all Den- ver-Pueblo rail traffic would be a joint operation on just the two ATSF/C&S and D&RG lines. With the 20th century’s booming pop-
ulation growth, the ATSF line in Colora- do Springs found itself running through residential neighborhoods with many grade crossings. The Santa Fe line from Kelker to Palmer Lake and the D&RGW line from Crews to Kelker were torn out in 1974, and the remaining segments joined to create today’s 32.4 miles of single track between Palmer Lake and Crews. Today, all these railroads have fun-
neled down to the two present Joint Line owners, BNSF and UP. Rio Grande pur-
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