The Florence and Cripple Creek Railroad (F&CC) was a 3 ft (914 mm) (narrow gauge) railroad running northward from junctions with the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad at the mill towns of Florence and later moved to Cañon City, CO, on the banks of the Arkansas River, up steep and narrow Phantom Canyon to the Cripple Creek Mining District, west of Pikes Peak. Started in 1893, it was the first railroad to reach the new, booming mining district from the "outside world"; as a result it earned substantial profits in its first years. The railroad hauled people and goods into the mining district, and ore concentrates from the mines south for milling in Florence or transfer to the D&RG for milling in Pueblo, CO. The F&CC's first main terminal was located in Victor, the "second city" of the district; but its branch lines served many of the largest mines within the area.
Ultimately, the F&CC began to struggle financially as other competing railroads, built to the 4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge, Midland Terminal and Colorado Springs & Cripple Creek District Railroads entered the district from Colorado Springs from the north or east. In addition, flash floods washed out significant sections of the F&CC mainline in the narrows of Phantom Canyon several times. By the early 1900s, the railroad was in serious financial trouble and merged with other railroads of the area under the Cripple Creek Central holding company. A final, large flash flood destroyed enough of the F&CC's right-of-way to convince its new owners it was financially unwise to spend money rebuilding it; and the line was abandoned and scrapped. The F&CC's well-kept motive power, eight 2-8-0 Consolidation freight engines, and four 4-6-0 Ten-Wheelers passenger engines, were quickly sold to other area narrow gauge railroads. An F&CC subsidiary, the Golden Circle Railroad, which operated narrow gauge commuter routes within the district itself, continued to operate for several more years after its parent's abandonment.
Today the original grade for this route is part of the Gold belt scenic byway and open traffic for most of the summer months. The graded gravel road is suitable for regular cars and within a few miles of its slow sweeping turns, narrow mountain excavations, its easy visualize what passengers experienced over a hundred years ago on their way to Victor or Cripple Creek.
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Famous quotes containing the words cripple, creek and/or railroad:
“The cripple tardy-gaited night,
Who like a foul and ugly witch doth limp
So tediously away.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubious ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)