Royal Gorge Route Railroad Is Built For Men Who Never Outgrew Trains

The Royal Gorge Route Railroad runs a 24-mile round trip out of Cañon City, Colorado, through a granite canyon narrow enough in one stretch that the track has to hang off the wall. Most of the scenic railroads that won me over did it with steam - Cass in West Virginia, Mount Washington, the V&T in Nevada - so a modern diesel operation had a case to make. It makes it with a locomotive cab you can buy a seat in, an open-air car that every ticket class can walk into, and a canyon two railroads once fought a two-year war over.

Cañon City sits roughly two and a half hours south of Denver, which puts the railroad inside the same long weekend as most Colorado guys trips - the same drive radius that gets a group to Leadville for high-country ATV tours. The railroad is worth the drive because it asks nothing physical of anybody. The guys who would rather sit with a drink and watch granite go past are having exactly as good a day as the ones hanging over the rail outside.

The Twenty-Four Miles The Highway Cannot Follow

Trains leave the Santa Fe Depot at 401 Water St. in Cañon City, Colorado, run up the Arkansas River into the gorge, and back out the same way. The daytime departures at 9:00 a.m., 12:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. take 1 hour and 50 minutes round trip. The 6:30 p.m. evening run stretches to between 2 and 2.5 hours over the identical 24 miles. The evening train buys you more time in the canyon, not more track.

The route matters because US 50 does not go where the rails go. The highway climbs out and around. Down at river level the walls stand roughly 1,000 feet over the track and close in until there is no bank left on either side. In a state where the good scenery usually comes with a parking lot at the end of it, you cannot drive to most of what you see from this train. Parking at the depot itself is free and sits right alongside.

The Two-Year War Two Railroads Fought Over This Canyon

The Royal Gorge War ran from 1878 to 1880, a fight over a slot in the rock barely wide enough for one line. On April 19, 1878, a hastily assembled Santa Fe grading gang started cutting a roadbed through the gorge while the Denver & Rio Grande tried to physically block them. The argument went to the U.S. Supreme Court, the D&RG came out with primary rights on April 21, 1879, and the two sides signed the Treaty of Boston on March 27, 1880, the D&RG paying $1.8 million for the line the Santa Fe had already graded.

The engineering that came out of that fight is still holding up the train. Where the gorge pinches to 30 feet across, the walls drop straight into the river with nowhere to put a roadbed. C. Shallor Smith, an engineer out of Kansas, answered it in 1879 with a 175-foot plate girder hung off one side of the canyon on A-frame supports, for $11,759. That is the Hanging Bridge, and you roll across it.

The first passenger train reached Salida in 1880. The last one ran on July 27, 1967, and the line carried nothing but freight for three decades until passenger service came back in the fall of 1998.

The Engineer's Cab Is The Seat Worth Planning Around

Ride With The Engineer is what separates this railroad from the rest of the scenic operations. It puts you in the locomotive cab alongside the engineer for the full 24 miles, about two hours, at $299 per person, with commemorative merchandise and a photo folio included. The minimum age is 13, riders between 13 and 17 need an adult in the cab with them, and you have to be 18 to ride on your own.

Be clear on what you are buying. You are up front for the whole run, watching the road ahead and getting the route and the history from the person doing the job. It is not advertised as taking the throttle yourself, and I would not book it expecting to.

The cab holds a handful of seats and the trains sell out, which makes this the piece of a guys trip that gets reserved first and dictates the rest of the calendar. Reservations go through the railroad online or at 719-276-4000.

What Each Class Of Service Actually Buys

Three classes run on the daytime trains. Vista Dome puts you in a glass-domed car with booth seating and starts at $139 per adult on non-peak journeys, $154 on peak. Deluxe Class has four-top tables and long bars set against the windows, from $129 non-peak and $144 peak. Coach Class runs high-back seats with butcher-block cocktail tables, from $109 and $124. Children two to twelve run $5 under the adult fare across the board.

The price ladder hides the best part. The open-air car is standing room only and open to anyone holding a ticket in any class, with what the railroad calls unfettered access. The best view on the train is not sold as an upgrade. The extra money buys the seat and table you come back to once you have had enough wind. For a group planning to spend most of the run outside, that is an argument for booking Coach and putting the difference into the bar.

One thing to know before you book for a mixed group: the train carries a lift for anyone who cannot manage stairs, but the Vista Dome is not wheelchair accessible.

The Ticket Covers The Journey And Nothing Else

The railroad states this plainly in its own FAQ, and it is the most useful sentence on the site: the price of your ticket covers the cost of your journey only. Dining, beverages, gratuities and other fees are all additional.

Run the arithmetic on an evening train and you see why it matters. The Twilight Train is $124 and up per person, and that flat rate applies across Vista Dome, Deluxe and Coach alike. Dining is another $35 per person. Then drinks, then the tip. A night that gets pitched as dinner and a show lands closer to $175 or $200 a man before anybody orders a second round.

The rest of the fine print is worth knowing in advance on a group booking:

• Cancelling more than 48 hours out - $20 per ticket.
• Inside 48 hours - tickets can be rescheduled, but no refunds are issued.
• Walking up at the depot - a $10 per ticket fee over booking ahead.
• Same-day tickets - reservations close an hour before departure, and the railroad wants you there 1.5 hours early.

For a bachelor party, or any group where one guy is going to drop out at the last minute, that 48-hour line is what the deposit conversation should be built around.

Oktoberfest, The Twilight Train And The Runs After Dark

The seasonal trains are where the case for a weekend with the guys gets easier to make. Oktoberfest runs the same canyon with bratwurst over red cabbage and sautéed apples, spaetzle and a Düsseldorf mustard, seasonal Oktoberfest beers off a fully stocked bar, and a Royal Gorge glass to take home. It goes on the 12:30, 3:30 and 6:30 departures.

The Twilight Train is the after-dark version. It leaves at 6:30 or 7 p.m., and around sundown the show starts from the open-air car - laser light choreographed to music and thrown directly onto the canyon walls, which by that point in the route are close enough to work as a screen. The ticket includes a commemorative pint glass, and the first beer, wine or soft drink is complimentary if a meal has been pre-purchased. In October the railroad runs a Halloween version of the same night, costumes included.

Seasonal schedules move from one year to the next, and the dates are the thing most worth verifying rather than assuming. Pull the current calendar at royalgorgeroute.com or call 719-276-4000 before anybody books flights around one specific evening.

What Else Fills The Weekend In Cañon City

Two hours on a train does not fill a weekend, and Cañon City is set up to handle the rest of it. The Arkansas River you have been looking at all day is one of the better whitewater runs in the country, and the Royal Gorge stretch packs 15 Class III and IV rapids into six miles, with named drops like Sunshine, Sledgehammer and Boateater.

If half the group wants moving water without the swim, Bighorn Sheep Canyon upstream is the gentler run. The rafts and the train share the canyon, so the guys on the water and the guys on the rail spend part of the afternoon waving at each other.

Above all of it, the Royal Gorge Bridge and Park runs a quarter-mile suspension span more than 1,000 feet over the river, plus a gondola across the gorge, a via ferrata bolted to the canyon wall and a zip line. In town, the Museum of Colorado Prisons occupies the old women's prison next door to a facility that is still operating, which is a stranger hour than it sounds.

One booking note that saves the group half a day. Denver is the airport everybody defaults to at two and a half hours out, but Colorado Springs sits about 50 miles from Cañon City, roughly an hour's drive. If the flights price out anywhere close, fly into Colorado Springs and sleep in Cañon City near the depot.

Put together, that is a Colorado guys trip that fills two full days without requiring anybody in the group to be an athlete. It also answers the problem of the buddy who has aged out of the ski trip and is not interested in a golf course, which is the same gap the alternatives to the annual golf trip keep trying to fill.

Book The Cab Seat, Then Build The Weekend Around It

The reservation that decides this trip is the cab, not the hotel. There are only a few of those seats per departure and the trains sell out, so whatever date you land for Ride With The Engineer becomes the date everything else gets arranged against - rafting, the bridge, the evening train, all of it booked afterward.

The other thing I would do differently from most people booking this is take the 6:30 p.m. departure over the daytime runs. Same 24 miles, same Hanging Bridge, but the evening train takes 2 to 2.5 hours against 1 hour and 50 minutes, and that extra half hour gets spent at the bottom of a canyon in the last light of the day. The railroad prices 6:30 as a peak departure, so the extra canyon time is not free. It is still the one I would book.

Trains do something to grown men that very little else on an itinerary manages. The steel starts rolling and the oldest guy in the group is twelve again. Royal Gorge is simply the operation that will sell him the seat next to the engineer.

Photos provided courtesy of Royal Gorge Route Railroad.