A dozen men –  call them the dirty dozen, because they soon will be – gather quietly at dawn in Antonito, a sleepy town of about 700 founded in 1889 at the southernmost end of Colorado’s San Luis Valley.

The most obvious new thing in old Antonito is a short, spotless concrete section of U.S. Highway 285 that the state laid down as part of Antonito’s Main Street in 2015. That, and the new Family Dollar. Most everything else here is old, including most of the dirty dozen shuffling their feet this morning.

Waiting for the men just south of downtown is a century-old slumbering steam engine, a 187,100-pound black metal beast loudly snoring in its habitat: an 1880s rail yard and depot. Attached to the locomotive is a line of antique passenger cars. The old men will board that train to take their positions – some in the engine and others in the cars – while the morning is still young.

The steam train will travel the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railway, a 64-mile narrow gauge track that stitches together two neighboring states: Colorado and New Mexico. Built in 1880 to transport minerals mined from nearby mountains, the railway now delights thousands of passengers from across Colorado and the world who love the sounds and smells of yesteryear.



When it’s running, the black metal beast is always hungry. Today the train is being driven and fed by seven men. The seven paid handsomely for the privilege of enrolling in the Cumbres & Toltec Engineer and Fireman School. Joining them are Cumbres & Toltec staff, a writer and a photographer.

For five of the seven students, their trip will be a series of sprints – 6-mile, 20-minute coal-shoveling shifts – that they describe as exhausting, exhilarating, addicting. The sprints add up to a marathon day. Like all sprinters and marathoners before a race, the men are quiet, reflective, rehearsing in their minds the task ahead.

The two men in the engine’s cramped cab will push the engine’s throttle; when they do, the earth itself will seem to quake. Ten railcars behind them stretch out and shake in succession, a jolt that awakened everyone aboard.

By race’s end, the seven students will smile like 12-year-olds, giddy because they had just cheated death.

If not for sturdy construction, meticulous care and stringent safety measures, the steam locomotive’s massive boiler could unleash the force of a bomb. Today, as on every day since the railroad began running, the boiler remained intact.

Today’s students had successful careers. Many grew up mechanically or mathematically inclined. It was exposure to steam engines at a very young age, typically on a trip with a grandfather, that led them to Antonito.

The school won’t lead its graduates to a job with the railroad. That would require at least four or five seasons, six months each, five days a week. The four-day class is an experience, not a career track. This is about fun, not work.

Along the way, the men who paid $3,200 apiece for the course will pay precious little attention to the stunning scenery passing them by – such as the deeply sliced and gasp-inducing Toltec Gorge and the gleaming ribbon of water at the gorge’s bottom, 600 feet below.

On the downhill side of 10,015-foot Cumbres Pass is the railway’s most fabled landscape – terrain that inspired Steven Spielberg to haul equipment and transport film crews for scenes in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and later provided the backdrop for the four-minute finale of the Christian Bale film Hostiles. It’s all something of an afterthought to the men with the 20-pound shovels and the throttle and the power of life and death in their hands.

 

One of these men, Jim Reynolds, practiced internal medicine in Boulder for 32 years. He is retired now, giving him time to operate the railroad’s steam locomotives. This is his 11th four-day engineering school. “It’s an addiction,” Reynolds said with a smile. “I tried rehab, but it didn’t work.”

Reynolds remembers the time as a 3-year-old when his grandfather took him on a ride behind a steam engine back home in Missouri. “I fell in love with steam then,” he said. “We rode from Springfield to St. Louis for a Cardinals ball game.” That’s a 70-year memory that all these years later drives Reynolds’ choice of a vacation.

In his 44 days of engineering school, Reynolds recalls one memorable mishap: the brake rigging fell off a rail car, derailing all 10 cars.

“All of a sudden, bang, the tank car jumped up,” Reynolds said. “Four of us wrestled back 10 cars from an embankment, using a 500-pound tool.”

On another trip, a big herd of sheep started going in front of the train – and stopped. “They were bound and determined to run under the train,” he said. The sheep survived.

Father and son Steve and Gabe Truesdale of Lincoln, Nebraska, find a new way to bond on this trip: They take turns shoveling coal.

Steve calls himself “a Renaissance man” who works in computer science, but he considers Gabe his crowning achievement. Gabe, the youngest of four children, plays second-chair cello in a local symphony orchestra. He built a 150-gallon saltwater aquarium. He’s “flown” every airplane simulator available. And he’s on the highly functional side of the autism spectrum.

Gabe eagerly jumps atop the engine cab to supply the thirsty engine with water from a tower. The engine holds 5,000 gallons. It will consume 3,500 of it to reach the top of Cumbres Pass.

Whether grandfather and grandson, or father and son, the steam engine is a strong allure for visitors.

The conductor running the engineering school trains is Ed Beaudette, who grew up on a family farm in Vermont, next to the Central Vermont Railway, when it still ran steam engines. In earning an undergraduate degree in theoretical physics, he developed “a healthy respect for gravity.” He managed plastics technology, working for decades with Exxon Mobil before retiring. He’s been with the Cumbres & Toltec for the last 13 years.

Safely in Chama, New Mexico, the dirty dozen – the seven paying customers, staff and the writer and photographer – stand sweaty and sooty, cinders clinging to their clothing, coal smoke blackening their hands and faces and filling their nostrils. The Texas barbeque that several will eat later in the day will taste like it was prepared in a coal fire. And they’ll do it all again next shift, and maybe next year, too.

The seven students muster their patience for a commemorative photograph. They’re standing in front of a picture-perfect railyard and depot fit for a big Hollywood finale.

The boys’ birth certificates might be yellowing from age but today they’re all 12-year-olds. On this special day, they got the better of the beast.