Cimarron Canyon Rail Exhibit

The rail exhibit at Cimarron preserves the last remaining railroad bridge of the Denver & Rio Grande's Black Canyon route, the narrow-gauge passenger and freight line that traversed the Black Canyon of the Gunnison between 1882 and the 1940s. The Pratt truss-style deck bridge over the Cimarron River went up in 1895, replacing a wooden trestle from the route's original 1882 construction between Gunnison and Montrose; of its original 288 feet, only the central span survives. Left as the route's sole surviving bridge after the line's abandonment in the 1950s and the flooding of the Gunnison in the 1960s, the trestle was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. Atop it sits a static display of Rio Grande equipment: 2-8-0 steam locomotive D&RGW No. 278, built by Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1882, the coal tender paired with it in 1935, boxcar No. 3132, built in 1904 by American Car and Foundry, and caboose No. 0577 of 1886. The railroad gifted the engine, tender, and caboose to the nearby town of Montrose in 1952, which leased them to the National Park Service in 1973, and a restoration program begun in 2010 returned the cosmetically restored equipment to the trestle on October 26, 2018, within Curecanti National Recreation Area.