Do the Loop

When the Colorado Central Railroad needed to climb a steep, narrow canyon at Devil's Gate just west of Georgetown, it employed Union Pacific engineer Robert Blickenderfer to design an ingenious solution: a 300-foot-long trestle that would allow the track to ascend in a more feasible grade by doubling back over itself in an engineered loop. Combined with miles of curves surveyed over the canyon's landforms, the Georgetown Loop would allow the train to traverse the two miles to the next mining camp of Silver Plume on a steep, but feasible, 4 percent grade. Construction supervisor Robert Brewster Stanton ordered the wrought iron trestle towers fabricated by contractors Clark Reeves and Company of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, a company that would later incorporate as the Phoenix Bridge Company, one of the country's premier bridge fabricators. The contractors initially installed the towers backwards over the stone pedestals so that the trestle ran downhill instead of uphill. After Stanton rejected the initial installation, they hastily reconstructed the trestle in the right configuration.

Stanton also found riveting problems, which Clark Reeves fixed, attributing it to the difficulty of convincing skilled riveters to scale the dizzying structure over the rocky canyon and rushing waters of Clear Creek. Finally in 1884 trains steamed from Georgetown, over the "High Bridge" and into Silver Plume.

The Georgetown Loop in particular became famous as a Gilded Age tourist destination, after William Henry Jackson photographed the breathtakingly tall trestle and the railroad advertised it. From 1884 through the end of the century, tourists came to "do the loop." - NRHP