Following the contours of the hills, a Rio Grande Southern freight extra claws its way up a lava-capped mesa on its run from Durango to Ridgway, Colorado. The helper engine leading the charge in this 2021 re-creation for Trains Magazine is the 1899 Schenectady-built 10-Wheeler #20, and the beefy road engine is the K-27 "Mudhen" #455, both of which carry the RGS "Sunrise" herald. Although we can refurbish, rebuild and re-letter extant equipment which ran on the RGS back in the day, the one thing that's really difficult to re-create is the rugged scenery and "sketchy" condition of the original line in Southwest Colorado. This particular image was made at MP 289.2 on the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad, at a location in Northern New Mexico that has become known as "Gravity Hill." While it's a superb photo spot, the desert conditions and volcanic mesas here in Northern New Mexico are quite different from the forested, Rocky Mountain terrain where the RGS ran, a couple of hundred miles to the west of this location. The track conditions here also look far better than what was typically the case on "The Southern."
