(door clattering) (train whirring) (train whistle blares) (bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (train whirring) (train whistle blares) (train whirring) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music) - [Narrator] Think of snow and one automatically pictures i of Colorado's fluffy powder and ski resorts second to none.

Winter Park Resort stands out from the rest because of its closeness to Denv What makes Winter Park unique other than great skiing?

It's the Ski Train.

No other train in America stops only feet from ski lifts.

Through the years, this train has transported thousands of skiers to the slopes.

In fact, the Ski Train has been as a Denver tradition for genera (upbeat music) Before the Rio Grande Railroad started running its ski trains, the New Haven Railroad operated snow trains to some eastern ski resorts on t The Boston and Maine and New York Central Railroads had ski trains as well.

At first, the Rio Grande operated special trains to ski locations within Colorado before they began regularly scheduled service to Winter Park.

Steve Patterson provides some ba about these early trains.

- After the Depression, people in Denver were wanting to So the "Rocky Mountain News" decided to sponsor ski trains to take people up to the winter they'd heard so much about.

These winter carnivals been going on in the Rocky Mountains for 25 years.

So they sponsored excursion, advertised it to run on Sunday, February 9th, 1936.

And the response was so tremendo much more than they ever anticip They had sold over 2,200 tickets and had to operate three trains to get people up to the mountain And so the first ski train operated that year, 1936, up to Hot Sulphur Springs.

The Denver and Salt Lake train c from Steamboat Springs to Hot Sulphur Springs with 500 people on it.

And so that was the first time they'd run a ski train.

About 1939 came a fellow along f named Frank Bulkley.

He had the Eskimo Ski Club.

- My dad started the Eskimo Ski Club in 1939.

His name is also Frank Bulkley, or I guess I should say my name is also Frank Bulkley.

I'm the third.

He's the second.

He negotiated with the railroad to run the Ski Train.

That train ran until, well, the club ran until 2018.

- And he wanted to take his skiers, children, up to the mountains.

So he had so many, he kept using several buses.

That didn't quite work out.

So he said to the railroad, "Why can't we run people on a tr So he convinced the Denver Salt Lake Railroad, "Why don't you run us a ski trai And so about that time, 1939, 19 that was the winter, the birth of the Winter Park Ski Train, which became city owned, owned by the city of Denver.

- [Narrator] Frank Bulkley, an ardent skier, saw the railroad as an excellent to transport his new Eskimo Ski Club members.

So in 1939, he contacted the Denver and Salt Lake Railway regarding transportation of his youthful skiers to Winter Park.

- The train was much easier to w when you have a whole bunch of k to take up to the mountains.

The buses, you had to worry about road conditions and coordinating getting a bunch of buses over the pass.

And it was much easier to take t through the Moffat Tunnel.

- [Speaker] During those early y the Eskimo Ski Club was one of t pretty much filled up the whole A number of Denverites grew up and then became a member of the Eskimo Ski Club.

They would meet in Union Station in the morning, they'd take them up, they'd be with the same instruct for several weeks in a row, and they'd learn to ski.

We kind of think that half of Denver learned how to ski by riding the Ski Train.

(bright music) (explosions booming) (civilians screaming) - [Speaker] Yesterday, December - [Narrator] In 1941, the United entered into World War II and this caused a temporary halt to the Ski Train.

Two years after the war's end, the Denver and Rio Grande Wester the Denver and Salt Lake Railway The railroad immediately began to recreate the Ski Train idea.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Ski Train was youth oriented and dominated by the Eskimo Ski whose ages ranged from 7 to 17.

Those $2 round trip fairs certainly enticed passengers to ride the train.

And yes, even snacks and hot drinks were available too.

So successful were the Ski Train that extra cars like these Santa Fe coaches were routinely leased.

As the Ski Train cars became old and more costly to repair, the Rio Grande purchased eight all-steel cars from the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1960.

These Pullman cars were built in and carried passengers to the slopes for many years.

Here are a few memories.

- [Kenton] When I first started it was the museum on wheels.

The older cars, they were fun to They rode beautifully.

Nice heavyweight cars.

So it was fun to ride.

It was like stepping back into h with the older equipment.

- I rode the Ski Train at least once a year during the 1970s and early 1980s That's when they still had the original old cars like this one.

I remember it as a combination of school bus subway.

Very crowded with lots of noisy We were a little group.

We didn' We rode the train just for the f It was a winter adventure in the mountains.

- [Steve] They're quite charming It had old flip-over seats.

The seats reversed.

You just flipped 'em this way, t And they were old velvet seats and little narrow overhead racks to put your coats and things in, maybe the boots.

- One real fun thing about the t is that you had either two seats facing each other, two people in a seat, or you could flip the back to where there would be, go from here to here.

So you had people facing that wa or you had people facing this wa In the kid's section, they were always like this.

And since they were like this, you had a little cubbyhole right where you hid under here when the conductor went by so you could save your train tic I didn't have to worry about that, but I played the game.

As you got older, the seats went from here to here because then you had your girlfriend right there and you had that to yourself.

- [Steve] And it's very unique.

It's just an old car, steam heat and toilets at the end of the ca where you could stand on the ped and look at the ground going by underneath.

And it wasn't quite satisfactory 'cause it was very, very limited It only had eight cars and it could not meet the demand - One time I was riding the trai when I was a member of the Eskim and I was going back to the snac and just as I was going between two of the coaches, I was suddenly enveloped in stea and I instinctively put out my a and grabbed the diaphragm curtai and the next thing I saw was the rear end of the train receding down the track because the train had broken in And of all the times that I worked on the railroad, that was probably the closest time I ever had to meeting my end I guess (chuck - [Narrator] Finally, several ye the Rio Grande came under new ma and the leadership of Philip Ans The Ski Train was about to be re - When the Anschutz Corporation the Rio Grande Railroad, I think it was the fall of 1985, the Ski Train came along.

I was working for Phil Anschutz at the time.

We decided that Ski Train was a wonderful, rich tradition and for the sake of preserving railroad history, it was worth some upgrades.

Improving but extending the service on the Ski Train, it was a complete re-engineering of the whole operation.

Not only did we want to upgrade the quality of the cars, but also change the service.

We went from a general admission type of train to three classes of service: coach, club, and luxury private car service.

So we needed different equipment to accomplish that style of serv - The initiative actually came from Philip Anschutz after he bought the Rio Grande.

And at that time, the Rio Grande was running a eight-car train that the cars and equipment were basically built in 1914.

They were old Northern Pacific steel coaches.

The Ski Train had been an instit but it was on its last legs, and there was no food and beverage service.

The cars were getting to the poi where they're past their mechani and Mr. Anschutz set the directi if we could, and make it economically viable, get replacement equipment.

- The old equipment was physically wearing out and there was a lot of band-aids and bailing wire to hold it together.

The crews at the shop did a marv of getting everything together.

- [Narrator] Finding replacement for the Ski Train was a challeng First came cost considerations and then the necessity to find c that still had serviceable years - At that time, I think the quotations for new equipment were in excess of a million dollars a car and so on and that was not really economically feasible.

So we looked at the used equipme and we looked at some equipment on the Alaska Railroad.

We were scouring the country for replacements, used cars, and actually, these cars were located in Canada.

They were part of the LRC equipment that had been retired.

They'd run in service from Montreal to Toronto and they were surplus to Via Rai And so we went up and looked at and we acquired them I think in 1987, '86, '87, and brought them down to Denver and refurbished them in Denver.

(bright music) - [Narrator] Jim Bain tells a st about a special greeting some VIPs received a few years ago when they were riding the Ski Tr - The summer of 1997 and Denver was selected to host the Summit of the 8.

They were trying to figure out something to do with the spouses on that Saturda and the Ski Train was selected to take them up to Winter Park up on the chairlift and then have lunch on top of th so they could experience the great Colorado scenery.

Everything's working out great and they kept bugging me, "Where's Tolland?

Where's Tollan Because earlier in the week, the newspaper had run a story about these folks in Tolland who'd purchased flags from all the nations, and they were out there on their lawn chairs waving the flags to welcome the train through Tolland.

We got to Tolland and there's Hillary Clinton and the French First Lady and the Japanese first lady on the back platform of the (ind and they're waving all the folks Just as we pass them, there's three men up in the wilderness up there up in the trees with their backs to the train and their pants down around thei They're mooning the train.

Everybody got a big laugh out of The Japanese lady I remember was fumbling for her camera.

The French lady said, "Ah, there's men like that in every country."

And everyone got a good laugh ou It all worked out great and it was a wonderful thing for (bright music) - Denver Ski Train has a rich hi going back almost 3/4 of a centu to become a Denver tradition for generations.

While passenger cars evolved from standard heavyweight coache to an upgraded service in the 19 the mission has always been to offer rail service to the popular ski resort of Winter Park, Colorado.

Recently, a new chapter in ski train history has unfolded with Amtrak's Winter Park Expres It was a simple idea that became Now those two-hour trips are onc an efficient, safe, and enjoyabl When the last version of the Ski Train left, there was a group of us standing outside the Moffat Tunnel watching it go into the tunnel.

It was a very sad day for all of because that had been around for so many years.

But as we saw that train disappear into the darkness, we started to think, "We have got to find a way to bring back another train."

- I remember the car behind me v from my earliest days of skiing starting in the early 1970s when I would go to Rocky Flats and get on the train there with friends from school.

Right up through junior high we would do this.

And this coach baggage car behind us right now came into play later on while I was in college doing an internship with the Rio Grande Ski Train.

I started by thinking about the What was the vision of all of th going all the way back to 1940 where the first Ski Train ran and then the Eskimo Ski Club and then Mr. Anschutz saving it and making it even better and then those dark days when there was no Ski Train and then to revitalize it with Amtrak's Winter Park Express?

- When the original Ski Train stopped operating, I thought it was a great loss for the people of the Denver Met that no longer had an easy way to get to the Winter Park resort - ColoRail was an early particip maybe the first participant, in restoring ski train service in Colorado.

The Anschutz train had stopped operating in 2009.

ColoRail was seeking goals that would appeal to its broad membership across t And the Ski Train came up at one of our meetings.

One of our members wrote an article for our newsletter about restoring the Ski Train and we got a very powerful response from our membership.

- So after our board meeting, I composed a brief article for the ColoRail newsletter advocating Amtrak's operation of a restored ski train.

Just before I shut my computer d I thought, "Is there anybody els that might be interested in this And I thought at the last minute that, "Oh, Brad Swartzwelter would love this idea.

He'd get a kick out of it because he worked on the Anschutz Ski Train."

- I knew then that the day that the Ski Train could be reinvigorated was coming, but I didn't know how to articulate it right and I didn't know how to put the plan together.

That required impetus from my good friend Bob Brewster, who put together a wonderful art and he sent it to me before it was actually published with ColoRail.

I read the article and said, "Absolutely right," and immediately spent most all of one night beginning the business plan that eventually became Amtrak's Winter Park Express.

- Well, the idea of a new train, it was a very interesting thing that happened.

I was in Denver in meetings and about midday we finished.

I called my office and my assistant said, "We've had a phone call and somebody said they need to t to the most important person in Winter Park."

And she said, "We think this is So I went ahead, made the call, couldn't imagine what it was gon and it was a gentleman by the name of Brad Swartzwelter.

Brad put together a draft of a proposal to Amtrak.

He brought it up to me.

We had our marketing people, our public relations people, and we all worked with it.

We got a proposal that we could all agree to and Brad took it to Amtrak and he brought it to a lady by the name of Joy Smith, who was very senior in the opera And Joy spent some time with it, talked to Amtrak, and said, "I think we should pursue this further."

So we arranged to have a group from Amtrak in Chicago come to Winter Park.

- [Jim] They agreed to do that.

They sent executives from Washin and from Chicago out to Denver.

13 executives were on the Amtrak (train whirring) - [Gary] Union Station had been just a little time before that.

And they got off the train, they saw the beautiful new stati and at that point we had a chance to talk to them about DIA and the new A train that took people from the airport all the way to downtown Denver.

They thought that was great.

They loved the idea of plane to - We met them in Denver.

I joined them.

We rode the California Zephyr up to Fraser.

And in Fraser, Gary DeFrange had a connection bus come pick us up and take us three or four miles over to where Winter Park is located on the tracks.

- Our ColoRail group chartered a for the return trip for these ma to see what the highway alternative to the train was lik So we boarded the bus, and before long, all the windows were fogged up.

We could not see why we were making all these hairpin turns leaning from one side to the oth We got back to Denver and immediately encountered a massive traffic jam on I-70 in rush hour.

And I mentioned to the Amtrak ma "So imagine this jam all the way back to Winter Park."

- Initially the Union Pacific, in fact, opposed the idea pretty strenuously, but not in a hostile way.

It's just their posture was, and that they're a freight railroad.

And they could see that additional passenger service on their lines could in some way impede freight - So once we decided we were moving forward, there were a number of things that we knew we had to address.

First of all, the tracks from Denver to Winter Park are mostly owned by Union Pacifi There's a small section in Denve that's run by the BNSF Railroad and they own it, but the majority was Union Pacif And so we knew we had to come down with an agreement that both railroads would be willing to sign on to and be supportive of.

Secondly, you know, these things you don't think of.

Where do you park this train Monday through Friday?

So we had to have a place to put the train.

Third, we had to park at someplace in Winter Park because where we were going to unload was on a live track.

So we knew we had to work on tha Fourth, we really had to make su that we followed all of the Federal Railroad Association, all of their rules and regulatio And we had to show that we had t And, of course, that was easy to with the test train.

- However, they turned around after they saw the great political and popular support we'd received for the route and soon we had both railroads as well as our whole political establishment in Colorado onboard.

This would become very important because getting the train started was one thing, but also to meet the Union Pacific's requirements, we had to build a four and a half million dollars platform up at Winter Park and that required public funding We were able to do that using our political influence.

We were able to get the state to put in a million bucks.

So Gary DeFrange up at Winter Park put in a million.

Amtrak put in a million.

We raised a bunch of additional from different sources, and by 2017, we had a heated platform built in Winter Park.

- We set up a time to bring the and we were gonna do a one-day t We put together a lot of advertising, a lot of PR, and we were ready to go.

And that night, at about six o'clock at night, I was home and I got a call from Amtrak and they say, "You're not gonna believe this.

The train is sold out and we have a waiting list."

So we then did another press rel We announced that because of the high demand, we were going to run the train a second time.

That day at 10 o'clock in the mo I got a call from Amtrak saying, "We have already sold the second train out."

- And it took months to get a demonstration together.

We finally did that in March of And then the success of that, plus a very dedicated plan, plus enormous support from Gary and the Winter Park Resort, from the Department of Transport of the State of Colorado, from ColoRail, of course, which was the cheerleader of the entire organization, and many others, the City of Denver, the City of Winter Park, they all came together with mone and the Union Pacific Railroad, our host railroad, the white elephant in the room, And we had a train.

And suddenly the public was able to re-enjoy what they had lost that had been such a vital part of our culture in this city for so many decades.

- I was fortunate enough to be on both trial runs of the new ski train service und Of course, it was just a trial.

There was no assurance that it would become a permanent But I could not believe this was actually happening.

Here we were with two train load packed with skiers and sightseers going to Winter Park.

The ski train is leading the way to other rail services within Co There were frustrations along th There were times when we wondere if we could make some things wor but I think it was well worth it If I had it to do all over again, we'd do it again.

- A fantastic sense of accomplis that I could never have even begun to do on my own.

But with the assistance of hundreds of other people who did unbelievable work, we were able to pull it off.

And it was the feeling that's similar to being in the cab of a P42 with a string of long-distance train cars behind you and you feel like the whole world is in your hands.

The conductor is always the luck He gets to look cool and wear the fancy hat and walk around with all the pas I wish everybody could see the dozens of other people behind the scenes that make it possible for the conductor to be cool, and they're the ones that are the real heroes of the Winter Park Express.

(bright music) (train whirring) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues)