Today, Thursday, we drove to the train station to park our Jeep and board a bus to Silverton, CO.  It was a nice enough ride on mountain roads, stopping a couple times to shoot photos of the fall foliage, especially the Aspen trees that are turning color.  The color was mostly yellow, but there was some orange.  Supposedly they will turn red, but we saw no evidence of that.

Betty by Yellow-Leafed Aspen Tree

Once we got to Silverton, we went directly to the Handlebars Restaurant (as in handlebar mustaches).  This is a restaurant that is part museum and part restaurant.  There are many stuffed animals and comical signs everywhere.  The food was OK.

Interior of Handlebars Restaurant and Bar

One of the cynical signs behind the bar

After lunch we had only a little time before the train left, so we could only walk around town and look at gift shops.  Betty got a Silverton shirt.

I snapped a photo of this shirt in one of the gift shops

The train ride was a loud, rattling, swaying, bouncy, and smoky ride on a narrow gauge train pulled by a 19th century steam locomotive.  The engine's fuel is coal, so there was coal smoke everywhere and steam being released loudly.  The steam actually created a rainbow once and a fellow traveler caught a snapshot of it. The train ran along one cliff edge after another.  The narrow gauge allowed sharp turns around the curves.

Rainbow created by engine steam

Train rounded many tight curves

 I rode this train 11 years ago, hanging off the back of the caboose in a snow storm and loved it.  The smoke was diluted by the time it got back there, and the steam was dissipated.  I was also 11 years younger.  Today, as others also remarked, it was a very slow drawn-out jostling rocking back-and-forth experience that went on forever (it seemed).  This train had no caboose.  We got on the train around 1:30 pm and arrived in Durango at 5:45 pm.  That is 48 miles in over 4 hours.  If those trains were that slow, no wonder train robbers could ride horses up along side and jump aboard.  The trains here are actually used to film that kind of Western movie, and many films have been shot here and at other nearby locations.  They say the people in the 19th century loved these trains because they were so much better than riding on a stagecoach.  The trains were actually more comfortable and what took a stagecoach 3 days took the train 3 hours.  The faster time was mostly due to taking a more direct route through (rather than around) the mountains.  The weather was cool and clear all day.  The unusual thing here is that a very hot sun will coexist with cold air.   One does not find this in Florida. If in the shade, it is cold enough to wear a coat; if in the sun it is very hot, forcing you to pull off the coat and maybe even your shirt.  This was not so much true in Silverton at 9300+ feet high, but it was definitely true this morning in Durango at 6500+ feet high.