Pictures Rediscovered After Decades
Ever have one of those times that you completely forget you have something?
Back at the end of the last century (it hurts a little to say that!) I had sort-of a special relationship with the Ansco Ski Train management. Basically, I had stood up a fan website about the train; they discovered it; they asked to borrow some of my graphics. In exchange they offered to comp me tickets on the train– for the whole family– anytime we wanted. Sweet deal, eh? Well, since we lived about 400 miles from Denver and rode the train maybe once per year, it wasn’t a whole lot of financial exposure for Ansco, but we still took advantage of the arrangement several times.
One of these times was on January 29, 2000. After surviving Y2k, we made the journey to Denver to ride the train. Now, one of the perks of this arrangement was that I was allowed to shoot photos and video from open vestibule doors, provided I was escorted by someone from the train’s volunteer staff. This turned out to be no burden at all; I was actually treated a little bit like a celebrity (“You have a website?”) Remember, this was still pretty early in the whole Internet game. If they only knew just how insignificant I really was! Anyway, the morning of the 29th the four of us boarded the train at Union Station and settled in for the two-hour ride.
In my case, “settling in” means never sitting for more than a minute before bouncing up again to take more photos!
On this day, based on the quality of the negatives, I must have been shooting ASA400 film, as the clarity is just not there. It’s a compromise between quality and being able to actually shoot a moving subject on a moving platform with the least motion-blur possible.
Incidentally: after I got this roll of film back, I must have scanned about three of the prints and promptly forgotten about the package. When I dug this out of storage last week, I found at least a dozen shots I had absolutely no memory of ever seeing! So here you go. We get to enjoy them together as if for the first time, which is basically true.
Based on my location for most of these photos we must have been seated on car 11, SHAVANO PEAK, which is the last “public” car on the train (the three club cars behind were premium, and the private cars behind them were invitation-only.
I didn’t shoot any more photos on the westbound trip, not sure why but probably because the alignment is less curvy overall and the staff always got fussy about prepping for the Moffat Tunnel transit and subsequent unloading process at Winter Park.
None of us were downhill skiers, but on this trip we booked a day of cross-country skiing down at Devil’s Thumb Ranch beyond Fraser. It’s a beautiful spot and I wish my knees were still up for that kind of activity!
After the day’s activities we re-boarded the train and headed into the nearby lounge-cafe car WINTER PARK. I shot a couple of images through the windows at the scenery as the train nudged into motion. (Jim Bain and the other management usually hung out in the opposite end of this car.)
Now for an anecdote. We were sitting in the cafe car right where I took that interior shot, all having our cocoa and such. Our kids were 11 and 8 at the time. The younger one was just taking a sip of cocoa with its whipped cream topping, when the older one poked her or something and made her laugh. The topping was blasted off the cup and across the table… and all over my face! I was furious, until I noticed some people at an adjacent booth laughing. Only then did I see the humor of the situation and began laughing myself… (No, I don’t have a photo!)
The reason for this final shot was to capture the new lettering reconfiguration. The backstory is like this. When these Canadian cars were first acquired around 1987, Ansco named each car after various Colorado geologic features. Coaches were in the MOUNT or PEAK series, club cars in the SPRINGS series, and the two cafes were in the PARK series. The cars all received the Rio Grande herald above the windows– at the time, Rio Grande was still the railroad owning the route. Mergers in 1988 and 1996, however, effectively expunged the Rio Grande as an entity (the Ski Train itself was owned by a separate corporate entity, Ansco). Given the changed conditions, Ansco management decided that a re-imaging, or re-branding was in order. The car names were buffed off the nameplates in mid-1999 and replaced with “The Ski Train” legend in a Birch font. The cars ran that way for the summer runs. However, evidently there was sufficient complaint raised, probably by the railfan community, about the missing car names that the company decided to put the names back on the cars, only less prominently. As you can see in the photo, the names were put back on under the vestibule heralds, in the same art-deco lettering but much smaller. I wanted to get a good up-close view of the change, but unfortunately I didn’t set up my camera manually for the shot and the automatic shutter exposure was too long. As a result we have the slightly-blurry image shown above. Well, that’s what happens when you get in a hurry…
Remember, this was long before digital cameras were the norm. Everything then was shot on film. Some of our Ski Train trips were extensively videoed; most had some number of stills taken. Somehow this trip, with its large number of frames shot, lay buried in my archives for over two decades, under-appreciated all that time. Now I get to relive some of those memories, and share them. The contemporary Winter Park Express runs the same route and we’re glad to have it, but I really miss the Ski Train. It was a fantastic ride and a unique experience.
Action Road 
