Exhibits and Layouts

View these companion exhibits that highlight both the photography and the phenomenon of Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, who introduced railroad photography and the world of railroading to popular audiences.

In the traveling exhibition Beebe and Clegg: Their Enduring Photographic Legacy, enjoy 20 of their most memorable black-and-white images together with labels highlighting each photograph plus informative interpretive panels providing additional background and context. With several prints never before seen by the public, the exhibition has been assembled by the Center for Railroad Photography & Art from source material used to produce the book of the same title, released in 2018 by the Center.

In the Colorado Railroad Museum’s companion exhibit Romance Along the Rails: The Phenomenon of Beebe and Clegg, learn more about this fascinating couple and view correspondence, Colorado-specific publications, and other physical reminders of their love affair with Colorado and its narrow gauge railroading legacy. Among the treasures found in this intimate exhibit are a typed letter from Beebe to Louis B. Mayer of MGM; a Central City Opera press kit plus a program from the opera Baby Doe, along with a photo of Beebe and Clegg with Central City socialites Fred McFarlane and Lillian Cushing; and a somewhat terse, typed letter from Beebe to Colorado Railroad Museum founder Bob Richardson, responding to a review by Richardson that Beebe considered negative, together with a copy of said review.

Colorado Railroad Museum /
image RWH collection

ike its neighboring state of Nevada, Colorado might well have incorporated a railroad train in the heraldic economy of its great seal, for wealth, social emergence, statehood itself and the identity that has come to be Colorado all rode behind the flanged wheel cleaving to the iron rail of its primeval railroads. In the steamcars American genius had perfected an agency of transport so incomparably superior to anything that had gone before or has since followed after as to be a way of life in itself. And of this way of life the narrow gauge was a microcosm in endearing diminutive. Its ensmalled proportions laid a compulsive hold on the human imagining and the cars carried in their strong rooms and locked express compartments the emotional treasure of a westering people. The surveyors pointed their transits and the chains followed up the long canyons and across the parks not only to Leadville and Gunnison, Telluride and Ouray. The surveys led into the ramparts and high passes of the Shining Mountains of the heart, perhaps if the Manitou spoke truly, to the very edge of the world over which the soul would one day plunge to peace forever.

When they drank at Clear Creek and from Animas, the grading gangs partook of the American sacrament, for once having tasted the rivers of fulfillment they must always return to the west that is the mystical apotheosis of American ex-perience. Like the Long Hunters before them they took the sacrament and they turned their eyes to the sunset as they drank.

But if the men who built the railroads perceived the cloudy trophies to which they aspired at all, they were for the most part obscured by the more immediate realities of tangible things. The grades were laid along the river courses and on shelves above the abyss almost without exception toward what everyone earnestly hoped might be limitless deposits of carbonate ores if not actually free gold and silver lacking only the imprimatur of the eagle to make them spending money.

Lucious Beebe & Charles Clegg /
Narrow Gauge in the Rockies / 1958

n September 21, 1950, where Grizzly Creek adds its small flow to the mighty Colorado River, a "Monument to an Idea" was dedicated, with Wilson McCarthy and Cyrus Osborn the principal speakers — indicative of the joint aegis of General Motors and the Rio Grande over the project. The arch of native granite should support the 9-foot-long, 500-pound replica for some time to come; already it has outlived the California Zephyr, the train that made the Vista-Dome famous.

Karl R. Zimmerman /
The Story of the California Zephyr

Located outdoors in the Railyard, just north of the main Depot building, the Denver Garden Railway Society’s outdoor garden railroad is one of the largest public garden railroad layouts in the United States. The Club’s operating garden railroad features two different track gauges, a number of scales, buildings, carefully maintained landscaping, and even a loop for operating scale live steam locomotives! This layout is operated whenever members of DGRS are available, and during special events, so it may not have train operating during your visit. However, the layout itself is quite interesting to see regardless!

Colorado Railroad Museum

Herbert W. Voltaw built a series of 1-inch scale locomotive and railroad car models in the 1940s, 50s and 60s using aluminum, steel bar, soft and hard woods, plastic, and glass. The Museum displays a number of these intricate works of art in this gallery.

Colorado Railroad Museum