Cumbres & Toltec
A photographic tribute to America's most spectacular scenic railway
By Sam Furukawa.
Cloth with dust jacket, 176 full color pages, 11x8.5" horizontal format. 2007.
"Featuring 237 dramatic photos of America's premier narrow gauge living history museum, this new book is the result of Sam Furukawa's longtime fascination with the C&TS. Sam covers the line from Antonito to Chama, chasing regular operations and special trains.
"ALMOST HIDDEN from public view in a high and remote corner of the Rocky mountains is the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad. This 64-mile line crosses and re-crosses the border between southwestern Colorado and northern New Mexico, passing through some of the most spectacular mountain scenery anywhere in the world. If that weren't distinction enough, trains on the C&TS are powered by 19th- and 20th-century technology: Steam locomotives. Those locomotives, the trains they pull, and the scenery they run through are the subjects of the photographs in this book.
"The history of the line, originally built by the Denver & Rio Grande in 1880, has been covered in dozens of books. Instead of more history, this volume seeks to show what the C&TS looks like today. While you'll find plenty of photos of locomotives and trains, you'll also find pictures made to evoke the vastness of the scenery that surrounds them. If you are among the hundreds of thousands of visitors that have ridden Cumbres & Toltec trains, the photos in this book are what your experience looked like from trackside. Some of the pictures are from well beyond trackside, including a series of remarkable photos shot from a jet helicopter at the height of the fall foliage season in the San Juan mountains."
