Manitou & Pike's Peak Railway Locomotive Kiddy Ride, Colorado

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Manitou & Pike's Peak Railway Locomotive Kiddy Ride, Colorado — Archive & Atlas

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Manitou & Pike's Peak Railway Locomotive Kiddy Ride, Colorado — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1955–1959

AA-2026-7956B0

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Someone decided that the best way to honor the Manitou and Pike's Peak Railway — the cog line that has been hauling tourists to the top of a 14,000-foot mountain since 1891 — was to render one of its steam locomotives as a kid ride with white pinstripe detail and prop it against a dry-stacked stone wall. The cog railway itself is a genuine feat of Victorian-era engineering, the highest in North America, built on the confident assumption that Americans would pay to be terrified at altitude by steam power. The ride captures the locomotive with the same silhouette authority that roadside attractions of the mid-twentieth century used to suggest history without committing too much budget to it. Manitou Springs spent much of the postwar decades leaning hard into its identity as the gateway to Pikes Peak, and a painted plywood engine in a tourist courtyard was exactly the kind of civic boosterism that seemed adequate to the task. The real locomotives retired from steam service decades before anyone thought to preserve one properly, so the cutout may have been as close to the original as most visitors ever got.

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