The Colorado Railroad Museum is a non-profit museum with 6.1 acres of property. It is located between the North and South Table Mountains in Golden, CO (near Lakewood also) where Clear Creek meanders through.
The museum was established in 1959 to preserve the story of Colorado’s colorful past. It has a lot of records from the state’s brief, but important era of railroad history, focusing particularly on the state’s pioneering narrow-gauge mountain railroads.
The museum is a railroad building from the 1880s, and it’s filled with old photographs, paintings and more.
Herb Votaw’s 1:24 locomotives & railroad cars with display in our museum window. There’s also a reconstructed depot telegrapher’s office there, complete with a working telegraph sounder.
The bottom level of the museum contains an area which specializes in railway history and features displays on different topics. They rotate the exhibits every few months to make each visit fresh and new.
The lower level has a miniature train layout that showcases Colorado’s rich railroad history. It’s operating scale model train layout is HO and HOn3.
The Robert W. Richardson library houses over 10,000 rare historic photographs, maps, timetables etc. It also contains material about Colorado railroads if you’re looking for reference materials on them.
The museum features a sprawling 3 ft (914 mm) gauge train collection and offers fun rides on event days when the steam engine is in use. You can find out when these days are by checking their website or social media.
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The museum has a bunch of different trains, including one from the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad. It’s a coal-burning locomotive made in 1890. The builder was Baldwin Locomotive Works, and the number is 11207.
This is the only surviving 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in Hg (1,435 mm) standard gauged steam locomotive from the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad.
All the railroad equipment is displayed outdoors, with all sorts of cool stuff to see. You can even take a trip down memory lane with our three-way stub switch, dual gauge track and switches and century old switch stands.
There are over 100 old narrow and standard gauge trains to be seen here. The oval track, which is 1⁄3 mile (0.54 km) in length, can accommodate 27 trains per hour and each train can hold 16 people.