Conejos County, CO Photo - A Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad steam Train.

A Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad steam train pulls into the tiny Osier, Colorado, station about midway on the railroad's route between Antonito in Conejos County, Colorado, and the New Mexico town of Chama. The narrow-gauge trains run over 10,015-foot Cumbres Pass and through Toltec Gorge, from which it takes its name. As of 2015, the railroad was the highest and longest narrow-gauge steam railroad in the United States, with a track length of 64 miles. The train crosses back and forth between the two states 11 times when it makes its full journey. The Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad has been jointly owned by the states of Colorado and New Mexico since 1970 when it was purchased from the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railway, saving it from the scrap yards. Early railroad buildings at Osier included a depot, section house, bunkhouse, and coaling platform. Most of the railroad structures were still standing as of 2015, but the rest of the town has disappeared.

Carol M. Highsmith (born 1946) is a photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed all 50 of the United States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico for 30 years. She specializes in documenting architecture, ranging from the monumental to the everyday and whimsical. Highsmith is donating her life ’s work of more than 100,000 images, copyright-free, to the Library of Congress, which established a rare one-person archive. Out of 14 million images, the Carol M. Highsmith collection is featured in the top six alongside of Mathew Brady and Dorethea Lange.

Credit line: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.