Laramie, North Park and Western Railroad
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Laramie, North Park and Western Railroad was a railroad in the U.S. states of Wyoming and Colorado between Laramie, Wyoming and Coalmont, Colorado. It operated under several different names between 1901 and 1951 prior to absorption by the Union Pacific Railroad.
History
The railroad was established in 1901 as the Laramie, Hahns Peak and Pacific Railway Company by Isaac Van Horn, who planned to construct the line to the mining camps near Gold Hill in the Snowy Range west of Laramie. Van Horn and his partners also invested in the mining camp of Centennial 30 miles (48 km) west of Laramie at the base of the mountains. Under the auspices of the Acme Consolidated Gold & Mining Company, the partners constructed a sawmill, lumber yard, newspaper, and other improvements. Fighting financial issues, the railroad did not arrive in Centennial until 1907 after mining operations in the Snowy Range had mostly died out.
The company opted to go south to North Park in Colorado. The company bought part of a coal deposit near Walden, Colorado and named it Coalmont. The first train reached Walden in October 1911 and Coalmont in December. The line was very difficult and expensive to operate during winter.
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This entry incorporates text from “Laramie, North Park and Western Railroad” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.