Our poor old blog, stuck in a time warp back in early October, because I have been procrastinating about updating it and we've had so much going on since then. Well, I can at least continue on from where I left off, because just going to see the balloons fly is not the only thing we did while we were in Albuquerque.

I left off with our visit to Old Town Albuquerque on Sunday afternoon. On Tuesday, really early in the morning, we all left to go take a train trip out of Chama, NM. It was almost a three hour trip and we got there around 9 or so. A cute little town and we all went off to buy coffee and a bit of something to eat, before the train left at 10. It's called the Cumbres-Toltec train and if you ride all the way through, it ends up in Antonitas, CO. We just rode halfway, though, to Cumbres Pass and stopped in Osier, to have a hot lunch.

Cumbres-Toltec Steam Train

The elevation in Chama is 7863 ft and it was a tad cold up there. But, we were all bundled up, because the cars did not have heat in them. It's an old coal burning steam train and our car, the Alamosa, was the one directly in back of the engine.  Some people stood outside in front of the car, but, it was very stinky up there and sooty black stuff was getting all over the place.

Looking from our car back towards the snack bar

Some of our group, waiting for the train to depart

 Just north of the train station, we passed a small RV park, near this little river, it looks like a real nice place to stay and it looked like it had hook ups, too. We're already starting to see some local color as we start climbing up into the mountains. After the conductor told us we could start walking around, we headed back to the observation car to take some pictures, but, found out real quick it was too cold to stand back there.

 So, we stayed long enough to snap off a few pictures, then, went and stood between the cars for awhile. This is a shot as we rode through the aspens that were turning golden. It was a great train ride, always heading up, winding around and through the mountains over trestles of creeks and canyons. We didn't see that much wildlife, although we did catch glimpses, now and then, of deer running just out of sight so fast, we couldn't get pictures of them in time.

 Sometimes, on the steepest parts of the grade, we would slow way down, almost coming to a stop, it seemed. The guy who was shoveling coal must have had big muscles, doing all that work just to keep us going. Once, while I was looking back, I saw a glimpse of a little car in back of us and found out later it was the work car to make sure there were no fires. 

 The higher we went, the foggier it got and then, we couldn't take any pictures for awhile. I almost missed this sign of Cumbres Pass, at over 10,000 ft. None of us were going outside at this point, because it was too cold! We made a stop in Cumbres, because we needed to take on water.

The thermometer says it's 44 degrees!

'

Filling the tank with water

 Here we are looking at another train in the distance. We hear there are a bunch of foreign photographers on the train, taking pictures of the scenery for something they are doing in their countries.They will be stopping at the midway point, where we have our hot lunches. Notice the color in the distance, here it is closer to us. Beautiful oranges and yellow, look great against the evergreen of the pines.

 At about the halfway point, we came to a long valley and we saw a bunch of vaction homes out in the middle of nowhere. We also passed quite a few large ranches. As you can see in the above photo, there was a meandering creek going through the valley, as well.

 Looking over at the train that was in front of us, now parked off on a side track. We are almost at our destination, Osier, at the half way point.

 When we get off this train, we take all our stuff, as we will be going back to Chama on the southbound train from Colorado.

Ted & Geri, Jere & Ronnie, me & Margie departing the train to go have lunch

Ron had meat loaf

I had turkey with all the trimmings

Northbound train to Antonito, CO

Southbound train to Chama, NM

This guy is the coal tender

Our train got to Osier first and as we stepped out of the train, the sun was shining and it was nice. Our food was buffet style, hot and inviting after the cold trip up the mountain. We were in the middle of our lunch, when the southbound train came in and even more people Ifiled into the large building.

As we walked out from lunch, it was trying to rain and it was getting colder. We walked around a bit to see what there was to see and I got some good pictures of the engine of the train we were taking back. I didn't get a picture of the engineer or coal man from the other train, but, this guy was standing there, so I got his picture. I tried to get the engineer in the pic too, but, he was lazy and didn't want to get out of his chair. This guy is going to have a relatively easy time of it on the way down the mountain, he won't have to shovel as much as the guy did on the way up....

Don't these pine trees look like they have golden plumes?

On the way back down the mountains, it started raining in earnest and we couldn't take many pictures at all. I felt sorry for the people that had come from Colorado, because they couldn't take any of the nice pictures we took on our way up.

All of us were in agreement that this was a great day to ride an old train!