Converting rails to trails can hurt economies and make it harder to battle blazes.
Forrest Whitman
Posted inArticles
What happens in a small town when the gas goes out?
A writer ponders his community’s dependence on natural gas in its absence.
Posted inArticles
Don’t give up on riding the rails
A writer muses on a recent loss of confidence in the West’s rail system.
Posted inArticles
Dear progressives, don’t give up on the small-town West
Political advice from a Democrat who ran and lost his own campaign for mayor.
Posted inArticles
Border and immigration agents have too much power
In July, ICE sent German foreign exchange students back home.
Posted inArticles
The political right and left are stuck in polarizing myths
Neighbors in a small Colorado town are splintered, but neither are correct.
Posted inArticles
Last ride for the West’s iconic trains?
Trump’s budget would make it harder for Westerners to ride the rail.
Posted inArticles
The Colorado caucus system works — sort of
The minuteae of the political process matter and are sometimes based on outdated systems.
Posted inArticles
Potty-mouths have a long history in Western politics
Donald Trump is just the latest politician to resort to vulgar language.
Posted inDecember 21, 2015: Secrets of the Deep
Western nativism has a rotten odor
Back in my railroad days, we often said that something had “a bad smell.” “I smell a bad order!”— lingo for a car that was rolling wrong and needed to be removed from the train. The alarm was shouted down from the conductor up in the “angel’s seat” in the caboose, back when a person actually […]
Posted inArticles
On E.M. Frimbo and riding the Western rails
People in the Western United States like their trains, or so E.M. Frimbo, The New Yorker magazine’s great rail writer with the unusual name, liked to say. But Frimbo believed that Westerners lost track of what happened to so many railroad lines: We spent the last half of the 19th century building them up, then […]
Posted inArticles
For the love of trains
On May 9, Train Day 2015, I’ll be in the bar-observation car aboard the Southwest Chief. The board game “Mexican Train” will be spread out on many tables, and there’s always room for one more player as the tiles are drawn. The Southwest Chief is a popular train, traveling between Los Angeles and Chicago, and […]
Posted inArticles
Just call John Hickenlooper the Silver Fox
John Hickenlooper, the recently re-elected (by a whisker) governor of Colorado, should be called the new “silver fox” for his work on water sharing, in memory of Delphus Carpenter, who earned that title back in 1922. That year, Carpenter cajoled seven Western states into signing the historic agreement that divvied up the Colorado River. Hickenlooper […]
Posted inWotr
Train Day brought out the Chief’s supporters
A baker’s dozen of us from central Colorado boarded the Amtrak Southwest Chief May 10. We were celebrating National Train Day, so called because back in 1869, a Golden Spike was pounded into a railroad tie, finally linking East and West Coasts by railroad. Lots of Americans still like to link up by train; on […]
Posted inWotr
Not all endangered species live in the forest
Struggling individuals in the rural West deserve as much support as, say, grizzlies.
Posted inWotr
Gold, guns, and suckers born every minute
With the right kind of marketing any unsound idea can flourish in the West.
Posted inWotr
Living in a caboose, supporting the railroad
I’ve lived for close on 20 years in an old heavyweight Burlington Railroad caboose. It’s grounded in Gilpin County, Colo., close to the Continental Divide, near milepost 41.77 on the Union Pacific Railroad’s Moffat tunnel sub –a subsidiary line leading up to the tunnel and through it. I may have slept in that old baby […]