Rollins Pass….The Ski Train….Moffat Tunnel….names from Colorado's railroad heyday.
This book tells a gripping story. It is about the building of Colorado's most famous railroad, and how the state became what it is today. Power, greed, tragedy and back room maneuvering are the background to the lives of the workers who built the road.
In 1903, Denver banker David Moffat formed the Denver, Northwestern and Pacific Railway Company. Its mission was to lay tracks through Colorado's mountains, over or through the continental divide and all the way to Salt Lake City. There were many skeptics and some who simply didn't want the railroad to succeed.
Mik Mas, a Denver water lawyer, finds himself a visitor to that year, 1903. Many of the people he meets are doppelgangers for friends — and enemies — he knows in twenty first century Denver.
Mik is a dead ringer for a local man who is missing in a jobsite accident. No one but Mik knows that, which makes his blending in, well, an adventure. An accidental and unwilling time traveler, he decides to make the best of it. He embeds himself into daily life in the railroad construction camps. Soon he finds himself embroiled with people he knows but doesn't know. Some are working for Moffat and helping to build the railroad. Some are helping people who are hostile to the road.
Disputes arise over the railroad's right of way, it's legal right to use land to scrape grade and lay track. These disputes soon come to a head. Mik is drawn in despite his desire and attempt to return to the twenty first century.
