The Denver, South Park and Pacific established a crucial rail link between Denver and the high Rockies, and although it never reached Utah or the Pacific, by 1880 Como had become a high alpine hub. In 1882 workers began laying track over Boreas Pass, then the nation’s highest railroad pass at 11,493 feet, and rail service to Breckenridge and Dillon began that year. The High Line later crossed the Continental Divide again and by 1884 continued to Leadville, cutting travel that had taken days by stagecoach or mule train to about 12 hours and transforming life in Summit County by bringing in mail, food, clothing, coal, building supplies, livestock, china, pianos, and mining equipment while carrying ore, cattle, sheep, and lumber out to Denver. Built as a narrow gauge railroad with three feet between the rails, the line could be laid more quickly and cheaply and handle sharp mountain curves, but steep hills and slow speeds earned it the nickname “Dam Slow Pullin’ and Pretty Rough Riding.” After bankruptcy, the company reorganized as the Denver, Leadville and Gunnison in 1889 and was then bought by the Colorado and Southern Railway, which ran the line until it closed in 1937. Railroad time shaped daily life, from station clocks set by an 11:00 a.m. telegraph signal to Dillon residents in the 1930s waiting for the Friday train that brought ice cream, while the severe winter of 1898–1899 silenced train whistles for 78 days and left sleighs and skis to bring the only supplies into Summit County. Engine 9, built in 1884 by the Cooke Locomotive and Machine Works of Paterson, New Jersey, was one of eight identical late 19th century steam engines made for the Denver, South Park and Pacific and passed through Breckenridge hundreds of times between 1884 and 1937. Coal fired its boiler, steam drove pistons linked by rods to the driving wheels, sand dropped onto the rails to prevent slipping, and it pulled a tender carrying coal and water, refilled at tanks such as Bakers Tank on Boreas Pass Road. The Colorado and Southern gave No. 9 a “Bear Trap” or Ridgway Smokestack in 1917 or 1918 and replaced its oil headlight with an electric one around 1930; weighing about 62 tons with its tender, it served mainly in passenger service and pulled the last passenger train from Leadville to Denver on April 10, 1937, when the High Line from Como to Leadville was abandoned except for a short stub to the molybdenum mine at Climax. The engine later appeared at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 and the Chicago Railroad Fair in 1948, then carried passengers in South Dakota and on Colorado’s Georgetown Loop Railroad before returning to Summit County in December 2010. Work on the High Line was demanding and dangerous for engineers, firemen, conductors, and brakemen, who faced failed brakes, wrecks, derailments, overturned locomotives, runaway trains, and deaths that weighed heavily on the community, yet railroaders were respected for their hard, steady work, their families recognized trains by the engineers’ distinctive whistles, and the line’s closure in 1937 ended an era of dedicated railroad pioneers in Summit County.