Frontier mining railroads charged full fare while degrading passengers to baggage cars.

Evidence

The narrow-gauge, steel-grade railroad, which runs up the canyon for the convenience of the rich mining districts of Georgetown, Black Hawk, and Central City, is a curiosity of engineering. The track has partly been blasted out of the sides of the canyon, and has partly been “built” by making a bed of stones in the creek itself, and laying the track across them. I have never seen such churlishness and incivility as in the officials of that railroad and the state lines which connect with it, or met with such preposterous charges. They have handsome little cars on the route, but though the passengers paid full fare, they put us into a baggage car because the season was over, and in order to see anything I was obliged to sit on the floor at the door. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 207

Categorization

• SHARE: A nerdy slice of Gilded Age travel grievance — the narrow-gauge engineering feat paired with the petty chiseling of putting full-fare passengers in a baggage car. Send to a rail-history enthusiast.
• SEED: Angle: “Curiosities of Engineering, Churls of Management” — how nineteenth-century mountain railroads sold grandeur and delivered baggage cars.