We rode the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad from Antonito to Chama, in the Parlor Observation Car at the back of the train. We had been looking forward to it for months.
We still got one thing wrong.
Not the route, not the class of service, not where we stayed.
We picked the wrong seat numbers — and while we spent a beautiful day either way, this was a small piece of information we didn’t have going in that would have made it better. It’s the kind of thing nobody tells you until after, so we’re telling you first.
And there’s a second thing, bigger than the seats, that we only understood by the end of the day:
The direction you travel changes the trip. Not the scenery, but the overall experience of the trip
Here’s what we learned, in the order you’ll need it.
First, what this train actually is
This matters, because it changes how you’ll feel sitting in it and riding along its rails.
The Cumbres & Toltec isn’t a heritage train assembled for tourists. It’s a surviving 64-mile section of the Denver & Rio Grande’s narrow gauge San Juan Extension, built in 1880 to reach the silver mining district of the San Juan mountains. Track crews started laying rail in February of that year and reached Chama, New Mexico by the 31st of December.
64 miles – 10 months – 2 tunnels – 10,015-ft. pass – 600-ft. drop from a narrow ledge into a gorge
They built it three feet wide instead of the standard four-foot-eight because narrow gauge was cheaper and could take tighter curves. It could go where a standard-gauge line simply couldn’t fit.
When the Rio Grande abandoned its narrow-gauge main line in 1969, Colorado and New Mexico each passed legislation to buy the Chama–Antonito segment. The two states have jointly owned it ever since. In 2012 it was designated a National Historic Landmark.
Our locomotive was 489, built by Baldwin in Philadelphia in 1925 for the Denver & Rio Grande Western. It is one hundred and one years old and it pulled us over a 10,015-foot pass!
We spent a good part of the day talking about the people who built the line. What it took to lay track at that altitude, on those grades, with what they had in 1880. You look down into the gorge from a car that’s inching along a shelf carved out of rock and it is hard not to think about the obstacles the workers overcame.
The part most people don’t realize until they’re booking
This is a point-to-point railroad. The 64 miles are too far to run round-trip in a day, so you ride one direction by steam and return to your starting depot by motorcoach.
That surprises people. It shouldn’t worry you. Our bus ride from Chama back to Antonito took a little under an hour and was genuinely pleasant. You’re seeing the same country from a different perspective, and after a full day in the mountain air, sitting still is not a hardship.
But it does mean the question isn’t only “which depot do I drive to.”
The direction question — this is the real decision
Here’s the thing we didn’t expect, and the reason we’d book it exactly the same way again.
Leaving from Antonito, the landscape builds.
You start in the San Luis Valley in low desert brush and sagebrush — open, dry, wide. Country that, honestly, looks a lot like home for us in Arizona. Then it begins to close in. The rock walls of Toltec Gorge. The tunnels. And then, slowly, shades of green – emerald, olive, mossy and vibrant fern colors.
By the time you reach Cumbres Pass, you are somewhere else entirely. And you got there gradually enough to feel every stage of it.
Going the other way, Chama to Antonito, you start at the top and work down. Same railroad, same views, reversed arc. Some people prefer that.
We would recommend to take the climb from the desert to the drama of the Cumbres Pass.
Also, for consideration along with the train departure decision is where you’re staying.
Antonito, Colorado — plan on basing in Taos.
This is what we did. Taos is a good hub for a longer Southwest trip: Red River, Taos Ski Valley, and Santa Fe are all in reach, and the town itself is worth days, not hours. The drive looked long on the map and wasn’t. The route is easy and the scenery does the work. Roughly twenty minutes out of Taos you pass the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, which is worth pulling over for. Build ten extra minutes into the morning and you get a second landmark on the way to the train.
Chama, New Mexico — plan on basing in Pagosa Springs.
Pagosa makes sense if what you want around the train is hot springs, outdoor time, and Durango within reach. Different trip, same railroad. And with Durango close by, you could add in the Durango & Silverton train.
You can stay in Taos and start in Chama too, just a little longer drive than going to Antonito.
There are other places to stay at both ends. These two are what we’d recommend, because they turn one train ride into a week, you’d actually plan a vacation around.
Now the seats
Here’s the piece we wish we’d have known when planning the day.
We rode the Parlor Observation Car — the car at the very back, with a private rear platform and an unobstructed view straight off the end of the train through the curves. The windows extend fully open, so you get mountain air and clean photographs with no glass in the way.
Seats are numbered, they face the windows, and which numbers you want depends entirely on which direction you’re traveling.
Antonito → Chama: ask for lower-numbered seats
Chama → Antonito: ask for higher-numbered seats
We didn’t know that. We turned our chairs around and still had a wonderful day, and the car is comfortable enough that this works fine. We’d do the whole trip again exactly as booked. But we’d make a different seat number decision.
What “Parlor” actually gets you, in plain terms:
Parlor Observation Car — adults only, back of the train, private rear platform, open-air gondola access, breakfast snack, juice and sodas, and the buffet lunch. Alcohol is extra.
Parlor Car — all ages, capped at twenty people, same open windows and same food, without the rear-of-train position.
General cars — family-friendly and the most affordable. Bench seating at the entry level; the next tier gives you four seats around a table, which is the better choice if you’re traveling as two couples. Gondola access included.
If you’re celebrating something, take the Parlor Observation Car. The adults-only quiet and the open rear platform are the difference between riding a train and spending a day inside a landscape.
Osier, and the people who run this railroad
The train stops midway at Osier, Colorado, an old townsite at 9,637 feet, and a buffet-style lunch is served. We’ll say this plainly: the lunch was excellent and the operation was efficient. That’s not a given at a remote stop with a trainload of people to feed in a fixed window, and they’ve clearly solved it.
But the thing we didn’t expect — the thing we’re still talking about — was the crew.
Many of them are descendants of generations of railroad families. The brakeman working our caboose was fourth-generation. He was proud of it in a way you don’t encounter often, and he had stories. Not a script. Stories.
We’ve been on eleven scenic rail journeys now, across the American Southwest and Switzerland. That kind of continuity — people working the same line their great-great-grandparents worked — is rare anywhere in the world.
It’s the reason this ride lands differently than its ticket price suggests it should.
Cumbres Pass
We live in Arizona. We love it. But we don’t get mountains like this.
At 10,015 feet, Cumbres is the highest pass reached by rail in the United States, and you come up to it through Tanglefoot Curve — a loop so tight the front of the train nearly looks back at the caboose.
Then it opens.
What we weren’t ready for was the green. Deep, brilliant, unrelenting green, set directly against bare rock cliffs. The color of the rock kept shifting as we climbed. The clouds that day were the big cotton kind, and they threw shadows across the cliff faces that moved while you watched them. Where the sun landed, minerals in the rock caught it and sparkled.
Neither of us said anything for a while.
That silence is the trip doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
Practical notes before you book
The Season is short The railroad runs roughly June through late October, Tuesday through Sunday. The 2026 season opened June 9 after a weather-related delay — dates shift, so confirm before you build a trip around a specific week.
The Altitude is real You’ll spend the day between roughly 7,900 and 10,015 feet. If you’re coming from sea level, don’t schedule anything demanding for the day before.
Dress in layers Open windows at 10,000 feet in July is not the same temperature as the parking lot in Antonito. Also there is no heating in the cars, so the fall months can get chilly.
Parlor cars are small The Parlor Car caps at twenty people. These sell out first.
Choose your seat wisely See above. We’re not going to stop saying it.
Where this fits in a bigger trip
On its own, this is one very good day. That’s not what we’d book it as.
What makes the Cumbres & Toltec worth planning around is what sits next to it — Taos, Santa Fe, Red River, Pagosa Springs, Durango, and the drive between them, which is a good part of the point.
For a couple marking an anniversary, a retirement, or a birthday that deserves more than dinner, this is the anchor day in a Southwest week, not the whole trip.
That’s the part that takes some sorting: which depot, which direction, which week, what goes around it, and how many nights on each end. It’s the kind of thing that’s much easier when someone’s already made the drive, eaten the lunch, watched the light move across those cliffs, and learned the seat lesson the hard way.
If a Southwest trip with a spectacular day on the rails is something you are looking forward to, we’d love to hear from you and what you are imagining for your experience.
Let’s talk…..we’re ready to listen!
