Later Pikes Peak card

This post card is a view of the mountains around Pikes Peak from on top of Pikes Peak. ....If you have seen the few blog posts in the past on this site about Pikes Peak you might have noticed that the train on this post card is much more modern. That is because this post card is only about 55 years old. It is a young one compared to those others.

I will be going backwards in history in my next few blog posts. I will be posting some of my post cards that focus on Pikes Peak. I will start with this one and work back in time according to the ages of the post cards – I know that I have one from 1906. There are 72 post cards of Pikes Peak in my collection, but I will not subject you to all of them, just the ones I consider to be interesting.

The picture on this post card introduces us to a new era on the Pikes Peak Cog Train. Prior this era the engines that brought the passengers to the top of the mountain were steam engines. They required stops to take on water and a fireman to shovel the coal into the firebox. In the 1925 a gentleman of the name Spencer Penrose purchased the railroad. After studying the situation, he developed a more compact version of the train that went up to the peak that did not run on steam power. The result was a self-contained railcar that was powered by gasoline. This unit made its first trek up the mountain on June 16, 1938. It carried 23 passengers.

This was quickly improved to train units that could carry up to 56 passengers powered by a diesel engine. That is what we are looking at on the post card above.

You can get the history of these improvements on the Pikes Peak website: http://cograilway.com/history.htm

This card was published by the Cooper Post Card Company out of Lakewood, Colorado.

I have mentioned them before, and now I know one more bit of information than I did back then…. that they were around in 1959.

In the box where the stamp is to be placed,

there is a code – 9C-K1762 – that tells me that this post card was printed by the Curt Otto Teich Company. The C places the date in the 1950s; the 9 makes it 1959. The K indicates that the process used was the Curteichcolor method; this means it is a chrome postcard – which this one is. The 1762 tells us that this was the 1,762nd batch of cards that were printed in 1959. There were 3,032 batches that year. 1,762 is 58% of 3,032 and if we interpolate this into 1959, this card was printed at the end of July or the beginning of August.