May I have your Autograph, Please?

The picture on the front of this post card is of the back end of the famous movie train Emma Sweeney.

The “Silver Vista” – the coach at the end of the train – is seen here on the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad in southwestern Colorado. This is one of the last narrow-gauge railroads left in the United States. The train operates in the Summer from Alamosa to Durango and to Silverton through some of Colorado’s grandest scenery. The move in which the train was featured was called “A Ticket to Tomahawk”. This website https://www.drhs315.org/emma-sweeney-2/history/ gives some very good history about the train and the making of the movie. I have included some excerpts from the website below. In 1949 Twentieth Century Fox produced the color film “A Ticket to Tomahawk”. The premise of the movie, set in 1876, was that to save the franchise of the Tomahawk & Western Railroad, a train must reach Tomahawk along with at least one paying passenger by a fast-approaching deadline – and the competing stage line will do everything it can to prevent it. The problem is that 40 miles of track from Epitaph are missing, because the rails from England were lost at sea. The plan is to pull the train (just the locomotive Emma Sweeny) over the mountains with a team of mules. Anne Baxter is the deputy marshal whose must protect the train. Dan Dailey is the reluctant paying passenger. Walter Brennan is the engineer, and Arthur Hunnicutt is the fireman. Rory Calhoun leads the gang that is supposed to stop Emma Sweeny. Mary Loos and Richard Sale, wife and husband, as well as avid railroad fans, wrote the script, and Richard Sale directed the film. The filming in the San Juans took place over about six weeks during August and September of 1949. The film premiered in Durango and Denver in April of 1950. The 1899 Schenectady locomotive Rio Grande Southern Railroad’s locomotive #20 (4-6-0, Ten-Wheeler), originally Florence & Cripple Creek locomotive #20, acted as Tomahawk & Western’s locomotive #1, the Emma Sweeny. It was adorned with a false funnel stack, a long wooden pilot, a link and pin coupler, and an oil or kerosene headlight box over the electric light with a set of six-point antlers on top. The fancy and colorful paint scheme included three-masted sailing ships on both sides of the tender. The train consist (part of which you can see on this post card) was Rio Grande Southern Railroad caboose 0409 lettered as “Route of the Bloody Basin Cannonball,” Denver and Rio Grande Western flat 1026, boxcar 3745, and combination car 212, all repainted and re-lettered. The train with Rio Grande Southern Railroad #20 was used in shots in Silverton, Animas Canyon, and on the old, wooden Rio Grande Southern Railroad trestle over Lightner Creek.

The post card was published by the Sanborn Souvenir Company, Incorporated in Denver, Colorado. It was printed by Dexter Press, Incorported out of West Nyack, New York. They used their exclusive "Genuine Natural Color" process for the printing. I scanned the back of the post card against a brown background so that you can see that the corners are rounded.