From silver screen fame to Durango’s Santa Rita Park

It may be Durango’s oldest movie star, with leading roles alongside the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Academy Award-winning actress Anne Baxter. At one point, it enjoyed a seven-year stint as a staple on a popular sitcom on prime time TV.

Now, the Emma Sweeny model locomotive spends most of its days under a canopy in Santa Rita Park, in quiet retirement along the Animas River while members of the Durango Railroad Historical Society restore the wooden replica to its former glory.

“It represents that very golden period of movie making here,” said society president George Niederauer, referring to about 20 films shot in the area between 1948 and 1956. “That’s what started attracting tourists here in the first place. Ridership went up like crazy.”

In 1949, 20th Century Fox produced the movie, “A Ticket to Tomahawk,” a Western musical comedy in which a railroad company is pitted against a competing stagecoach company while attempting to reach a town on a strict deadline.

Shot over six weeks in the San Juan Mountains, 20th Century Fox used a real 1899 locomotive, which was used in scenes in Silverton, Animas Canyon and on the old trestle over Lightner Creek. That train is now being restored before it enters the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden.

But a twist in the movie involving 40 miles of missing track required filmmakers to build a wooden prop to give the appearance mules were pulling the locomotive over Molas Pass, through the Fort Lewis College mesa and down Blair Street in Silverton.

“The model was so good, it fooled some of the railroad people,” said Hank Phillips, who worked as a stand-in for Arthur Hunnicutt on the set. “He said I was much better looking. I said, ‘Yes, but you get a lot more money.’”

Phillips, 89, was born and raised in Durango, and worked as a fireman for the real train. Now living in Phoenix, he said the entire town was excited when film crews reached Durango.

“The movie’s a bit on the corny side, but it was a whole lot of fun,” he said.

After the premiere of the film in Durango and Denver in 1950, the Emma Sweeny model was put in storage until 20th Century Fox, in financial trouble, sold it to a private individual in California who put the locomotive on display outside a gas station.

Eventually in the hands of a new owner, the Emma Sweeny landed a role on the CBS sitcom “Petticoat Junction,” a comedy about a small town inn. From 1963 to 1970, the model train was used mainly in studio shots.

When the show’s run ended, the Emma Sweeny was sold to another tourist and truck stop owner, who left the model train outside, exposed to the elements.

“It ended up in really bad shape,” Niederauer said. “Part of the problem is, it’s mostly wood. If you have it out in the weather, and if you don’t keep it up, it just starts to deteriorate.”

In 1980, the model was donated to Amador County in California, where officials did some repairs and repainting. But in 2011, recognizing the replica train’s historical significance, Durango Railroad Historical Society members and Durango city officials donated $5,000 to Amador County’s history museum to bring the Emma Sweeny back to the place where it was built.

Niederauer said the approximately $20,000 restoration project should be completed by summer. He hopes to put up some interpretative signs explaining the model train’s long, interesting history, from silver screen fame to a pavilion in Santa Rita Park.

And the society’s work doesn’t stop there. The group also has been actively restoring the 1895 “315” steam engine, which ran for the first time in nearly 60 years in 2007.

The train is locked up in an engine house in Silverton. The group runs it once in a while, but Niederauer said the real purpose is to preserve the train as it looked in the early 20th century, and hopefully one day, bring it back to Durango.

Fred Wildfang, a local historian, said it’s important to have these kind of historical markers around town, if only to serve as a reminder of how dependent Durango is on the railroad, then and now.

“There was no Durango until the railroad came,” Wildfang said. “It built Durango. And even today, the train is probably the most important thing in town. It’s been extremely critical.”

jromeo@durangoherald.com