After more than a century as one of the area’s premier tourist attractions, the Pikes Peak Cog Railway’s future is in doubt.

The railway, which has shuttled generations of visitors on breathtaking, 8.9-mile trips to the summit of Pikes Peak and back, won’t reopen this spring after several months of maintenance, and it could remain closed for up to three years while its owner, The Broadmoor hotel, studies its fate, Broadmoor President and CEO Jack Damioli said Tuesday.

And after that process, it might never reopen, he said.

It seems very strange to shut down a tourist attraction that moves 2,000+ PER DAY so that you can "study" it for three years.

Rails are rails, readily available. The rack sections can be cut from stock automatically using commercial CAD / CAM technology, left and right sides joined by fabrication. There's no reason to complicate what's a fairly straightforward job using today's available technology.

For Pike’s Peak, it's economics. [The owners] have extracted all the value they can, and the ROI on refurbishing it won’t be fast enough to justify doing it. Too many other places to put the money where the ROI will be greater. They may be trolling to see if government will put up the money.

Rails are rails, readily available. The rack sections can be cut from stock automatically using commercial CAD / CAM technology, left and right sides joined by fabrication. There's no reason to complicate what's a fairly straightforward job using today's available technology.