Today, January 1, 2026, was the first day I went without an accompanying Colorado Narrow Gauge calendar after decades of popular production. According to TideMark's post, they decided to end their publication of all calendars.
To our friends and customers,
I regret to report that after 45 years, we have decided to discontinue our calendar program. As a result, we will not publish any calendar titles for 2026. We appreciate your interest and support through the past four decades.
Best,
Scott Kaeser
Publisher
For years, Charles E. Ditlefsen offered a calendar titled Those Magnificent Trains. In 1985, he published an ad in Trains for his calendar with scenic landscapes and Rio Grande K-28s sharing the months with standard gauge behemoths in less scenic places. Clearly, the Colorado photos and the narrow gauge photos gathered a lot of interest because in a few years, Mr. Ditlefsen introduced Colorado Narrow Gauge.
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| Colorado Narrow Gauge 2025 Calendar is the last full run in a long line of beautiful runs |
The run began when CEDCO advertised his offering in the October 1991 Trains magazine issue. Titled Colorado Narrow Gauge 1992 Calendar. it sold well enough for follow-on production. CEDCO continued issuing the calendar in paper for nearly a decade before allowing TideMark to take over the popular title around 2009.
Personally, I was a great fan. I was amazed at the seemingly inexhaustible supply of pre-1970 railroad photographs from Colorado's narrow gauge past! I would always read the incredibly detailed and researched descriptions that came along with each month. Every single month the "Five Ws" of each photograph were answered in those pages.
In regard to photographs, Al Chione seemed to take a lot of them, but he was not alone nor did the photographs seem to vary noticeably in quality or variety. It was always something new to view, and I never felt like I got a bad year. Considering such quality, a price increase would have been worth the sacrifice, especially in view of the alternative.
In short, this calendar was an inspiration to me in presenting the best I could to my readers. Including myself, Colorado and Narrow Gauge fans are in considerably poorer shape this year. It's my hope that someone takes up the challenge, directly or indirectly, to add more quality offerings to this legacy.
On a side note, in 1995, CEDCO even managed to sell a CD-ROM version of its train calendar that allowed the user to put together and print their own calendars using desktop printers. A few narrow gauge photos were included, but the pictures were limited in size and quality. It may have been asking much of the technology of the time to fit BMP format pictures on a CD together with the software. Nonetheless, I always thought using a JPEG format might have saved the Trains Calendar CD-ROM from being a single issue, brave as it was.
