One woman’s unlikely journey to powering a historic train in Colorado
photos by Jerilee Bennett The Gazette
Jenn Jenks, one of very few female steam engineers in the U.S., works at the Georgetown Loop Railroad alongside her father, Sam McCloskey, continuing a family tradition of railroad work that dates back to her great-great-grandfather.
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GEORGETOWN • The train rolls into the station, and the engineer stepping out of the front cab appears fit for the history books: a man in a striped cap, checkered shirt, overalls and bandana. His shift has ended. Up steps a driver noticeably different.
Taller, for one. And a woman.
That’s Jenn Jenks, who is all too aware of the popular image of an old train engineer here at the Georgetown Loop Railroad, here where locomotive history is on full display and simultaneously broken. As far as Jenks is aware, she can count on two hands the number of women around the country operating steam engines like these.
She steps into the cab to lead another scenic tour through Colorado’s central mountains. She presses the throttle and pulls brakes and levers and the string for the howling whistle. She waves and smiles at tourists, including wide-eyed girls.
“She don’t like talking about herself much, she’s very shy,” says her stepdad, Sam McCloskey, the railroad’s chief mechanical officer. “But I think she’s proud of the role model she’s become for young girls.”
Jenks is quietly proud, yes. Proud to be that presence for those wide-eyed girls. Proud like the young conductor walking up and down the train car aisles this afternoon, checking tickets.
Engineer Jenn Jenks gets ready to back one of the engines into the work barn at the Georgetown Loop Railroad in September.
Isabel Shaw hears the conversations. “I hear a lot of moms telling their girls, ‘Oh, my gosh! You could be a conductor, too!’ It enlightens this idea that you can do whatever you want to do.”
One could even be the driver — so long as these historic trains are around into the future. This is Jenks’ greatest pride, the point that gets her talking more: “Keeping these old antiques running,” she says.
“It’s kind of a dying art, working on them and running them and that,” she continues. “That’s why I’m hoping my son, Joe, will get into it, because he’ll be the next generation to keep it going.”
Joe, 11, indeed wants to get into it. He just might be the next in the family to help prolong the Georgetown Loop Railroad, which dates back to 1884.
Young Joe would have the story of a distant relative, a man buried at Georgetown’s cemetery known to have worked in the train’s early years amid the silver boom here. The boy would have lessons from his dear “papa,” McCloskey. And, of course, from his mom.
During a stop, female engineer Jenn Jenks and her stepfather Sam McCloskey emerge from the cab to pose for photos for the tourists on Georgetown Loop Railroad on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2025.
Jenks and her stepdad are sidekicks on the train and in the engine house. The locomotives are stored here where they receive “tender loving care,” as Jenks puts it. She is not only an engineer, but also a mechanic and machinist leading a small team of men with similarly hard, grease-stained hands.
“You gotta get your hands dirty,” says Tim McIntosh, one on the team who any given day might be laying track, turning a wrench or welding.
He follows Jenks’ lead. “Probably the hardest-working person I’ve ever met,” McIntosh says.
It is the hard work that century-old trains require. It is highly technical work. That’s clear from watching Jenks run big machinery to carve a custom block to fit just so into the guts of an engine.
“Whaddya think?” she says, handing it to McCloskey for inspection. “I take enough weight off?”
But maybe more than technical, the work is about feel, Jenks explains. About the subtleties of these old trains that can only be felt by driving them and intimately getting to know them. They are “living and breathing,” Jenks says, with “their own personalities and quirks.”
And histories also.
“Engine No. 40 is 103 years old, she’s our oldest,” Jenks says. “111 is the next oldest. She’s actually turning 98 tomorrow.”
She is Jenks’ favorite. “Being the younger sister, she’s still the most powerful one,” she says.
Engineer Jenn Jenks handles the controls of the steam engine with the Georgetown Loop Railroad on the way from Silver Plume to Georgetown in September.
And also maybe a little stubborn, as these old locomotives tend to be.
“You can’t tell these locomotives what they can and cannot do,” Jenks says.
Nor can you tell her. Nor does she pay mind to the signs all around the engine house, signs that very well could have been around in the railroad’s early days: “STOP. MEN AT WORK.”
McCloskey seems embarrassed. “That just shows the prejudice we were talking about,” he says.
He was talking about the life his stepdaughter and her mother have lived. Jenks was a child at the time her mother started a new life with McCloskey.
Life before “really wasn’t that great,” Maria says.
“Her first husband was pretty abusive, and I had some abuse as a child in my family,” McCloskey says. “So I tried to raise all my kids, especially my girls, to know they could do anything a man could do. They didn’t need to be stuck in an abusive relationship, because they could do anything else.”
Jenn Jenks not only drives the trains but pitches in to manufacture parts used on the Georgetown Loop Railroad on Wednesday, Sept. 25.
They could work around the ranch in Wyoming; Jenks and her mom baled hay and ran cattle alongside McCloskey. He ran a trucking business in the oil fields, and the women would be instrumental. They would haul heavy equipment to rugged company sites.
“We were always being told by the company men, ‘You can’t do this and you can’t do that, because you’re a woman,’” Maria says.
McCloskey knew they could; out of high school, Jenks was driving some of the biggest trucks and training older men. It seemed she took after her mother.
“She may have watched me,” Maria says. “That it didn’t bother me that men were looking at me or watching me and thinking I didn’t belong. I just did my job.”
The family would eventually take on a much different job. Out of the oil business, they moved to Oregon, where they would volunteer on the Sumpter Valley Railroad, the historic tourist attraction.
For McCloskey, it was a return to a childhood fascination with steam engines. And maybe it was something of a return to Jenks’ childhood as well.
“Jenn was a bookworm, never really got into the mechanical stuff early on,” McCloskey says. “But when she did, she jumped right in.”
On the railroad, she was jumping between bookish, historical curiosities and challenging mechanics. She discovered a deep connection, these old trains as living and breathing. “She was a natural,” McCloskey says.
They developed their skills to land work at the Georgetown Loop Railroad in 2017. Of course Maria came along; these days she oversees the Silver Plume depot and helps in other ways, recently decorating the forest ahead of Christmas tours. As the train rolled through, she looked proudly on at her daughter in the driver’s seat.
That’s not how everyone looks at Jenks.
Engineer Jenn Jenks handles the controls of the steam engine with the Georgetown Loop Railroad through the beautiful scenery on the way from Silver Plume to Georgetown on Wednesday, Sept. 25.
“There’s still people that comment, ‘She doesn’t belong there,’” McCloskey says. “Things in the world we’d all like to think have changed over the years, in a lot of ways, it hasn’t changed. There are still roles that are traditionally male-dominated. Locomotive engineer is one of them.”
That helps explain why Jenks doesn’t see other women on steam engines, she thinks.
“I think part of it is they’ve been told it’s a man’s job, and they don’t really see that they can do it,” she says.
Maybe these old, stubborn trains have a message: “Don’t be told what you can and can’t do,” Jenks says.
As far as prejudice, she seems too busy to care. Too busy here in the engine house, keeping the trains rolling.
She stops only to grab lunch with a co-worker. He offers to drive. She offers instead.
“I like my pickup,” she says.
