Denver and Rio Grande is a 1952 American Technicolor Western film, directed by Byron Haskin and released by Paramount Pictures. The film is a dramatization of the building of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, which was chartered in 1870. It was filmed in the summer of 1951 on location on actual D&RG track (now the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad) near Durango, Colorado.

Plot

In the late 1870s, chief engineer Gil Harkness and construction foreman Jim Vesser are surveying a new route for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad (D&RG) through the Royal Gorge in Colorado. Vesser learns that a crew from the competing Cañon City & San Juan Railroad is also in the gorge and confronts former friend Bob Nelson and his unscrupulous boss, McCabe. McCabe shoots Nelson in the back during a fight but he and crony Johnny Buff blame Vesser, who thinks he accidentally shot Nelson while stunned from a blow. Linda Prescott, the secretary of D&RG president General William J. Palmer, believes Vesser to be a cowardly killer. An injunction stops work by the D&RG in the gorge and Vesser suggests they run the CC&SJ men "out on a pole." Linda, who is actually Nelson's sister and is spying for McCabe after being told by him that Vesser murdered her brother, angrily accuses him of acting above the law.