Flew into Denver and drove up to Cheyenne - it's about an hour and 10 minutes on the interstate. Stopped in Fort Collins for lunch - quite a bit of action there, but I hadn't done any research, so I only caught glimpses of things driving into town. Lots of free (2 hour limit) parking near the depot. A few restaurants and stores near the depot (1 brewpub inside), but downtown has a lot of vacant stores and businesses are mainly second-hand goods and art galleries. If you want food and shopping like a larger metro area, drive up to Dell Range Road on the north side of the airport. Area around the depot is being redeveloped and seemed safe but there was an assortment of skeevy homeless types hanging around. Not much different than many METRA stations. Nobody bothered me but I didn't go out of my way to approach any of them. There is an observation room in the depot, but you have to pay admission to the museum to get in to it. Four large armchairs to watch the trains (4 tracks immediately in front of the station) but the room has floor to ceiling windows and got pretty warm inside. There's a 6-foot fence separating the tracks from the old platform. If you walk a bit west of the depot, you can get a better view from ground level. You can walk over the yard on the road bridges, but most of the bridge has 1-inch chain link fencing. I don't know if you can get any good pix with a standard size camera lens - the tight mesh obstructs the view. Camp Stool Rd runs parallel to the tracks east of the yard but I didn't see a good place to get off the road along there. You can drive west of the yard past the interstate and there are a couple of short access roads you can park on. Didn't try to access the tracks from the south side. Morning and late afternoon sun was best for pix since all the viewing spots I found were on the north side of the tracks. Bring sunscreen and/or a hat and water. It was consistently in the 80s with 26% humidity, not a cloud in the sky, and being at 6,000+ feet elevation, the sun was quite intense. There was a boatload of trains (obviously) but only one foreign unit - a KCS.
