Listen down the distance.

Somewhere in the mountains, the mournful whistle of a steam locomotive is echoing in a snowy canyon, lamenting the death of "Uncle Robert" Richardson, one of the co-founders of the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden.

Robert William Richardson, 96, died Saturday in his sleep at the Mount Nittany Medical Center in State College, Pa., after a hospital stay for pneumonia and other health problems, said Rick Tyler, a nephew.

Mr. Richardson, who turned his boyhood hobbies into careers, was born May 21, 1910, in Rochester, Pa. In 1915, Mr. Richardson moved with his parents to Akron, Ohio, where he graduated from high school. As he grew up, his hobbies were stamp collecting and railroading.

He was the second editor of Linn's Weekly Stamp News, the principal publication in that field, said Ronald C. Hill, a longtime museum board member.

With World War II on the horizon, Mr. Richardson quit the stamp publication and became a traveling salesmen, which brought him to Colorado for the first time in 1941, Hill said.

After serving in the Army Signal Corps., Mr. Richardson moved to Colorado in 1948, buying the Narrow Gauge Motel in Alamosa.

He displayed railroad equipment on the motel grounds and lobbied against abandonment of the state's narrow-gauge lines.

"It can accurately be said that his untiring efforts and the publicity he generated were among the primary reasons that the Silverton train and the Cumbres and Toltec were preserved for future generations," Hill said.

"It is no exaggeration to say he did more than any other person to preserve Colorado's unique railroad heritage," the board member said.

Mr. Richardson and Cornelius W. Hauck, another railroad enthusiast from Ohio, co-founded the Colorado Railroad Museum, which opened in 1959.

Never married, Mr. Richardson lived on the museum grounds in a farmhouse that had been on the site, Hill said. Mr. Richardson, who served as the museum's executive director, collected stamps and researched the heroes and events they commemorated.

Tyler said his uncle also devoured histories, savoring the foibles and human eccentricities of great personages.

When Mr. Richardson retired from the museum in 1991, at age 81, he drove himself back to Pennsylvania in a Jeep station wagon that the museum board gave him after initially buying it for his use.

"He said he wanted to go back to the part of the country where he had been raised," Hill said.

Mr. Richardson lived on his own in Bellefonte, Pa., about 10 miles from State College, until he went into the hospital Feb. 16, Tyler said.

"His wish was to be cremated with no formal funeral service, and that was done in Bellefonte," Tyler said. A memorial service is planned in Bellefonte in April and another tribute is being organized at the museum to coincide with Mr. Richardson's May birth date.

Besides Rick Tyler, of Willoughby, Ohio, other survivors include another nephew, Bruce Tyler; a niece, Jean Tyler; and a brother-in-law, Fred C. Tyler, all of Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Memorials: Colorado Railroad Museum, 17155 W. 44th Ave., Golden 80402, for the restoration of Denver & Rio Grande Western locomotive 346, which Mr. Richardson purchased with his own funds in 1950.

garnerj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5421