Steam & Excursion > Cumbres in spring

I came across the following, again without time noted. If you have any idea about the year, even a guess. It will be appreciated
1.  Chama Depot, early in the morning before the train is made up.
2.  489 backing up.
3.  Moving forward.

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4.  Passing by a tank.
5.   Making a right turn
6.  Heading for Cumbres.

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Interesting stuff.  Looks like a mixed consist of freight cars and rider boxes.  At the risk of saying the obvious, the lettering on the engine would suggest sometime during the Scenic Railways tenure, probably in the 70's.  Hopefully others can be more specific.

JBWX

​​I don't think the 489 was rebuilt until the early 1980s.

This was the Rocky Mountain Railroad Club's 50th Anniversary Excursion in June, 1988.

It ran from Chama to Big Horn and return.

488 was helper from Chama to Cumbres, 489 took the train on to Big Horn and return.

I was engineer on 489.  Bill "Moose" Anderson was my fireman (both of us were RMRRC members).  Russ Fischer was engineer on 488.
http://s23.photobucket.com/user/earlknoob_/media/scan0002.jpg.html

http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b388/earlknoob_/scan0002.jpg



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/22/16 13:56 by Earlk.

Another sign that it is 1988 is the lack of spark arrestors. IIRC they ran for most of the '88 season without them.

Thank you JBWX, Grande473, and Eark for the information.  Eark are you in  #2?  Great pintures in the Photobucket.  I shot a few minutes too early.

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No that is Moose running the 489 while we were making up the train.  I was back in the consist helping switch the train out.  I recall it was very hectic time on the C&TS.  We were filming a movie over near Antonito, and had to deadhead equipment in the night before for this trip and the train couldn't be made up until that morning.  It was a mess.  If I recall we were only about 15 minutes late getting out of town.

The runby above is at Coxo (the same spot where my linked pic was taken.  I am firing 489.  That year we ran most of the summer without the spark arrestors on the stack, which made a big difference in how the locomotives steamed.  It took a lot of work (as in shoveling) to make a smokey photorun.  I was bound and determined to make 489 smoke hard on this runby.  The result was 2-3 lineside fires, the haze of which you can see to the rear of the train. 

Both locomotives looked real sharp.  I had just painted and lettered them a couple of weeks before.

Some one in another thread asked about the number boards by the stack.  We had numbers in them back then along with the light bulbs behind them.  Here is a night shot taken by Steve Peck back in 1984 with everything lit up, including my D&RGW class lamps.
 

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Thank you EMDX90 for the information.  And thank you Eark for the great night shot and more details.  I was wondering what the left pillar of smoke was.  Haruo

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The last pic looks like early spring, with a skiff of snow on the ground.  John Coker looks to be running 488.  Off hand I'd guess it was one of the rotary trains heading out in the mid-1990's.  We had some sort of funky-looking stick-on numbers on the cabs then.  Later I did some serious graphic artist work and created some better looking numbers....

Thank you again Earlk for your comments. It snew the night before and I took those before it melted.

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488 has an identiy disorder by wearing 484's tank.  We did that for a Rotary run so that all the locomotives would be lettered "Rio Grande".  How that was important when the Rotary OY was lettered "C&TS" escapes me after all these years, but it was done at the request of a video company.

As it looks like 488 is all by her lonesome in Chama, this might be after we got the Rotary train up on top of the hill.  We had 3 engines shove the works up to Cumbres, then cut one engine off and sent it back to Chama.  We had some serious track problems caused by the melting snow just south of Cresco, and 488 was used to run some cars of ballast up there while the rest of the Rotary train continued east.  We need to get the line patched up before the Rotary outfit came back off the hill.  I seem to remember some issues with getting across the trouble spot coming home. 

Thank you for your interesting background story.

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