DRGW MOW between Alamosa and Durango

How many MOW employees did the DRGW have working on the ng. between Alamosa and Durango/Farmington/Silverton in the 1950's/early 1960's?

The recent thread on ballast got me to looking at my pix for the 1960's as well as recalling my walks along the track at various times. One thing that seems apparent is at least in the early 60's when I first visited, even though the ballast was mostly native earth, the surface and line of the track itself was generally very good. I would guess that a reasonable level of maintenance was necessary to keep the long pipe trains on the track (at least most of the time).

Since I'm not aware of much in the way of mechanized narrow gauge track maintenance equipment on the DRGW, and I have been told things like tampers don't work very well in native earth, I presume whatever maintenance was done was done the old fashioned way....manually.

This got me to thinking that the DRGW must have had a reasonably sized maintenance force on the ng., but I have no idea what the total number of people might be. From my limited knowledge I would guess there were gangs based at Antonito, Sublette, Cumbres, Chama, Durango, and?????

JBWX



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 11/18/2009 12:34PM by John West.