Re: Silverton - and another Mears RR farther west ...

Hello again -

The sunny morning of Saturday, 09/20, eventually gave way to clouds and a fairly heavy storm,
which was followed by a stupendous double-rainbow of which I managed to catch only the last
few minutes.  Silverton's rain-washed storefronts were equally colorful:


The next day I headed north to Ouray and Ridgway, and then followed alongside the Rio Grande Southern most of the way to the Forney Farm south and west of Delores.  I was a bit surprised to find the ore tipple at Sawpit (near Placerville) still pretty much intact roughly seventy years after it was used to load uranium ore into RGS gons during WWII:




While on the phone making arrangements to meet at Goose #5 in Delores and then find lunch, Steve reminded me that the RGS coaling facility at Vance Junction had been restored.  There's a graded road heading west at Ilium that turns south and appears to follow the RGS r-o-w as far as the north abutment of where the Ames trestle once stood, but I turned off and drove northwest on a much narrower road until I came to Vance Junction:


The interpretive sign indicated that these "coaling pockets" were originally designed to hold just enough coal to fill the tender of one of the small engines used in the early nineties, and that men were paid fifteen cents per ton of coal shoveled from a gondola into the pockets:


It appears to me that the restoration isn't quite complete - that there must have been chutes that were lowered to carry the coal across the gap between the structure and the tenders.  Does anyone on the NGDF have drawings, plans and/or photos to post that show how an engine would be fueled here?

Also, does anyone know if the intake side of this structure was modified later on to allow coal to be dumped directly from a drop-bottom gon into the pockets in order to eliminate the labor-intensive shoveling?

Thanks in advance for any additional information you can provide!    

- Russ